Historiography

Nicholas Zharkikh

The historiography of the fall of Kyiv in 1482 is interesting in two respects: first, how historians assessed the significance of the event and determined the culprits; second, how the accumulation of factual data affected the coverage of events.

Nicolas Karamzin (1818)

Mikhail Maksimovich (1847)

Sergei Solovyov (1855)

Vladimir Antonovich (1882)

Mikhail Vladimirsky-Budanov (1890)

Frederick Papée (1900)

Mykhailo Hrushevsky (1904)

Ludwik Kolankowski (1930)

Konstantin Bazilevich (1952)

History of Kyiv (1963)

Yaroslav Pelensky (1980)

History of Kyiv (1982)

Gleb Ivakin (1996)

Vladislav Gulevich (2013)

Vladislav Gulevich (2018)

Conclusions

1. The traditional direction of the study of the attack on Kyiv in 1482 is to clarify the context of interstate relations in which the attack took place, and its place in subsequent political events. The existing fund of sources inclines to such direction.

2. Researchers are unanimous in determining the crucial role of Moscow as the initiator of the attack.

3. Silencing or whitewashing Moscow’s role in organizing the attack should be considered a falsification of history.

4. The accumulation of factual data on the topic stopped in 1959 with the publication of the full text of the Vologda-Perm Chronicle. The limited set of sources did not prevent early researchers from drawing generally correct conclusions, and the availability of a complete set of sources in the last 60 years did not save the authors of this period from errors and falsifications.

5. Insufficient attention was paid to the source analysis of available texts, which led to some erroneous statements.

6. Such areas of research as the history of the people (working masses, not the authorities), military history, local history (history of the city of Kyiv), only marked, not developed – neither in terms of methods nor in terms of specific results.

7. No comparative studies have been conducted at all, although Tatar attacks provide material for comparisons from both earlier and later times.

Shortened text of the section. Full text in ukrainian version.