Oleksiy Tolochko

Tolochko is the director of the Centre of Kievan Rus' Studies (Ukrainian: Сектор досліджень історії Київської Русі) in Kyiv, and is known for his work on textual criticism of the Primary Chronicle.

His father is archaeologist Petro Tolochko, his mother is art critic Tetyana Valeryivna Kara-Vasilyeva; both are members of the National Academy of Sciences as well.

He has taught medieval history of Ukraine at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute in the United States.

In the early 21st century, he was one of the leading scholars (along with Tetyana Vilkul, one of his former students[2]) to challenge the traditional consensus that Aleksey Shakhmatov had essentially been correct about how the Primary Chronicle was put together.

[3] Tolochko argued that Shakhmatov's idea of layers of pre-existing svods that went all the way back to eyewitness accounts of the events they narrate could no longer be maintained.