Petrov, Aleksei L.

Petrov, Aleksei L. [Петров, Алексей], b 16 March 1859 in Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire, d 5 January 1932 in Prague, Czechoslovakia. Russian historian and Slavist; full member of the Shevchenko Scientific Society from 1925. A graduate of Saint Petersburg University (1880), he taught in Saint Petersburg secondary schools in 1880–7, the school of Higher Courses for Women from 1887, and the university from 1911. From 1922 he lived as an émigré in Prague. He wrote many studies on the history and ethnography of Transcarpathia. Among his works published separately were studies, in Russian, of the ethnographic border of the Ruthenians (ie, Ukrainians) in Austria-Hungary (1915), Magyar hegemony in Hungary and Hungarian Rus’ (ie, Transcarpathia, 1915), monuments of 16th- and 17th-century Transcarpathian Ruthenian church life (1921), the issue of the Slovak-Ruthenian ethnographic border (1923), and Carpatho-Ruthenian place-names from the mid-19th to the early 20th century (1927). Many of his studies appeared or were reprinted in Materialy dlia istorii Ugorskoi Rusi (Materials on the History of Hungarian Rus', 9 vols, 1905–14, 1923, 1932), which he edited. Petrov also contributed to the Naukovyi zbirnyk of the Uzhhorod Prosvita society, Karpatorusskii sbornik, Česká revue, and other Czech scholarly publications.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 3 (1993).]