Activities and affiliations

Scholarship and theory 1949–

American historian and publisher who documented Stalin's last conspiracy

'There should be a major film, and it should be called Gulag. This is the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century.'

American publisher and historian who founded the Annals of Communism series at Yale University Press in 1991, bringing newly opened Soviet archives to Western readers for the first time. His 2003 book Stalin's Last Crime, co-authored with Vladimir Naumov, drew on previously closed KGB and presidential archives to reconstruct the Doctors' Plot and argue that Stalin was planning a mass deportation of Soviet Jews and a new wave of terror on the eve of his death. Since 2009 he has served as executive director of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, leading efforts to preserve Eastern European Jewish heritage.

Scholarship and theory 1949–

Cuban-born US sociologist and historian of the Cuban Revolution

In December 1977 she helped lead the Antonio Maceo Brigade with Lourdes Casal on a visit to Cuba by 55 exiles, a trip that preceded the 1978 dialogues between Cuban exiles and the Cuban government.

Marifeli Pérez-Stable is a Cuban-born sociologist and historian of Cuba, born in 1949; her family left the island when she was 11. She took her PhD in sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1985 and a master's in political science at the University of Florida. She is the author of The Cuban Revolution: Origins, Course, and Legacy (Oxford University Press, first edition 1993), whose periodization the dictionary's historiography draws on. She was professor of sociology at Florida International University, now professor emeritus, and served as vice president for democratic governance at the Inter-American Dialogue from 2004 to 2009. Her designation as Cuban is an attributed label; no formal US citizenship status is documented.

Scholarship and theory 1949–

the British economic historian whose three-position taxonomy of NEP's failure shaped the historiographical debate

Why did NEP fail? I should like to distinguish three ways in which this question has been answered: rational abandonment, irrational or political decision, and constrained choice.

Mark Harrison is a British economic historian who studied economics at Cambridge and modern history at Oxford, and taught at the University of Warwick from 1975, researching the Soviet economy for over four decades. His 1980 paper 'Why Did NEP Fail?' identified three positions in the historiographical debate (rational abandonment, irrational or political decision, and constrained choice), a taxonomy that has structured assessments of NEP ever since. His work expanded into the economics of warfare, state secrecy, and coercion, earning the Alec Nove Prize for Accounting for War (1996) and producing Secret Leviathan (2023), a landmark study of information control under Soviet communism.

Scholarship and theory 1949–

The interpreter who mediated summit diplomacy

He recalled interpreting as searching for the threads connecting two languages.

Pavel Palazhchenko is an interpreter and writer whose work documents the decisive conversational spaces of late Soviet diplomacy. As the English interpreter for Mikhail Gorbachev and Eduard Shevardnadze, he took part in the US-Soviet summits at Geneva, Reykjavik, Malta and elsewhere. His memoir records not only leaders’ words but also the working processes of arms-control negotiations and the growth of trust, offering a Soviet-side account of the peaceful end of the Cold War. He later continued as an international-relations analyst and press official at the Gorbachev Foundation.

Scholarship and theory 1950–2025 ○ Natural causes

A revisionist historian of Soviet political history

He likened the archives to laboratories where he could try to explain the unimaginable.

J. Arch Getty was an American historian of Soviet political history and Stalinism who taught and conducted research at UCLA. In Origins of the Great Purges (1985), he challenged the picture of Stalinism as the product of seamless central control, emphasizing weak party organization, local autonomy, and conflict within the leadership. That approach became a major strand of the Western revisionist debate surrounding Khrushchev’s revelations and the interpretation of Stalinism, although it did not absolve Stalin or the party leadership of responsibility for terror. After Soviet archives opened, he and other scholars used new records to reassess the scale of repression and the workings of state violence.

Scholarship and theory 1950–

The historian who interpreted the Prague Spring between the tanks and the memory wars

The experience of the occupation, the incredible solidarity in August 1968: that belongs to those very rare historical moments that not everyone gets to live through, and one can count oneself lucky to have experienced it.

Jan Pauer is a Czech-born historian who witnessed the Prague Spring of 1968 and emigrated to West Germany the following year. In 1995 he published Prag 1968, the definitive account of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, and spent his career at the University of Bremen's Research Centre for Eastern Europe studying modern Czechoslovak history. In his 2011 ENRS article, he argued that the invasion marked 'the start of a civil society opposition and the historical end of reform communism,' contending that the Prague Spring was buried twice: first by Soviet tanks and then by the memory politics of post-1989 Czechia.

Scholarship and theory 1950–

An archival journalist who reconstructed the Cold War's most dangerous crises

He recast the Cuban Missile Crisis not as a summit-room myth, but as an hour-by-hour crisis compounded by accidents.

Michael Dobbs is a British-born journalist and nonfiction author who reported from the front lines of the Cold War's end and other international conflicts. As a Washington Post correspondent and bureau chief in Eastern Europe, Paris, and Moscow, he chronicled the collapse of the socialist bloc and its international consequences. One Minute to Midnight cross-checked American, Soviet, and Cuban sources to reconstruct the Cuban Missile Crisis hour by hour, showing that the danger of nuclear war was far greater than familiar summit-room myths suggested. His method shifts attention from great-power leaders alone to commanders, civilians, and accidents that could magnify a crisis.

Scholarship and theory 1950–2023 ○ Died

The institutional economist who crystallized the 50-year debate over the Kosygin reform in a single book title

In 1977, when he defended his candidate's dissertation on the 'Asiatic mode of production,' the Academy of Social Sciences under the CPSU Central Committee, the official reviewer, submitted an evaluation whose essence was: 'This is not Marxism.'

An institutional economist of Tatar origin born in Moscow, he graduated with honours from the MSU economics faculty and taught political economy there, attracting attention with a controversial dissertation on the 'Asiatic mode of production' that the Academy of Social Sciences under the CPSU Central Committee denounced as 'not Marxism.' In 1993 he helped Kuzminov found the Higher School of Economics (HSE), serving as its first department chair, first vice-rector, and first full professor, becoming a central architect of the Russian institutional-economics school. As editor of the 2017 collective monograph 'Missed Chance or Last Valve? On the 50th Anniversary of the Kosygin Reforms of 1965,' he crystallized the polarized historiographical debate: reform as a lost opportunity for the planned economy versus its last safety valve, in a single title.

Scholarship and theory 1950–

A historian who reread Sino-Soviet relations through Cold War archives

In 1995 he spent over a million yuan of his own money to buy declassified Russian archives, which he then opened to fellow scholars free of charge.

Shen Zhihua is a historian of the Cold War, the Soviet Union, and Sino-Soviet relations who led the Center for Cold War International History Studies at East China Normal University. He expanded the documentary basis of Chinese Cold War scholarship by personally collecting declassified Russian materials and editing large archival compilations. His work explains the Sino-Soviet split through the interaction of state interests and competition within the international communist movement, questioning accounts that reduce China’s choices to ideological solidarity alone. His studies of the Korean War and the Sino-Soviet alliance trace the calculations of China, the Soviet Union, and Korea, bringing a major Chinese interpretation of the Cold War to an international readership.

Scholarship and theory 1950–2025 ○ Stroke

Leader of the Soyuz faction who nearly turned a parliamentary session into a constitutional coup

On 17 June 1991, as the concluding speaker of the session, Alksnis told the Supreme Soviet that the Union Treaty was unconstitutional and that deputies must back Pavlov's Cabinet because it 'works for the USSR, for the preservation of this state.'

A Soviet Air Force colonel of Latvian descent who became the most visible hardliner in the USSR Congress of People's Deputies. As co-chairman of the Soyuz faction, he demanded martial law, called for Gorbachev's ouster, and on 17 June 1991 urged an immediate vote on Pavlov's emergency-powers resolution, drawing the accusation that he was staging a constitutional coup. After the Soviet collapse he served two terms in the Russian Duma, was beaten by riot police defending the anti-Yeltsin parliament in 1993, and spent his last decades as an unreconstructed Soviet patriot.

Scholarship and theory 1950–

Economic historian who argued partial reform would only destroy the planning system

'Analyses of "Gorbachev's economists" never mention the words "charlatan" or "ignoramus."'

A Soviet-born economist who emigrated to the United States, trained at Novosibirsk University and the University of Pennsylvania. In his 1988 article 'Lessons of the 1965 Soviet Economic Reform,' he argued that resistance from central ministries and Gosplan to the Kosygin reform was not mere bureaucratic self-interest but a rational recognition that partial market reform would destroy the central planning system without putting any workable alternative in its place. Together with Michael Ellman he edited The Destruction of the Soviet Economic System; this systemic incompatibility thesis became a key argument in the historiographical debate over why Soviet reforms consistently failed.

Scholarship and theory 1951–

Romanian-American political scientist and authority on the 1989 revolutions

In Bucharest in June 1990, he witnessed miners violently crushing anti-government protesters, an experience he said gave him insight into 'barbarity in its crassest, most revolting form.'

