Russkaya Starina (Russian: Русская старина; Old Times in Russia) was a Russian history journal published monthly in St. Petersburg by amateur historian Mikhail Semevsky and his successors between 1870 and 1918. Its authors included Ivan Zabelin, Dmitry Ilovaysky, Nikolai Karlovich Shilder, and Nikolay Kostomarov. A collected edition was reprinted in 2008.
Semevsky was highly enthusiastic about the history of 18th-century Russia. His journal covered the imperial period of Russian history, including the era of palace revolutions. It was Russkaya Starina that first brought to light the unpublished pages of Eugene Onegin and Dead Souls, Bolotov's memoirs, Kuchelbecker's diary, and many other materials long forgotten or repressed by censorship. Semevsky personally persuaded numerous old nobles and bureaucrats to put their reminiscences into writing.
In the late 1870s another amateur historian, Sergei Shubinsky, set up a rival publication, The Historical Herald.
This article incorporates material from the public domain 1906 Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary.