The magazine was founded by the journalist and scholar Sergey Shubinsky and Alexey Suvorin (as publisher) with a view to "providing the reader, in the most lively and accessible form possible, with the full account of what happens in the historical science and literature both in Russia and in Europe."

Part of the Russian history journals' 'triumvirate', alongside Russky Arkhiv and Russkaya Starina, it differed from the other two in making accessibility and fine literary style its main priorities.

[1] Among the prominent contributors to Istorichesky Vestnik were Russia's leading historians of the time Mykola Kostomarov, Konstantin Bestuzhev-Ryumin, Egor Zamyslovsky, Alexander Brückner, Ivan Zabelin, Alexey Korsakov, Leonid Maykov and Rafail Zotov.

[2] The historical belletrists Evgeny Salias De Tournemire, Daniil Mordovtsev, Grigory Danilevsky, Vsevolod Solovyov, Evgeny Karnovich, Pyotr Polevoy, Viktor Burenin, Nadezhda Merder (N. Severin), Rostislav Sementkovsky, as well as authors like Sergey Terpigorev, Pyotr Gnedich and Ieronim Yasinsky were regular contributors to Istorichesky vestnik.

Several important memoirs and diaries, by authors like Viktor Askochensky, Ksenofont Polevoy, Avdotya Panayeva, Vladimir Sollogub, Nikolai Ignatyev and Ilya Arsenyev, were published in Istorichesky Vestnik.