Activities and affiliations

Political and party leadership Affiliation unconfirmed 1941–

The dissident architect who walked out of a Soviet prison camp and opened Estonia's political road to independence

On 23 August 1987 at noon, Hirvepark stood empty until the stroke of twelve, when two to five thousand people suddenly filled it. Parek recalled: 'Unbelievable! Something had to be done.'

The daughter of an Estonian officer, she was deported to Siberia at seven and spent four years in exile. Working as an architect, she was arrested in 1983 for anti-Soviet samizdat activity and imprisoned for four years; seven months after her release she co-founded the MRP-AEG and organised the Hirvepark rally of August 1987. That rally became the starting point of the Baltic independence movement, and the following year she was elected chair of the ERSP, Estonia's first non-communist party. After independence she served as interior minister in the first post-Soviet government, resigning in the 1993 Pullapää crisis, and later converted to Catholicism, living at Pirita Convent while leading the drive to build a memorial to the victims of Stalinism.

Government and administration Soviet Union state institutions 1941–2018 ○ Natural causes

An Estonian communist leader who chose to preserve the Soviet Union

In 1991, as Estonian independence approached, he joined the Politburo while backing the Soviet Union.

Lembit Annus was a Moscow-aligned Estonian communist leader who stood at the centre of the late Soviet conflict over national independence and preserving the Union. From December 1990 until the party was banned in August 1991, he was First Secretary of the Communist Party of Estonia on the CPSU platform, and in 1991 he joined the CPSU Politburo. After the party's dissolution, he remained active in communist politics as a Pravda correspondent and Tallinn municipal councillor.

Ideology and propaganda Soviet Union state institutions 1941–2020 ○ Natural causes

The last Soviet culture minister

In his diploma performance as Hitler, Gubenko poured all his hatred for the man who killed his parents into the role. Lyubimov saw it and immediately brought him to the Taganka Theatre.

An actor and film director who rose from war orphan to People's Artist of the RSFSR. He was the first working arts professional to become Soviet Minister of Culture (1989–1991) since Anatoly Lunacharsky. After the USSR collapsed, he entered left-wing politics, serving as chair of the Duma's Culture Committee and deputy speaker of the Moscow City Duma, where he defended Soviet cultural heritage. Following the Taganka Theatre split, he founded and led the Sodruzhestvo Aktyorov Taganki until his death in 2020.

Scholarship and theory 1941–

An economic historian who traced the bureaucracy of Soviet planning

In the final 1938 Politburo transcript Gregory unearthed, Stalin explained the purge: 'I explain it by the fact that we were engaged in great deeds.'

Paul R. Gregory is an American economic historian whose work examines the Russian and Soviet economies. Combining statistical analysis with interviews, he studied how Soviet bureaucracies and planners actually operated and helped preserve officials’ testimony through the Soviet Interview Project. His 2000 retrospective on the Soviet planned economy, co-authored with Yuri Olsevich, interpreted the Kosygin reform as an attempt to combine directive planning with profit incentives without resolving their institutional tension.

Scholarship and theory 1941–

British historian whose 'Castro' argued US hostility pushed Cuba toward socialism

His 1990 'Castro' is cited as a leading statement of the thesis that US hostility pushed Cuba toward communism and dependence on the USSR, casting Castro as a nationalist and anti-imperialist in the vein of José Martí.

A British historian born in 1941, Professor Emeritus of Contemporary Spanish Studies at the London School of Economics. He took an MA in Latin American Studies at the University of London's Latin American Institute and a doctorate in history at the LSE, and held a Senior Lectureship at Goldsmiths, University of London. Appointed to an LSE Readership in Contemporary Spanish Studies in 1996, he became Assistant Director of the Cañada Blanch Centre for Contemporary Spanish Studies and later Professor in the Department of Government and the European Institute, and has been Emeritus Professor in the Government Department since 2006. He describes his research interests as centring on contemporary Spanish history, with the political career of Fidel Castro, the Cuban Revolution and Cuba-United States relations as another area of expertise.

Scholarship and theory 1941–

Revisionist trailblazer who reconstructed Soviet social history 'from below'

'Nothing fails like failure, and for historians approaching the revolution's centenary the disappearance of the Soviet Union casts a pall.' ('What's Left?', LRB, 2017)

The Australian-born historian who led the revisionist school of Soviet studies. In the 1970s and 1980s, with works like Education and Social Mobility, The Russian Revolution, Stalin's Peasants, and Everyday Stalinism, she pioneered a 'history from below' that read the Soviet system through the eyes of workers, peasants, and city-dwellers rather than the state and its leaders. In her 2017 LRB essay 'What's Left?', she surveyed the centenary histories of the October Revolution and mapped the three dominant frameworks (the totalitarian model, revisionist social history, and the post-1991 consensus that the revolution was a 'historical dead end'), arguing that the revolution's path to Stalinism was the product of social dynamics, not inevitability, a stance that unsettled both Cold War orthodoxy and its Marxist critics.

