[citation needed] In 1894, Shakhmatov returned to Moscow and won great acclaim for his PhD dissertation, entitled Studies in the Sphere of Russian Phonetics.

[citation needed] Shakhmatov participated in the Commission for the Study of the Tribal Composition of the Population of the Borderlands of Russia set up in February 1917.

The Academy subsequently cherished his memory and instituted a special Shakhmatov Prize, to be awarded "for the best works in source science, textology and linguistics".

[2] In his monographies "Research in a field of the Russian phonetics" (Исследования в области русской фонетики, 1894), "To the history of sounds in the Russian language" (К истории звуков русского языка, 1903), and others, Shakhmatov set a goal to restore the All-Russian pronunciation in all of its phonetical details by way of juxtaposition of old and modern eastern Slavic dialects with involving of data from other Slavic languages.

He established with a great degree of precision the stages of evolution of that key document, even attempting to reconstruct the postulated proto-version of Nestor's chronicle.

His studies of Slavic etymology revolved around the idea of close contacts and influences between the ancient Slavs and Celts, a hypothesis that was subsequently discarded.