1. Aleksey Shakhmatov was a full member of the Russian Academy of Sciences since 1899 and a chair of the Department of Russian language and philology of the Academy of Sciences, a member of the Constitutional Democratic Party and the Russian Empire State Council.
Aleksey Shakhmatov went to a public school in Moscow and developed interest for Old Russian language and literature at an early age.
Aleksey Shakhmatov furthered his education at the Imperial Moscow University, later delivering lectures in the same institution.
In 1894, Aleksey Shakhmatov returned to Moscow and won great acclaim for his PhD dissertation, entitled Studies in the Sphere of Russian Phonetics.
Aleksey Shakhmatov revived the Academy's linguistic periodicals, edited the academic dictionary of Russian language and was elected to represent the Academy at the State Council of Imperial Russia and Imperial State Duma.
In 1909, Aleksey Shakhmatov moved to work at Saint Petersburg University as a professor.
Aleksey Shakhmatov participated in the Commission for the Study of the Tribal Composition of the Population of the Borderlands of Russia set up in February 1917.
Aleksey Shakhmatov helped prepare sweeping reforms of Russian orthography, which would be implemented by the Bolsheviks in 1918, and his orthography is still used to this day.
Aleksey Shakhmatov refused to leave Petrograd for the West, a fatal decision that led to his premature death from malnutrition and exhaustion in 1920.
Aleksey Shakhmatov is an author of several works in phonetics, dialectology, lexicography, syntax, history of East Slavic languages, modern Russian literary language, history of East Slavic people, history of Old Russian literature, Slavic accentology.
Aleksey Shakhmatov is best remembered for having pioneered textological research of early Russian chronicles, notably the Primary Chronicle.
Aleksey Shakhmatov established with a great degree of precision the stages of evolution of that key document, even attempting to reconstruct the postulated proto-version of Nestor's chronicle.
Aleksey Shakhmatov's research proved seminal for subsequent generations of historians.
Aleksey Shakhmatov was responsible for publication and pioneering studies of minor or derelict Slavic languages.