Introduction

Abstract

This issue of Russian Studies in History (RSH) presents the fourth and final installment of portraits of the Russian tsars, that is, biographical sketches of Russia's emperors and empresses that assess their reigns and place them in historical perspective. Russia's Romanov rulers needed to be rediscovered: for the most part, before the launching of perestroika Soviet historical writing neglected serious analysis of the country's past rulers (with the exception of tsars Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great, study of whom was often motivated by contemporary considerations). The Gorbachev reform, however, threw open the past to debate and discussion, and in this new climate writers on public affairs, then professional historians reconsidered the lives and reigns of Russia's rulers. To counter the large volume of speculative writing about the past, the journal Voprosy istorii (Problems of History) enlisted leading specialists to author historical portraits of both Russian tsars and Soviet commissars whose careers had been distorted and even patently falsified by Soviet historiography.