Robert Owen Crummey (April 12, 1936–November 6, 2023), a ground-breaking scholar of early modern Russia, died on November 6, 2023, in Davis, California. He was 87 years old. His career was wide-ranging, innovative, and enormously influential on his field. He graduated with a Bachelor's degree from the University of Toronto in 1958 and entered the graduate program in History at the University of Chicago. There he initially intended to study French history, but was drawn to Russian history by studying with the Leo Haimson and Michael Cherniavsky (who became his advisor). He completed his PhD in 1964 and began teaching at Yale University in 1965. In 1974, he moved to the Department of History at the University of California, Davis, where he stayed until his retirement in 1994. At Davis, he served as Dean of the College of Letters and Sciences from 1988 to 1994.
Bob was an original and eclectic thinker, a graceful writer, and a subtle historian. As he pursued two major themes over his career, he constantly deepened and expanded his work with new approaches and new theoretical frameworks. His initial field of study, and the one to which he was perhaps most devoted, focused on the Old Believers—religious dissenters in the Russian Orthodox Church in the seventeenth century who established a sect that endures to this day. In his first monograph, The Old Believers and the World of Antichrist: The Vyg Community and Russian State, 1694–1855 (1970), Bob tracked the history of one community of Old Believers over several generations, taking primarily an institutional and political approach. Throughout his career, Bob expanded and elaborated upon this study in a number of important articles and book chapters, sometimes applying comparative and theoretical approaches from other disciplines, to explore the community's theology, worship, and beliefs. He explored the spirituality of the Old Belief's founders, experimented with the idea of Old Belief as popular religion, and assiduously tracked how Old Believers created a “textual community” so that its conservative spirituality and beliefs could endure by taking full advantage of the new (for Russia) technology of printing. These and many other seminal essays are gathered in his Old Believers in a Changing World (2011), a collection of his most masterful articles and book chapters.
In the 1980s Bob turned in a very different direction, applying quantitative methods to a prosopographical study of the members of the tsar's informal council, the “Boyar Duma.” His Aristocrats and Servitors: The Boyar Elite in Russia 1613–89 (1983) is a collective biography of the elite based on a gargantuan collection of biographical data in archival and printed sources. Analyzing how this group of rough-hewn, illiterate military servitors gradually transformed themselves into the competent officials required for the state's growing central bureaucracy and expanding imperial administration, Aristocrats and Servitors constitutes a history of the seventeenth-century state itself. He published numerous complementary articles around the issue of boyars and court politics, one of the most impressive being the detailed quantitative analysis in his seminal 1980 book chapter “The Origins of the Noble Official: The Boyar Elite, 1613–1689” (in Pintner and Rowney's, Russian Officialdom, 46–75). He rounded out his interest in boyars in further essays: his study of court rituals (1985) was one of the first in the field of Muscovite history to take seriously the place of rituals in politics. His analysis of the system of precedence (mestnichestvo) (1980) was perhaps the first to question the received interpretations and offer new ways of thinking about honor, service, and the formation of power in the Muscovite monarchy. These three articles continue to be cited today by anyone interested in the political culture of early modern Russia.
Bob's fair-mindedness as a scholar and a person made him particularly good at historiography, to which he devoted several important articles. His survey of work on Ivan IV “the Terrible” (1976) deftly navigates the turbulent waters of that field, and his last historiographical survey, “The Latest from Muscovy” (2001), offered a frank but still optimistic overview of where the field of early Slavic studies was at that moment—and where it might venture to in the next decades. His judiciousness and breadth of knowledge were on full display in his general survey The Formation of Muscovy 1304–1613 (1987), still the best single-volume study of the centuries of Muscovy's state building. Generations of students have used his and Lloyd E. Berry's edition of sixteenth-century English travel accounts to Russia, Rude and Barbarous Kingdom: Russia in the Accounts of Sixteenth-Century English Voyagers (1968), benefitting far more than they probably realized by his learned annotations, which helpfully put into context some of the English travelers’ misapprehensions about Russia.
Bob was an exceptionally generous and kind person. In a field that was experiencing radical revisions of the received wisdom in many areas, Bob not only led the way by suggesting novel approaches and new conclusions but, both in print and in person, maintained a tone of judicious good will towards all sides of these debates. He was particularly fond of referring to our small band of colleagues as a family, and he always treated us as such. As a mentor, his comments were both meticulous and fair, and his emotional and academic support was simply unfailing.
The title of his first book (with Lloyd E. Berry) was recycled for a collection of essays in his honor, Rude and Barbarous Kingdom Revisited (2008), where the reader can find a full bibliography of his work. The Festschrift is evidence of his colleagues’ great esteem and respect for him as a scholar, as well as their fondness for him as a friend. Robert Crummey was a kind person, intensely supportive of his own students, and welcoming and helpful to all who knew him. We will miss his wry and erudite wit and his big-hearted winning smile.
