Lindsey Hughes was an internationally renowned authority on 17th and 18th-century Russian history, and in particular on the age of Peter the Great.

As well as teaching at London University’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES, now part of UCL), where she was a professor and head of the history department, she wrote prolifically and was a valued member of an influen-tial cohort of scholars brought together in the Eighteenth-Century Russia Study Group, which was founded in 1968 by Anthony Cross.

Lindsey Audrey Jennifer Hughes was born in 1949 and educated at Dartford Grammar School for Girls, and the University of Sussex, where she took a first in Russian. She went on to a PhD at Darwin College, Cam-bridge, with a thesis devoted to Moscow Baroque architecture.

Hughes’s knowledge of Russian language, history, art, architecture and music equipped her superbly for exploring the history and culture of late Muscovite Russia as it stood on the eve of the violent transformation wrought by Peter the Great. Her work demonstrated that modernity was in the air even before him.

Her first monograph, published in 1984, was a biography of the westernising Prince V. V. Golitsyn (1643-1714). Golitsyn served Peter’s half-sister and rival, Sophia, who had her own ideas about the proper direction a modernising Russia should take.

In her second monograph, Sophia, Regent of Russia (1657-1704) published in 1990, Hughes illuminated the difficulties Russian court iconographers had in depicting a personage who at that point was unique in Russian history, a woman ruling in her own right.

In the 1990s, Hughes wrote two admired studies of the age, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great (1998) and Peter the Great: A Biography(2002), both of which received widespread scholarly acclaim, and – thanks to the clarity and liveliness of her writing – were no less readable for a general audience.

Hughes began her teaching career at Queen’s University Belfast in 1974, moving to the University of Reading in 1977. After the Atkinson Report on Russian studies in Britain, the decision was made to close the Russian department there and Hughes moved to SSEES in 1987, becoming Professor ten years later. She was well loved by colleagues and students, especially the many graduate students she nurtured through the stresses of writing a thesis.

Russian art and architecture constituted a lifelong passion, and those who accompanied Hughes on trips to Moscow frequently found themselves pulled into dank courtyards to see one of the distinctive architectural features of a city increasingly transformed by the wrecker’s ball.

While researching her thesis in Moscow, Lindsey carved out an alternative career as a singer of English songs on Soviet children’s TV. At home, Lindsey was a valued member of numerous choirs, most recently the St Paul’s Knightsbridge Festival Choir. Among her great domestic pleasures were her three cats.

In the mid1990s she was found to have cancer, of which her mother had died when Hughes was 16. She recovered but it returned in 2005; she delayed going into hospital in order to complete the manuscript of her last book, a history of the Romanov dynasty.

In January last year she married her partner, James Cutshall, who survives her.

Professor Lindsey Hughes, historian of Russia, was born on May 4, 1949. She died of cancer on April 26, 2007, aged 57