Russia. A History

J. Blum, Lord and Peasant in Russia (New York, 1969), economic and social history from the era of Kiev Rus to the abolition of serfdom in 1861.

R. O. Crummey, The Formation of Muscovy, 1304–1613 (London, 1987), informed and highly readable interpretative survey.

R. S. Hellie, Slavery in Russia, 1450–1725 (Chicago, IL, 1982), thorough study of law and practice of slavery.

D. H. Kaiser, The Growth of the Law in Medieval Russia (Princeton, NJ, 1980), on the evolution of triadic, state-initiated legal institutions and concepts by Ivan III’s time.

J. L. H. Keep, Soldiers of the Tsar (Oxford, 1985), detailed history of army until 1874 conscription reform.

N. S. Kollmann, By Honor Bound: State and Society in Early Modern Russia

(Ithaca, NY, 1999), on the meaning of ‘honour’ and ‘dishonour’ in Muscovite law and society.

E. Levin, Sex and Society in the World of the Orthodox Slavs, 900–1700 (Ithaca, NY, 1989), study of ecclesiastical sources on such matters as marriage, sexual crimes, sexual deviance.

J. Martin, Medieval Russia, 980–1584 (Cambridge, 1995), comprehensive survey drawing upon most recent scholarship with new interpretations and analysis.

M. Perrie (ed.), The Cambridge History of Russia, i: From Early Rus to 1689 (Cambridge, 2006), authoritative essays on institutions, society, and culture in pre-Petrine Russia.

A. E. Presniakov, The Tsardom of Muscovy (Gulf Breeze, Fla., 1978), classic pre-revolutionary account.

G. Vernadsky, A History of Russia

(5 vols., New Haven, CT, 1943–69), survey from prehistory to 1682 and reflecting the perspective of the Eurasian school.

1. THE BEGINNINGS TO 1450

S. Cross and O. P. Sherbowitz-Werzor (eds. and trans.), The Primary Russian Chronicle: Laurentian Text (3rd edn., Cambridge, 1973), basic source for early history.

F. L. I. Fennell, The Emergence of Moscow, 1304–1359 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 1968), detailed examination of Moscow’s growing political importance, emphasizing inter-princely conflicts, Mongol influence, and relations with neighbouring principalities.

———The Crisis of Medieval Russia, 1200–1304 (London, 1983), detailed political narrative.

C. J. Halperin, Russia and the Golden Horde

(London, 1987), reinterpretation of Mongol impact, counterbalancing destructive aspects with evidence of close, pragmatic Mongol-Rus relationships.

J. Martin, Treasury of the Land of Darkness (Cambridge, 1986), on international fur trade from the ninth to fifteenth centuries.

B. A. Rybakov, Kievan Rus (Moscow, 1989), Marxist interpretation by leading Soviet historian.

Ya. N. Shchapov, State and Church in Early Russia (New Rochelle, NY, 1993), collection of essays on the institutional structure of the Church and its relations with the princes of Kievan Rus.

2. MUSCOVITE RUSSIA, 1450–1598

G. Alef, Rulers and Nobles in Fifteenth-Century Muscovy

(London, 1983), essays on the institutions, symbols of autocracy.

P. Bushkovitch, Religion and Society in Russia (Oxford, 1992), on the change in élite religious life.

R. O. Crummey Aristocrats and Servitors: The Boyar Élite in Russia, 1613–1689 (Princeton, NJ, 1983), social history of the Muscovite aristocracy.

H. W. Dewey (comp., trans., ed.), Muscovite Judicial Texts, 1488–1556 (Ann Arbor, MI, 1966), texts of the law codes of 1497 and 1550 and other key documents.

J. L. I. Fennell, Ivan the Great of Moscow (London, 1963), political biography.

E. L. Keenan, Jr., The Kurbskii-Groznyi Apocrypha: The Seventeenth-Century Genesis of the ‘Correspondence’ Attributed to Prince A. M. Kurbskii and Tsar Ivan IV (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), controversial challenge to the authenticity of a set of crucial sixteenth-century sources.

M. Khodarkovsky, Russia’s Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire 1500–1800 (Bloomington, Ind., 2002), survey of Russian expansion into the southern and south-eastern steppe.