Dmitry Fedosov, who was an Honorary Fellow of the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies (RIISS) and editor of the six volume Diary of Patrick Gordon of Auchleuchries published by Aberdeen University Press, passed away in the early days of 2024 aged 61.
Dmitry had worked closely with Professor Paul Dukes of Aberdeen University, a noted historian of Russia. In his memoir An Inventory of Traces (RIISS 2023), Dukes wrote of his first meeting with Fedosov:
My diary tells me that there was a lecture on 5 April entitled ‘Lenin and the Future of Socialism’, but I cannot remember if I attended it. Certainly, on 6 April, I met Dmitry Gennadevich Fedosov on the steps of the Lenin (soon to become the National) Library. I had previously heard of a young enthusiast for Scottish History from two sources, Geoffrey Barrow, the historian and John Erickson, the political scientist, and one of them had given me his telephone number. Now, Dmitry told me his own story, which I was able to follow easily, since he was bilingual. (In all the years I have known him, he has made one small error, asking me if I would like a toast for breakfast, and this was probably because we had enjoyed too many toasts the night before.) Born to a Ukrainian mother in Kiev, he had spent some years in Washington DC, where his Belorussian father had been a Soviet diplomat, and he himself had taken on an American accent, which fortunately overlaps with Scottish. Later, his father had given him the famous clan map of Scotland, complete with heraldic devices, and he was an immediate and complete convert. When the Fedosov family first paid a visit to Scotland, Dmitry insisted on walking across the bridge from England, kneeling and kissing the ground. (104)
Paul Dukes introduced Fedosov to the diary of General Patrick Gordon, Gordon having been chief advisor to Peter the Great in Russia, though born at Auchleuchries in Aberdeenshire. The diary, written in seventeenth-century Scots-English, had only been published in segments in English in the nineteenth century and in a highly inaccurate version in German.
Fedosov set himself the double task of editing the original, held in archives in Moscow, and at the same time translating it into Russian so that it could be available to Russian historians. Finding a British publisher proved difficult because of the scale of the project – six volumes covering the whole of Gordon’s life from 1635–99 (the early part is an autobiography rather than a diary) – and the likely timescales in producing them, until the Research Institute itself undertook to publish all six volumes at the same time as the Russian translations were appearing.
Starting in 2009 and completed in 2016, The Diary of General Patrick Gordon of Auchleuchries, published by Aberdeen University Press, has provided historians of Russia with new insights into what Paul Bushkovitch of Yale University described as ‘a whole range of issues, military, cultural, social, and also political’ (Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies, 3:2 (2010); doi: https://doi.org/10.57132/jiss.123).
Individual volumes, such as the largest, Volume 5, 1690–95, also contain some of Fedosov’s most detailed accounts of Gordon’s activities, not only as courtier, adviser and military leader, but as a committed Roman Catholic who helped establish an active Catholic community in Russia. Please see the Open Access volumes in the series here.
From early in his career Fedosov had been tracking down Scots who worked in or fought for Russia and planned a book with his colleague Oleg Nozdrin providing all the known information about them, to be titled Lion Rampant to Two-Headed Eagle: Scots in Russia 1500–1725. This was nearing completion in the year before he died and we hope that at some point in the future, Aberdeen University Press will be able to publish it as testament to Dmitry Fedosov’s commitment to Scottish culture and to the history of Scots in Russia.