Ruslan Grigorievich Skrynnikov (Руслан Григорьевич Скрынников; 8 January 1931,

Kutaisi Kutaisi (, ka, ქუთაისი ) is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world and the third-most populous city in Georgia, traditionally, second in importance, after the capital city of Tbilisi. Situated west of Tbil ...

Georgian SSR The Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic (Georgian SSR; ka, საქართველოს საბჭოთა სოციალისტური რესპუბლიკა, tr; russian: Грузинская Советская Соц� ...

, – 16 June 2009, St. Petersburg,

Russia Russia (, , ), or the Russian Federation, is a transcontinental country spanning Eastern Europe and Northern Asia. It is the largest country in the world, with its internationally recognised territory covering , and encompassing one-ei ...

) was a Russian

historian A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the st ...

who studied the reign of

Ivan the Terrible Ivan IV Vasilyevich (russian: Ива́н Васи́льевич; 25 August 1530 – ), commonly known in English as Ivan the Terrible, was the grand prince of Moscow from 1533 to 1547 and the first Tsar of all Russia from 1547 to 1584. Iva ...

. He later moved on to study the

Time of Troubles The Time of Troubles (russian: Смутное время, ), or Smuta (russian: Смута), was a period of political crisis during the Tsardom of Russia which began in 1598 with the death of Fyodor I (Fyodor Ivanovich, the last of the Rurik dy ...

. For Skrynnikov, control over the bureaucratic apparatus (rather than the issue of centralization) was the primary point of contention explaining Muscovite political struggles of the 15th and 16th centuries.Nancy Shields Kollmann. ''Kinship and Politics: The Making of the Muscovite Political System, 1345-1547''. Stanford University Press, 1987. Page 15. In the late 1960s he described Ivan's Oprichnina as the reign of terror designed to root out every possible challenge to the autocracy: Skrynnikov' monographs about the Oprichinina and the Russian conquest of Siberia have been reprinted many times and translated into other major languages. He also authored the biographies of Ivan III, Ivan IV, and other Russian tsars.

References

Soviet historians Russian medievalists Saint Petersburg State University faculty 1931 births 2009 deaths People from Kutaisi 20th-century Russian historians Burials at Serafimovskoe Cemetery Herzen University faculty {{russia-historian-stub