Scholarship and theory 1941–

A historian who recast the international history of Japan's surrender

Japan's surrender in August 1945 cannot be explained by the atomic bomb alone.

Tsuyoshi Hasegawa is a Japanese-American historian of modern Russian and Soviet history, the Cold War, and Russo-Japanese relations. His work ranges across the Russian Revolution, Soviet-Japanese relations, and the international history of the Pacific War's end, linking diplomacy to social and political change. His major book, Racing the Enemy, reopened debate over Japan's surrender by arguing that the Soviet declaration of war and invasion in August 1945, not the atomic bombings alone, decisively altered Japan's strategic options.

Government and administration Czechia state institutions 1941–

The market reformer who rejected a third way

“We want a market economy without any adjectives.”

Václav Klaus was a Czech economist and politician who represented a radical route from state socialism to a market economy after 1989. He founded the Civic Democratic Party, helped lead the dissolution of Czechoslovakia, and later served as Czech prime minister and president. He sympathized with the Prague Spring's political liberalization but rejected its economic Third Way, a position that shaped the transition's call for an unqualified market economy and the subsequent Czech conservative line. As president, he challenged European integration and climate policy while emphasizing national sovereignty and markets.

Scholarship and theory 1941–

An ethnologist who challenged the nation as a fixed essence

He described the nation as a powerful metaphor that political actors compete to monopolize.

Valery Tishkov is a Russian ethnologist and social anthropologist known for studying ethnicity, nationalism, and interethnic conflict. He treated nations less as naturally given communities than as categories mobilized and reconstructed by political actors and elites, an approach crystallized in Ethnicity, Nationalism and Conflict in and after the Soviet Union: The Mind Aflame. As Minister for Nationalities in 1992, he connected scholarly analysis of ethnicity to the governing problems of a multiethnic state and the prevention of conflict. His constructivist interpretation became one pole of debate over whether nationalism is chiefly elite-made or also an autonomous expression of popular experience.

Scholarship and theory 1941–

A biographer who reshaped the study of Soviet leadership

In the biography's preface Taubman called Khrushchev "a complex man whose story combines triumph and tragedy for his country as well as himself."

William Taubman is an American political scientist and historian of Soviet politics and the Cold War. After years of research, he published Khrushchev: The Man and His Era in 2003, a biography that won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. The book presents Khrushchev as both an heir to and a critic of Stalinism, placing the secret speech at the Twentieth Party Congress within the leader’s character and institutional setting. Taubman also wrote studies of Gorbachev and Stalin’s American policy, tracing the relationship between Soviet leadership and international politics.

Government and administration Latvia state institutions 1942–

The Communist Party secretary who led Latvia's Supreme Council through the restoration of independence

On 14 January 1991, General Kuzmin's ultimatum to the chairman of the Supreme Council was simple: repeal the laws Latvia had adopted, or the army would act. Gorbunovs did not repeal them, and a week later flew to Moscow to face Gorbachev.

A farmer's son from Pilda in eastern Latvia, he graduated from construction college, Riga Polytechnical Institute, and the Moscow Academy of Social Sciences, then rose through the Latvian Communist Party apparatus to become Central Committee secretary for ideology. He broke with the party's hard line in 1988 by backing the Latvian Popular Front, and as Chairman of the Supreme Council presided over the 4 May 1990 session that declared the Soviet Union an occupying power and began the transition to restored independence. During the January 1991 Barricades he stood firm against General Kuzmin's ultimatum, then flew to Moscow on 21 January to confront Gorbachev directly.

Scholarship and theory Affiliation unconfirmed 1942–1980 ✕ Assassinated

Guyanese Marxist historian who demonstrated how Europe underdeveloped Africa, scholar-activist of the Pan-African revolution

"For the only great men among the unfree and the oppressed are those who struggle to destroy the oppressor." — How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972)

A Guyanese Marxist historian and Pan-African activist, Rodney reshaped Third World historiography with How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), arguing that the slave trade, colonialism, and the capitalist world system structurally produced Africa's underdevelopment. From the Dar es Salaam and West Indies campuses he helped build a decolonised social science, and in Guyana he pursued a socialist politics grounded in multiracial working-class solidarity.

