Professor Lindsey Hughes

Lindsey Audrey Jennifer Hughes, historian of Russia: born Swanscombe, Kent 4 May 1949; Lecturer in Slavonic Studies, Queen's University, Belfast 1974-77; Lecturer in Russian, Reading University 1977-87; Lecturer in Russian History, School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London 1987-89, Senior Lecturer 1989-92, Reader 1992-97, Professor of Russian History 1997-2007; married 2006 Jim Cutshall; died London 26 April 2007.

Peter the Great, Lindsey Hughes recalled in her inaugural lecture as Professor of Russian History at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, had invaded her imagination from her first days as a student at Sussex University, from which she graduated with a first-class honours degree in 1971.

The shadow the 6ft 7in emperor cast on her life was resisted for all of two decades as she decided to go to Cambridge to research for a PhD under the supervision of the eminent scholar Dr Nikolai Andreev on "Moscow Baroque Architecture: a study of one aspect of Westernization in late 17th-century Russia" (awarded in February 1977).

Ever the all-rounder, interested in all aspects of Russian culture, and possessing a sound knowledge of the Russian language, Hughes began her prolific publishing career with a flurry of articles on 17th-century Russian art and architecture and in 1984 published her first monograph, Russia and the West: the life of a 17th-century westernizer, Prince Vasily Vasil'evich Golitsyn (1643-1714). From Golitsyn, it was but a short step to his lover, the Tsarevna Sophia, who acted as regent from 1682 to 1689 during the infancy of the joint tsars, Ivan V and Peter I.

Sophia, Regent of Russia (1657-1704), the first monograph in any language to do justice to a much-maligned figure, duly appeared in 1990 and the scene was set for a decade's absorption with the great Peter himself that led to Hughes's magnum opus, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great (1998). This was a work of meticulous scholarship and careful (re-)examination of primary sources, written, as always, with admirable clarity and precision, despite its 600-plus pages. Hughes herself drew attention to her following in the footsteps of Isabel de Madariaga's magisterial Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great (1981) and she continued with her Peter the Great: a biography (2002), which she termed her "Little Peter", a highly readable and lively biography, to match Madariaga's similar "Little Catherine".

Lindsey Audrey Jennifer Hughes was born in Swanscombe, Kent in 1949; at the age of 16 she lost her mother (to whose memory she was to dedicate her Petrine Russia). She had her first taste of Russian during her schooldays at Dartford Grammar School for Girls and went to Sussex to study under the influential troika of the late Sergei Hackel, Robin Milner-Gulland and Beryl Williams. It was at the age of 25 that her university teaching career began with her appointment as Lecturer in Slavonic Studies at Queen's University in a trouble-riven Belfast in 1974, but three years later she moved to Reading, where she had ample opportunity to reveal her versatility as a teacher, not only of Russian history but also of literature and language, and her considerable administrative and organisational skills.

Russian at Reading was, however, to become but one of the unfortunate victims of the ill-considered Atkinson Report on Russian Studies in Britain, but it led to Hughes's transfer in 1987 to the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, where over the next 20 years, her career and life were to blossom luxuriantly.

She swiftly scaled the promotion ladder and her professorship duly came in 1997, by which time her list of publications was a yard long and her international reputation well and truly established. She was the recipient of several prestigious book prizes; she delivered papers on a regular basis at conferences in America, Britain, Italy, and Russia, and she delivered them with panache and a sense of fun; she was the tireless editor of other people's articles for the Slavonic Review and for collective volumes; and she herself organised numerous seminars and conferences, including for the last 20 years the annual meeting of the International Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia, whose members and gatherings held a particular place in her affections.

Despite the long hours she spent in archives and at her computer, scholarship was also fellowship and her manner was always open and welcoming and the friendships she forged enduring and deep. Lindsey Hughes loved scholarship, but she loved and found time for many other things, including singing with the St Paul's Knightsbridge Festival Choir, visiting the Donmar, the joys of gardening, and her cats, Tablet, Catherine and Sophie, mentioned proudly in the prefaces to her books. Sophie, daughter of Catherine, who died at a ripe old age just a month before her mistress, was also credited in a hurriedly compiled local newspaper back in 1999 with Hughes's professorship in Russian history.

Lindsey Hughes was also a passionate collector of "things Russian", from spoons to samovars, from coins to engravings, and her enormous collection was endlessly increased from successful forays to markets and shops by her long-time partner Jim Cutshall, whom she married in January 2006.

Cancer, from which her mother had died and the first onset of which Lindsey had defied a decade earlier, returned at the end of 2005 and for more than a year, with Cutshall's devoted support, she battled the disease courageously. On 16 March she completed the manuscript of her study of the Romanov dynasty; the following day, she had her final relapse and entered the London Bridge Hospital, where she died a week before her 58th birthday.

In order to write the commissioned Romanov book, she had put aside, and thus never finished, the book on which she had been working over the preceding two or three years, to be entitled "Landmarks of Russian Culture", one of which, inevitably, was to be the Bronze Horseman, Catherine the Great's monument to Peter I; Lindsey Hughes, however, had long since erected her own monument with the series of studies that have ensured her standing as England's foremost authority on 17th- and early 18th-century Russia.

Anthony Cross