Despite the short duration of his two-year reign, Richard III (1452-1485) became one of the most famous British monarchs. Shakespeare and Thomas More portrayed him as a physical and moral monster, a cruel tyrant who killed many people for the sake of power, including his young nephews. Modern scholars have made serious adjustments to this image: in their opinion, most of the accusations against the monarch were invented by his opponents, and Richard himself was an extraordinary politician, to whom England owes much of the transition from the Middle Ages to the Modern Age. These conclusions are supported by historian Vadim Ustinov, who created the first biography of Richard III in Russian in the context of English and European history of the 15th century.