REAL ACQUAINTANCE with Taʾrikh al-rusul wa-l-muluk by Abū Ja'far Muḥammad ibn Jarīr al-Ṭabarī (224/839–310/923) began in Russia as elsewhere after the Leiden edition of M.J. de Goeje appeared in 1879-1901. Of course Russian orientalists were formerly aware of the existence of this fundamental work, which, beginning with Creation, expounded the history of the world as a sequence of appearances of God's messengers to people and which detailed the history of the first three centuries of Islam. But neither purposeful searches for manuscript copies of the work’ nor casual acquisitions succeeded in bringing any part of it to state libraries in St. Petersburg in the original. Later only a single volume of al-Ṭabarī's Taʾrīkh was found in numerous libraries and private collections all over vast territories of the former USSR. Therefore Russian orientalists had only very limited chances to use it: either through quotations by later historians or through the Persian version of Balʿami. Naturally there did not exist any Russian translation from al-Ṭabarī. In addition orientalists in Russia until after the 1880s rarely used the Russian language. The study of Arabic, then represented in the capital almost exclusively, was in fact a branch of European scholarship and works were mostly published in German, French or Latin.

Muslim scholars of Russian citizenship, even such outstanding among them as Shihabaddin Marjani of Kazan were apparently not acquainted with the Taʾrīkh of al-Ṭabarī.

Meanwhile the same narrow circle of orientalists in St. Petersburg was well informed, from the very beginning, about efforts undertaken by M.J. de Goeje aiming at publication of al-Ṭabarī's Taʾrikh as an international enterprise, with use of all its known manuscripts from libraries of various countries and drawing in most prominent Arabists to prepare the text. According to M. Kunik, cited in de Goeje's “Introductio”: Gottwald persuaded two ḥājjīs of Kazan to research the existence of a copy at Medina. They brought home the vague information that a copy had existed, but, they were told, “the volumes had been transported to Constantinople”. De Goeje noted also that “the Russian historian M. Kunik deems the publication of this work of “the father of Mohammedan universal history” so important that he calls it a duty of the empire (i.e. the Russian empire), which possesses the Caucasus and reigns on the shores of the Caspian, to provide for a complete edition of al- Ṭabarī ”.