The Russian historian Vasily Osipovich Klyuchevsky (1841-1911) explored the socioeconomic fundament of Russian cultural and political development; his writings have become the basis of modern Russian historiography.

Vasily Klyuchevsky was born in January 1841, the son of a rural Orthodox priest. Having decided against a career in the Church, he completed the undergraduate degree of the historical-philological faculty of Moscow University in 1865. In 1872 he received his master's degree, defending a thesis on the lives of the saints as historical sources; in 1882 he received his doctorate. He began his teaching career in 1867, and in 1879 he was invited to teach at his alma mater, where in 1882 he became professor of history. In 1900 Klyuchevsky was elevated to academician of Russian history and antiquities in the august Imperial Academy of Sciences.

Klyuchevsky was nurtured intellectually in the heady political and philosophical atmosphere of the Russian 1860s. In the period of the 1905 revolution, he...