Dr Dmitry Fedosov IntFRSE

Dr Dmitry Fedosov was a historian with expertise in the history of Scotland and Russia and the links between the two countries from the Middle Ages to the present. In both original English and Russian translation, he edited the monumental ‘Diary of General Patrick Gordon of Auchleuchries’ (1635–1699), who was principal advisor to Tsar Peter the Great. Dmitry’s also worked on the biographical survey ‘Lion Rampant to Two-Headed Eagle: Scots in Russia 1500–1725’. He co-foundered and acted as Chairman of the Moscow Caledonian Club, established in 1994.
Rebecca Boyd, a friend of Dmitry Fedosov, writes:
Dmitry Gennadyevich Fedosov was the leading authority on Scots in Russia. International Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Honorary Fellow of the University of Aberdeen, senior researcher at the Department of Western European Mediaeval and Early Modern Times at the Institute of World History (Russian Academy of Sciences) and Candidate of Historical Sciences, his academic career established him as a world authority on the role of Scots in Russia and the links between the two countries from the Middle Ages to the present.
Born in Kyiv, Ukraine in 1962, Dmitry Fedosov’s lifelong passion for Scotland began early. In 1986 he graduated from the Department of Mediaeval History at Moscow State University, and in 1990 defended his Ph.D. thesis, “Scotland in the 11th – early 14th centuries: Social development and political struggle” at the Institute of World History. From 1990 he worked in the Department of Mediaeval and Early Modern Times at the Institute of World History in the Russian Academy of Sciences, becoming a senior researcher in 1996. He was elected an Honorary Fellow of the University of Aberdeen as well as a International Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Fedosov dedicated twenty years to the completion of the first academic publication of the Diaries of General Patrick Gordon of Auchleuchries (1635–1699), the principal advisor of Tsar Peter I. This gargantuan project involved transcribing and translating over 3500 hand-written pages written in Scots, including correspondence in Latin, in the original and in Russian translation, resulting in six volumes published in both English and Russian. He was responsible for the translation into Russian of the Declaration of Arbroath, the iconic Scottish document of 1320 on which the American declaration of independence was modelled. At his death he was compiling a historical and biographical reference book, Lion Rampant to Two-Headed Eagle: Scots in Russia, 1500–1700 with O. Y. Nozdrin. By the time of his death, he had also translated seventeen of the twenty volumes of John Barbour’s The Brus, the classic chronicle of the Scottish Wars of Independence, written in 1375, transforming 14,000 octosyllabic lines of old Scots into the Russian poetic equivalent. This was a unique feat of scholarship, requiring an unsurpassed knowledge of the Scots language.
Dmitry Fedosov was the co-founder in 1994 and Vice-President of the Moscow Caledonian Club, a public organisation uniting those with a passion for Scotland and descendants of Scottish families in Russia. In 2007 he was a member of the board and chief advisor for Russia’s first military tattoo held in Moscow’s Red Square, the Kremlin Zoria. The title and concept were his, based on his experience of the Edinburgh Military Tattoo.
Dmitry Fedosov’s family, friends and colleagues will remember him as an inspirational man whose friendships ran as deeply as his scholarship. His passionate enthusiasm for, encyclopaedic knowledge of and immeasurable contribution to the historiography of Scottish-Russian relations across the centuries place Scotland in his lasting debt.

Past fellows list