Nikolay Likhachyov

right|frame Nikolay Petrovich Likhachyov , alternatively transliterated as Likhachev (12 April 1862 – 14 April 1936) was the first and foremost Russian sigillographer (that is, an expert on seals) who also contributed significantly to an array of auxiliary historical disciplines, including palaeography, epigraphy, diplomatics, genealogy, and numismatics. He was elected a member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in 1925 and was put in charge of the Archaeographic Commission in 1929.

Nikolay Likhachyov graduated from the Kazan University in 1884 and joined the staff of the Saint Petersburg Archaeological Institute in 1892. His early work shed light on the hierarchy of 16th-century Muscovite clerks, or diaks.

He developed an early interest in medieval icon painting and produced several pioneering studies on the subject, the country's first monarchist party which later became associated with the Black Hundreds.

Likhachyov's proximity to the right wing of the tsarist government, as well as his own considerable fortune and unfailing taste, helped him to amass one of the largest collections of antiquities in the Russian Empire. It encompassed 15,000 old coins and 1,500 icons, as wells as some 80,000 books, including a selection of manuscripts and incunabulae. In an attempt to save the remaining collections from dispersal in the days of the Russian Revolution, Likhachev conveyed them to the Academy of Sciences,

It was in 1930 that Likhachyov, Sergey Platonov, Yevgeny Tarle and several other prominent historians were arrested in connection with the Industrial Party Trial. The Likhachev collection of cuneiform tablets from Ur and Lagash, for instance, is currently divided between the Pushkin Museum and the Hermitage Museum.