Igor Pavlovich Shaskol'skii

Igor Shaskol'skii was born in Saint Petersburg in 1918. He graduated from Leningrad State University (LSU), now Saint Petersburg State University, in 1941. In 1941–42 he was present during the siege of Leningrad by the Germans during the Second World War and helped to build defensive structures. He was evacuated in 1942 due to illness.[1]

In 1947 he produced a thesis for LSU on the struggle of Novgorod with Sweden and Norway in the 13th century.[1]

At the end of the 1940s, Shaskol'skii was teaching at a Communist Party school and working for a Karelian-Finnish branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences in Petrozavodsk, after which he worked at the State Museum of the History of Religion in Saint Petersburg. From 1956 to 1995 he worked at the Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg and was a part-time lecturer at Saint Petersburg University (LSU) from 1951 to 1986.[1]

In 1965 he defended his doctoral thesis before the Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg on the subject of the 1617 Treaty of Stolbovo and trade relations between Russia and the Swedish state in the first half of the 17th century.[1]

He was a corresponding member of what is today known as the Saint Petersburg Institute of History.[2]

Shaskol'Skii specialised in the history of Russian relations and trade with the Baltic and Scandinavia in the medieval and early-modern periods, particularly trade and diplomatic relations with Sweden.[3] He also addressed the Normanist theory that proposed that the origins of the Rus' were Norman, and therefore Scandinavian, taking a nuanced position that broadly accepted the anti-Normanism endorsed by Soviet historiography but also acknowledged that there was primary evidence for parts of the Normanist position. The theory was historically controversial because of disputed evidence and politically controversial because it dealt with questions of national identity.[4] His book, Normanskaia teoriia v sovremennoi burzhuaznoi nauke (Norman theory in modern bourgeois science) was published in 1965 and also dealt with the history of the Varangian controversy.[5]

He was instrumental in the wider dissemination of primary source material from archives through his work on editorial boards and wrote many articles that made extensive use of primary sources.[3]

Shaskol'skii died in Saint Petersburg in 1995.[1] His masterwork, Ekonomicheskie otnosheniia Rossii i Shvedskogo gosudarstva v XVII v. (Economic Relations between Russia and the Swedish State in the Seventeenth Century), was published posthumously in 1998 and represented the culmination of his research into Russian trade in the Baltic in the 17th and early 18th centuries. In the book he showed that the accepted Soviet position that the trade went mainly through Arkhangelsk on the northern coast, due to the blocking effect of the Swedish Baltic provinces, was wrong and in fact Russian trade in the Baltic was strong.[3]

In 2018, a collection of essays on Saint Petersburg and Sweden in the 17th and 18th centuries, edited by P. V. Sedov, was published in Saint Petersburg to mark the 100th anniversary of Shaskol'skii's birth.[6]

• G. V. Forsten

• Sedov, Pavel Vladimirovich. (Ed.) (2018) Novgorodskai︠a︡ zemli︠a︡, Sankt-Peterburg i Shvet︠s︡ii︠a︡ v XVII-XVIII vv. :Sbornik stateĭ k 100-letii︠u︡ so dni︠a︡ rozhdenii︠a︡ Igori︠a︡ Pavlovicha Shaskolʹskogo. Saint Petersburg: Nestor-Istoriia. ISBN 9785446914791

• Entry at Encyclopedia Petrishule
• List of works of I. P. Shaskol'skii