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This paper publishes nine documents devoted to the service of Andrei Ivanovich Ushakov (1672–1725), major of the Preobrazhensky Life-Guards Regiment between 1714 and 1721. The Novgorod nobleman started his career as a soldier in the Preobrazhensky Regiment. In 1706, Ushakov already had the rank of a lieutenant and was an adjutant of the tsar. Between the 1700s and early 1710s, Ushakov fulfilled diverse orders of Peter the Great: he delivered weapons, horses, gunpowder, provisions to the army, conducted reconnaissance missions, and reported on the location and movements of the Swedish army. In December 1708, Ushakov was involved in the work of an investigator for the first time. In the early 1710s, orders to control and investigate became Ushakov’s principal among various assignments. At the decision of the tsar, Ushakov became deputy of Pyotr Tolstoy, who was head of the Secret Chancellery established in February 1718 specifically to investigate Tsarevich Alexei’s escape. For his participation in the investigation, Ushakov was properly rewarded by Peter, who granted him the rank of a brigadier and lands confiscated from convicts. Ushakov maintained regular correspondence with the tsar: however, there is no unified collection of documents from Ushakov’s personal archive. For this publication, the authors chose decrees (written both in the sovereign’s own hand and in a clerk’s hand), letters by Tsarevna Ekaterina Alekseevna, and extracts from Senate books reflecting the participation of Ushakov in various events and investigations in the first quarter of the eighteenth century from the corpus of documents kept in the Archive of the St Petersburg Institute of History of the RAS.

The elements of expert analysis established in Russian academic circles by the late nineteenth century, when auxiliary historical disciplines became an indispensable part of the academic base of historical knowledge, are described in this article with reference to a lost letter by Peter I to Georg Wilhelm de Henning sent on 24 December 1724. These elements include the study of the letter, the stages and methods of introducing it into scholarly circulation, and the assessment of its significance and value in monetary terms. It is established that the original of the letter ended up in a private collection in the early twentieth century and became inaccessible to historians. However, handwritten copies, a draft, and descriptions have survived. The article analyses the work with Peter I’s letter performed by the members of the commission for the publication of Peter the Great’s letters and papers, as well as by the first owner of the letter, N. K. Bogushevsky, the Parisian antiquarian Noël Charavay, into whose hands the letter fell a decade after its former owner’s death, and N. P. Likhachev, a prominent specialist in a number of auxiliary historical disciplines to whom the antiquary turned for an expert opinion. While researching the copies and descriptions of Peter I’s letter, the authors used traditional methods of expert analysis of the missing original found in the collections of St Petersburg Institute of History (Russian Academy of Sciences), the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts, and the National Archives of France. Referring to handwritten materials from the Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts, the Russian State Library, and sales catalogues, the authors carry out a brief analysis of the Western European and Russian antiques market in the late nineteenth – early twentieth centuries in relation to Russian documents from the eighteenth century (prices and demand). The attribution of authenticity to historical documents (including the first Russian emperor’s autographs) was not only an issue of the reliability of historical knowledge or academic interest, but also one of reputation of connoisseurs, collectors, antiquarians, and the experts they turned to. At the same time, reputation helped ensure the quality of expertise and was a tool for raising this through horizontal connections within the professional community.