Born into a Romanian communist elite family and defecting in 1981, he is a political scientist who has analysed Stalinism and the collapse of East European communist systems from a comparative politics perspective. His 2003 Stalinism for All Seasons provided a definitive synthesis of Romanian communism, and in 2006 he chaired the Presidential Commission for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship, steering the country's landmark reckoning with its past. His 2009 article on the causes, meanings and consequences of 1989 became a benchmark for scholarship on the revolutions, arguing that ethnic conflict and authoritarian backsliding in the aftermath do not diminish their 'generous message' and colossal impact.

Scholarship and theory 1952–

An economist who reads international monetary order through history

He read the Marshall Plan not simply as an aid project, but as a structural adjustment program that changed postwar Europe’s economic order.

Barry Eichengreen is an American economist and economic historian who connects the history of international monetary and financial systems to contemporary policy problems. His work on the gold standard showed how the structure and management of an international monetary regime helped transmit the Great Depression. In his study of the Marshall Plan, he emphasized that the conditions attached to aid, not simply its volume, pushed Western Europe’s postwar mixed economies toward more markets and less control. That argument made him an important reference point in debates over whether reconstruction succeeds through cash, institutional conditions, or their combination.

Scholarship and theory 1952–

Balkan historian whose Albania at War brought Albania's wartime experience into European historiography

Albania at War recast the occupation as fragmentation and internal division, a power struggle ending in the communists' rise and Enver Hoxha's regime; the war, he concluded, pulled Albania out of one isolation only to push it into another.

Historian of the Balkans and Albania, born 27 January 1952. He took his Ph.D. at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1982, was professor of history and chair of the Department of History at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne, and is now professor emeritus there. He is a foreign member of the Albanian Academy of Sciences. Neither his citizenship nor his national origin is documented. His books include King Zog and the Struggle for Stability in Albania (1984), Albania at War, 1939–1945 (1999) and Balkan Strongmen (2006); he co-edited Albanian Identities (2002) with Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers and co-wrote A Concise History of Albania (2022) with Oliver Jens Schmitt.

Scholarship and theory 1952–2014

Portuguese historian of the colonial war and of Angola's 1977 purge

Died in Lisbon on 30 October 2014; her husband and co-author Álvaro Mateus had died about a year earlier, in August 2013.

Portuguese historian. Born in Viana do Castelo in 1952; she died in Lisbon on 30 October 2014. Her research covered Portuguese colonialism, the colonial war and the political police; her doctoral work became A PIDE/DGS na guerra colonial 1961-1974 (2004), a reference study showing the PIDE was more brutal than assumed, worked closely with the Army in the colonies, and persisted in Africa after being dissolved in Portugal itself, siding with those who obstructed decolonisation. With her husband and co-author Álvaro Mateus (a former PCP militant, d. 2013) she published on Angola and Mozambique, including Purga em Angola (2007) on 27 May 1977, in which she held President Agostinho Neto responsible for the killing of Nito Alves's supporters. She interviewed former political prisoners; recordings and transcripts are held at the Torre do Tombo.

Scholarship and theory 1952–

A historian connecting Chernobyl to modern Eastern European history

Forty years on he wrote, "In a way, Chernobyl created glasnost."

David Marples is a Canadian historian at the University of Alberta who studies the modern history and politics of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine. He was an early analyst of Chernobyl’s social and political consequences, beginning with Chernobyl and Nuclear Power in the USSR, published in the year of the accident, and later work on nuclear policy, safety, and the responses of states and affected communities. His research expanded to national history, famine, and the Soviet collapse, while treating Chernobyl as an important influence on the USSR’s crisis without reducing that collapse to a single cause.

Scholarship and theory 1952–

The scholar who read 1989 as liberal democracy's endpoint

In 1989 he wrote: “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, but the end of history as such.”

Francis Fukuyama is an American political scientist and scholar of international politics who has compared the formation of states, institutions, and political orders. His 1989 essay “The End of History?” interpreted the end of the Cold War and the spread of liberal democracy as a point reached in humanity’s ideological evolution, making it one of the defining claims in debates over what 1989 meant. He expanded the argument in The End of History and the Last Man (1992), while later work stressed state capacity, the rule of law, and accountability, qualifying any simple early optimism.

Scholarship and theory 1952–

An Estonian legal scholar who challenged the Soviet official narrative in the language of law

On the Yakovlev commission, he argued that the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic was legally null and void.

Igor Gräzin is an Estonian legal scholar and politician whose work has ranged across legal theory, philosophy of law, and comparative jurisprudence. Elected to the Congress of People's Deputies of the Soviet Union in 1989, he served on the Yakovlev commission examining the secret protocols and the legal meaning of the Baltic states' incorporation. His intervention brought legal expertise into the political struggle over sovereignty and historical memory during the Soviet Union's final crisis.

