Politically close to the kadet party (of which his father was one of the leaders), Vernadsky began his career as a supporter of liberal ideas, authoring the biographies of Nikolai Novikov and Pavel Milyukov.

Vernadsky's first book in English was a widely read textbook on Russian history, first published in 1929 and republished six times during his lifetime.

In 1943, he embarked on his magnum opus, A History of Russia, of which six volumes were eventually published, despite the death of his co-author, Professor Michael Karpovich, in 1959.

He pointed out many substantial cultural differences between Russia and Europe and praised the success of Russian development along an independent path that revealed its unique character.

For that reason, Vernadsky could identify the roots of Russian culture in an ancient period long before the Slavic groups arrived.

Indeed, Vernadsky argued that this polarization was one of the main weaknesses of the tsarist regime, making it incapable of dealing with the revolutionary movements of the early twentieth century.

[3] While G. Vernadsky's writings about the historical past were based upon solid archive sources, his flight from Russia separated him from original materials of the latest periods.

Thus, some critics of early editions were doubtful about certain figures and estimates he made for contemporaneousness, pointing out that some of them were rather a guess than hard evidence.