Tatiana Tairova-Yakovleva

Biography On her mother's side, the researcher comes from an old Polish noble family; her grandmother was Tatiana Zhudra before her marriage.

She was born into a family of an art historian and an athlete. After retiring from sports, her father became the head of the physical education department at one of Leningrad's universities and the director of the Petrovsky Stadium, which from 1994 until 2017 was the home arena of the Zenit football club.

Scholarly and educational activities Education and early career From 1984 to 1989, Yakovleva studied at the History Department of Leningrad State University (LSU). The supervisor of her course projects, which in her first three years were devoted to the figure of Cossack colonel Ivan Bohun, and her thesis, which dealt with the figure of hetman Ivan Vyhovsky, was professor Yuri Davidovich Margolis (LSU), Doctor of Historical Sciences.

In 1990–1991, she studied in the postgraduate school of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS) University of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Next, she interned at Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. Among the lecturers were such Ukrainian studies scholars as Omeljan Pritsak, Fedir Shevchenko, Mykola Kovalsky, and George Gajecky.

In 1992, she was expelled from the postgraduate programme at Saint Petersburg State University (the renamed LSU) for "Ukrainian nationalism". Her opponents at St. Petersburg State University called her dissertation "Kostomarovism (костомаровщина), "support for the People's Movement of Ukraine (RUKH)" and "Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism". On 29 April 1994, she defended her doctoral thesis at the Institute of History of Ukraine of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, titled The initial stage of the Ruin: the socio-political situation and foreign policy of Ukraine in the late 1650s. The scientific supervisor was Margolis, her teacher at LSU in the 1980s.

Nevertheless, ten years later on 19 May 2004, she defended her doctoral dissertation on Social and Political Struggles in Ukraine in the 1660s: Internal and External Factors of the Ruin at St. Petersburg State University in St. Petersburg. The scientific opponents (reviewers) were Boris Florya, Alexander Turgayev, and Andrey Pavlov.

Centre for Ukrainian Studies Icon depicting Peter I, Catherine Alexeyevna and Ivan Mazepa. Illustration in Tairova-Yakovleva's 2007 book Mazepa. Since 2003, Tairova-Yakovleva worked at Saint Petersburg State University in the Department of History of Slavic and Balkan Countries, founding the Centre for Ukrainian Studies in 2004. Also in 2004, she discovered and subsequently published the so-called "Baturyn Archive" (or "Baturyn Library"), which was a significant event for the world of Ukrainian studies, as it revealed a large number of previously unknown historical documents, and presented the structure and content of the hetman archives for the first time. She was a member of the Academic Council of the Institute of History of Saint Petersburg State University, an expert at the Russian State Science Foundation, and an expert at the Russian Academy of Sciences. She is a member of the Russian-Ukrainian and Russian-Lithuanian commissions of historians.

Tairova-Yakovleva was the director of the joint publication of the Centre for Ukrainian Studies on documents from the archives of Ivan Mazepa, stored in St. Petersburg (the project was funded by Kowalsky Program for the Study of Eastern Ukraine). Under her leadership, the Centre published sources on Ukrainian history stored in the archives of St. Petersburg and Moscow. In 2020, she completed a joint project with the Institute of History of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine to publish the Samiilo Velychko Chronicle. Frank Sysyn praised her for this accomplishment in 2021: "Tatiana Tairova-Yakovleva and her colleagues have finally given us the academic edition of Velychko that we have needed." which was devoted to the study of Ukrainian history and linked to the 368th anniversary of the 1654 Pereiaslav Agreement.

On 24 February 2022, she was one of the first to condemn Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. On 27 February, she signed a collective anti-war appeal by Russian intellectuals. In a video message, she strongly condemned the Russian invasion and Russia's policies. She expressed regret that she is a Russian citizen.

In June 2022, Tairova-Yakovleva was dismissed from her position of professor of Ukrainian History and Director of the Centre for Ukrainian Studies due to her vocal opposition to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Following her dismissal, she was a research fellow supported by the Gerda Henkel Stiftung in Germany from 2022 to 2024.

In 2007, she had already been granted the Honorary title of Ukraine "Guardian of the Ukrainian Cossacks" (Берегиня Українського козацтва) for preparing and publishing the book Mazepa.