Hello reader! As you may be able to tell, this blog has not been updated in quite some time; this should soon be rectified. I have been quite busy in the past two years, getting married, buying a home, and starting a new career path, that of historian. I am currently in graduate school, pursuing my master’s degree in European History. Given these major life changes, I had put my blog on hold for a time. Now that summer is approaching, I hope to spend more time posting a wide variety of content on this site, from my personal historical research and writing to news analysis and essays on current affairs.

The first such post will be up shortly; it is a paper that was accepted for presentation at the 2020 conference of the North East Slavic, East European & Eurasian Studies Society. Unfortunately (but not surprisingly), that conference was cancelled due to the coronavirus outbreak, so I am hosting the paper here for your reading pleasure. It is most definitely an academic historiographical treatise and may not be supremely accessible to the lay reader, but I hope you will read and enjoy it regardless. Please check back soon to learn about the fascinating, bizarre, complex saga of Simeon Bekbulatovich, a man who was the supreme power in the entirety of Russia for all of one year during the reign of Ivan the Terrible.

Cheers!