Military command Yemen state institutions 1942–1986 ✕ Killed by gunfire at the meeting

South Yemen's defence minister, shot in the January 1986 Aden violence

On 13 January 1986 guards of Ali Nasir Muhammad opened fire on opposition Politburo members in the Central Committee meeting hall; he was killed there.

A South Yemeni soldier and politician who served as a Politburo member of the Yemeni Socialist Party and as minister of defence. He joined the National Liberation Front against British colonial rule, rose through the army after independence, and after the party split sided with the al-Tugma faction that supported Abdul Fattah Ismail. He was killed on 13 January 1986 when Ali Nasir Muhammad's guards opened fire on opposition Politburo members at the Central Committee meeting hall in Aden; his death was one of the triggers of the civil war that followed.

Political and party leadership South African Communist Party (SACP) 1942–1993 ✕ Assassinated

The SACP leader who kept the revolutionary flame alive after laying down arms

“We are negotiating to create better conditions for socialism. I am a communist.” — Interview shortly before his assassination, 1993

General Secretary of the South African Communist Party and Chief of Staff of Umkhonto we Sizwe, he led the left wing of the liberation movement from armed struggle through the turn to negotiations. His assassination by a far-right immigrant in 1993 nearly derailed South Africa's democratic transition, but instead galvanized the final agreement on the 1994 elections.

Political and party leadership Yemeni Socialist Party (YSP) 1942–2002 ✕ Assassinated in Sanaa in

Yemeni socialist politician and advocate of unity and pluralism

On 28 December 2002 he was shot dead in Sanaa minutes after addressing the Islah party's conference; he was deputy secretary-general of the Yemeni Socialist Party.

Born in 1942 in the village of Kuhal in Yemen's Ibb province, he studied Islamic law in Dhamar and Sanaa and took part in the defence of Sanaa during the seventy-day siege. He helped found the Yemeni Revolutionary Democratic Party in 1968, was imprisoned for three years after the events of August 1968 in Sanaa, moved to Aden in 1971 and was elected to the Politburo in 1972. A founder of the Yemeni Socialist Party in 1978, he served as minister of culture and tourism in unified Yemen and became a leading advocate of human rights, political pluralism and the opposition coalition.

Military command Soviet Union state institutions 1942–2014 ○ Died

The air-defense general who ordered KAL 007 shot down, later commander-in-chief of the Russian Air Force

"I will always be convinced that I gave the right order": Kornukov on the KAL 007 shootdown.

Born the son of a Donetsk miner in the Ukrainian SSR, Anatoly Kornukov rose through the Soviet air-defence forces to become the general who, on 1 September 1983, ordered the shootdown of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 as it crossed Sakhalin. When his superiors refused to take responsibility, he directed the interceptor pilot Major Osipovich to destroy the target on his own authority, maintaining to his death that the order was justified under Soviet and international law. Neither rewarded nor punished for the incident, he kept rising and in 1998 became the first commander-in-chief of the unified Russian Air Force. The decision cost 269 civilian lives, and he later declared he would 'always be convinced that I gave the right order.'

Military command Soviet Union state institutions 1942–2020 ○ Natural causes

The last Soviet defence minister and final Marshal of Aviation

On 25 December 1991, as Gorbachev's nuclear briefcase was transferred to Yeltsin, Shaposhnikov told the press: "The nuclear button is in reliable hands."

A career officer who rose from fighter pilot to Commander-in-Chief of the Soviet Air Force over three decades, Shaposhnikov played a decisive role in the August 1991 coup when, as air force chief, he proposed to Defence Minister Yazov that troops be withdrawn from Moscow and the Emergency Committee be dissolved. After the coup's collapse Gorbachev appointed him the Soviet Union's last Defence Minister, and on 26 August 1991 he was promoted Marshal of Aviation, the final person in Soviet history to receive a rank bearing the word 'marshal.' He oversaw the transfer of nuclear command from Gorbachev to Yeltsin, served as CIS Joint Armed Forces Commander-in-Chief and later as Secretary of Russia's Security Council, before heading Aeroflot and advising Sukhoi.

Military command Soviet Union state institutions 1942–2021 ○ COVID-19

The Soviet air force general who personally led 1,927 helicopter drops over the burning Chernobyl reactor

"Tons of graphite were burning inside the reactor. Firefighters were powerless. We decided to extinguish the hearth from helicopters."

Born to a Mokshan peasant family and trained at the Orenburg military aviation school, he flew reconnaissance missions in the 1968 Czechoslovakia invasion, the 1969 Sino-Soviet border conflict, and over Afghanistan in 1979. As chief of staff of the Kyiv Military District Air Force, he received the call about the Chernobyl explosion on 26 April 1986, flew immediately to the site, and for ten days led helicopter crews dumping 4,925 tons of sand, lead, and boron into the burning reactor from 200 metres, personally flying over the crater. He continued serving until 1998 despite radiation exposure, then spent his final years as a United Russia deputy in the State Duma.

