Vyacheslav Shishkov

In 1891 he graduated from the Vyshny Volochyok Civil Engineering College (Vyshnevolotskoe uchilishche konduktorov putei soobshcheniya).

After the October Revolution, about which he felt apprehension, he spent some time wandering around Russia (in the Luga district, Smolensk, Kostroma, and Crimea).

For the last seven years of his life he worked on the historical epic Yemelyan Pugachev (Russian: Емельян Пугачёв), "a colorful panorama of the 18th-century Cossack and peasant uprising,"[1] whose first volume he published in 1941 while he was living in blockaded Leningrad; it was published (unfinished) in three volumes after his death and won him the Stalin Prize.

He left Leningrad in April 1942 and his seventieth birthday was celebrated in Moscow in October 1943; on this occasion he was awarded the Order of Lenin.

Biographies and critical works have been written by V. Bakhmetev (1947), A. Bogdanova (1953), I. Izotov (1956), V. Chalmayev (1969), N. Yeselev (1976), and N. Yanovsky (1984).