Scholarship and theory 1954–

A journalist-historian of Cold War crises

In his Berlin 1961, Kempe records General Lucius Clay's retort to President Kennedy at the height of the Checkpoint Charlie tank standoff: "Mr. President, we're not worried about our nerves. We're worrying about those of you people in Washington."

Frederick Kempe is an American journalist and author whose German family background and European reporting shaped his work on Cold War politics and transatlantic affairs. His major book, Berlin 1961, combines newly declassified American, Soviet, and German documents with interviews to reconstruct the building of the Berlin Wall and the October tank confrontation at Checkpoint Charlie. The book interprets Kennedy's crisis management as weakness and places Khrushchev's decisions within their political constraints, an asymmetry that an independent review challenged and made part of the work's historiographical significance.

Scholarship and theory 1954–2011 ○ Liver cancer

Nanjing University historian whose How the Red Sun Rose dissected the Yan’an rectification movement

His How the Red Sun Rose (2000) reconstructed the Yan'an Rectification Movement from party documents and memoirs, treating it as the process through which Mao consolidated personal authority and fixed the party's later methods.

Born in Nanjing, he grew up watching his father persecuted as a “rightist” during the Cultural Revolution and taught modern Chinese history at Nanjing University. How the Red Sun Rose: The Origins and Development of the Yan’an Rectification Movement, published in Hong Kong in 2000, reconstructed the movement of 1942–1945 from published sources alone, showing how Mao concentrated the party’s power in himself through thought reform, cadre screening and the “rescue campaign”, and set the template for later political campaigns. Banned on the mainland but widely read there, he died of liver cancer in 2011.

Scholarship and theory 1954–

The archival historian of Stalin's state antisemitism who argued the 1953 deportation was a myth

Stalin's Jewish deportation became a kind of Loch Ness Monster: many claimed to have seen it, but no one has ever presented a single piece of incontrovertible evidence.

Russia's leading historian of the Stalin era, who set the scholarly standard through his archival excavation of Soviet state antisemitism. His books In the Clutches of the Red Pharaoh (1994) and Stalin's Secret Policy: Power and Antisemitism (2001) are the monumental reference works that documented the full scope of late-Stalinist persecution of Jews, including the Doctors' Plot and the anti-cosmopolitan campaign. In his 2003 article 'Deportation: A Mystification,' he provoked fierce debate by arguing the widely accepted claim that Stalin planned a mass deportation of Jews was like the Loch Ness Monster: a story many claimed to have seen but for which no archival evidence existed, a position that now stands as the central counterpoint to Brent and Naumov's Stalin's Last Crime.

Scholarship and theory 1954–

A historian who reshaped the history of Vichy and wartime memory

In 2017 the historian of wartime memory was himself detained for ten hours at Houston's airport, nearly deported after U.S. border agents questioned the stipend for his lecture.

Henry Rousso is a French historian of France during the Second World War, the Vichy regime, and the changing memory of that past. Born in Cairo to a Jewish family that moved to France after the Suez Crisis, he made the relationship between historical experience and collective memory central to his work. His landmark book The Vichy Syndrome examined how post-Liberation France reconstructed, muted, and confronted collaboration and responsibility, while his term résistancialisme named the myth that exaggerated the Resistance’s size and national unity. His scholarship helped establish the study of contemporary memory as a field that distinguishes historical evidence from political uses of the past while tracing their interaction.

Scholarship and theory 1954–

A historian who clarified the political conflicts of modern France

Le Monde has called him "one of the best historians of the French twentieth century."

Julian Jackson is a British historian of twentieth-century France who has traced the conditions and consequences of political choices from the Depression and Popular Front to the Occupation and Gaullism. His study The Popular Front in France examined the relationship between reform and rearmament, democratic defence and mass mobilisation across political, social and cultural dimensions, becoming a major reference point in debate over the period. He later broadened his work to the French defeat of 1940, the German Occupation, postwar homosexual politics and May 1968.

Scholarship and theory 1954–

A scholar who reread war after withdrawal

"The regime of President Najibullah, however, survived until April 1992, over three years after the Soviet withdrawal," he wrote, against predictions that it would fall within months of the Soviet departure.

Mark N. Katz is an American scholar of international politics whose research covers Russian politics and foreign policy, revolution, and the war on terror. At George Mason University, he taught and wrote on Soviet and Russian policy in the Third World and the international dimensions of revolutionary movements. In a 2011 analysis of the Afghanistan withdrawal, he argued that Soviet military and economic aid sustained Najibullah's regime for more than three years after the troops left, challenging the assumption that withdrawal necessarily meant imminent collapse.