People of the Revolution and the USSR

1965–

A historian who reads the Soviet collapse as elite power struggle

In a 2021 interview he formulated the Soviet dissolution as the result not of an anti-nomenklatura revolution but of its incompleteness and inconsistency, treating the Moscow–Kyiv–Minsk core’s political struggle as decisive rather than peripheral national movements alone.

Aleksandr Vladlenovich Shubin (born 18 July 1965, Moscow) is a Russian historian and left-wing public figure. He graduated from the Moscow State Pedagogical Institute in 1989 after Air Force service in 1984–1985, worked at the Institute of World History of the Russian Academy of Sciences from 1992, took his doctorate in history in 2000, and has taught at the State Academic University for the Humanities since 2003 and the Russian State University for the Humanities since 2007. His research covers socialist thought, revolutionary and anarchist movements, Soviet history and twentieth-century international relations; he is the author of about 25 monographs and served as an adviser to Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov in 1997–1998.

1975–

Historian who advanced an alternative theory that corruption among Leningrad leaders provoked the late-Stalinist purge

Sushkov argued the 'Leningrad Affair' was driven not by factional rivalry but by Leningrad's leaders showing how the secret-ballot system could be voided.

Andrei Sushkov is a Russian historian of the Soviet party-state power system and the administrative practices of regional nomenklatura. Drawing on primary sources from archives in the Urals, St. Petersburg, Karelia, and other regions, he advanced an alternative interpretation of the 'Leningrad Affair': the purge was provoked not only by elite power struggles but by widespread corruption and the private appropriation of state resources among Leningrad's leaders. His 2018 monograph 'The Leningrad Affair': A General Purge of the 'Cradle of the Revolution' is regarded as the most systematic treatment of the subject, reshaping a key debate in postwar Stalinist political history.

1977–

A quantitative reinterpreter of Russian economic history

His 2021 study showed that regional differences in famine mortality were more closely associated with ethnic bias than with food productivity.

Andrei Markevich is an economic historian who reconstructs Russian economic history through quantitative evidence and institutional analysis. His work examines the state, markets, industrialization, and planning in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union over long time spans, and he has taught and conducted research at the New Economic School in Moscow. A 2021 study with Natalya Naumenko and Nancy Qian found that the high mortality of Ukrainians during the 1932–33 famine cannot be explained by food production alone, linking it to ethnically biased procurement policy and migration restrictions. The study uses large regional datasets to connect the famine’s economic mechanisms with the responsibility of state policy.

1987–

A historian of the Soviet economy's reform possibilities and limits

"The Soviet economy can and should be considered as a single object," Safronov insists, reading its history as "cycles of centralisation and decentralisation."

Alexei Safronov is a Russian economist and historian who studies the Soviet economy across its full historical span. He rejects a simple opposition between liberalization and computerization in the Kosygin reform, instead presenting it as an attempt to combine economic and mathematical methods with material incentives inside a planned economy. His account stresses that the 1965 reform was more conservative in design than later memory often suggests, while its incomplete implementation produced both measurable gains and persistent limits.

?–? ○ Life and death unknown

The briefly recorded first chair of the Petersburg Soviet

On 13 October 1905, he was elected the first chair of the newly founded Petersburg Soviet.

Bogusław Zborowski was a labour movement activist in the 1905 Revolution whose personal biography is scarcely documented. He became the first chair of the Petersburg Soviet of Workers' Deputies at its founding on 13 October 1905, and was replaced the following day by Georgy Khrustalev-Nosar. His brief tenure marks the moment when workers' representatives began consolidating a political organization amid the strike movement.

?–

A historian of the institutional limits of Soviet industrial reform

In his 2025 study, Pivovarov showed that restoring the ministries centralized management in name while leaving them without effective power over enterprises.

Nikita Pivovarov is a Russian historian who studies Soviet economic history and changes in industrial-management institutions. As a senior researcher at RANEPA's Research Center for Applied History, he examines late-Soviet reforms through documents and institutional design. In a 2025 study, he traced the restoration of sectoral ministries during the Kosygin reform and argued that, amid the Brezhnev-Kosygin conflict, centralization was compromised from the outset and the ministries lacked effective authority over enterprises.