Political and party leadership Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) 1942–2022

Angola after Neto

Took over as president after Neto's death in 1979 and remained in office until 2017. He led the first round of the 1992 multiparty election, but no runoff was held, and the civil war ended after Savimbi's death in 2002.

He succeeded Neto as Angolan president in 1979. Educated in the USSR, he had served as planning minister. He led the MPLA state amid civil war and oil dependence and favored a pragmatic approach recognizing a role for private enterprise.

Government and administration 1942–2023 ○ Arrested 1993, amnestied 1994

The Supreme Soviet chairman who stood with Yeltsin against the coup, then fell to Yeltsin's tanks

During the October 1993 siege of the White House, when Yeltsin offered safety guarantees, Khasbulatov replied: 'I need no guarantees, I can offer guarantees to Yeltsin myself.'

Ruslan Khasbulatov was a Chechen-born Soviet economist and Russian politician who became the last chairman of the RSFSR Supreme Soviet. On the day of the August 1991 coup, he was Yeltsin's closest ally: he personally drafted the appeal 'To the Citizens of Russia' and helped organize the defense of the White House. After the Soviet collapse, however, he turned the parliament into the center of opposition to Yeltsin's economic reforms and concentration of power, leading to the 1993 constitutional crisis in which he and Vice-President Rutskoy commanded the parliamentary resistance until tanks shelled the building and they were arrested. Amnestied in 1994, he left politics and returned to academia, teaching world economics at his alma mater.

Government and administration Soviet Union state institutions 1943–

The engineer who became the first person in Soviet history to run against a sitting General Secretary

At the First Congress in May 1989, he stood before the microphone and offered himself as a candidate against Gorbachev. 'To set a precedent,' he said. By 1,415 to 689, the assembly voted to keep his name off the ballot.

Born in Oryol in 1943, Obolensky was a geophysical engineer who spent twenty years at the Polar Geophysical Institute on the Kola Peninsula, where in 1987 he founded the first informal reform group in the region, the Voluntary Society for Assistance to Perestroika. Elected a People's Deputy of the USSR in 1989, he made history at the First Congress by putting forward his own candidacy for Chairman of the Supreme Soviet against Mikhail Gorbachev: the first alternative candidacy against a sitting General Secretary in Soviet history. After the August 1991 coup attempt, he was elected chairman of the parliamentary commission investigating it, and he opposed the dissolution of the USSR, regarding the Belovezha Accords as unconstitutional.

Military command Soviet Union state institutions 1943–

The last Soviet soldier to leave Afghanistan, the face of the Soviet withdrawal

On 15 February 1989, standing on the Friendship Bridge, he told a Soviet TV reporter: "There is not a single Soviet soldier left behind me."

A Soviet general who served three tours in the Soviet–Afghan War and, as the last commander of the 40th Army (1987–1989), directed the Soviet withdrawal. He was made a Hero of the Soviet Union in 1988 for Operation Magistral, which lifted the siege of Khost. On 15 February 1989 he crossed the Friendship Bridge on foot, the last Soviet soldier to leave Afghanistan, the symbolic end of the nine-year war. He went on to command the Kyiv Military District, served as First Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs of the USSR, and as Deputy Minister of Defence of Russia. In 1991 he ran for vice-president alongside Nikolai Ryzhkov. In the post-Soviet era he served twelve years as governor of Moscow Oblast, embodying the political transition of the Soviet military elite.

Scholarship and theory 1943–

The revisionist historian who recast the Korean War as fundamentally a civil war

"Civil wars do not start: they come" (The Origins of the Korean War)

An American historian of East Asia whose two-volume The Origins of the Korean War (1981, 1990) recast the conflict not as an international Cold War clash but as a civil war rooted in Japanese colonial rule and post-liberation social conflict. As Gustavus F. and Ann M. Swift Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, he fundamentally reshaped how American scholarship understands the Korean War, earning the John K. Fairbank Prize and the Kim Dae-jung Academic Award. His work directly challenged the traditionalist Cold War narrative, igniting fierce historiographical debate and shifting the paradigm of modern Korean history.

Political and party leadership Congo - Brazzaville state institutions 1943–

Congolese Labour Party and the oil state

Our country will not be totally independent until our people are free of the yoke of poverty.

A military leader of the Congolese Labour Party who became president in 1979 after serving as defense minister. He led the one-party state and oil-financed development. The 1991 National Conference and multiparty transition changed the power structure of his first presidency.