People of the Revolution and the USSR

Labour Party (United Kingdom) Liberalism and republicanism 1931–2017 ○ Natural causes

The historian who made the Spanish Civil War a global narrative

Thomas began The Spanish Civil War without knowing a word of Spanish, and the book was banned by the Franco regime and smuggled into Spain as a clandestine best-seller.

Hugh Thomas was an English historian whose 1961 The Spanish Civil War made a large, readable survey of the conflict available to an international audience. Drawing on printed diplomatic sources, participant accounts and interviews, he presented the Republican struggle and its internal violence without simply adopting either Communist or anti-Communist polemic. The book became a clandestine bestseller in Francoist Spain, was repeatedly revised, and remained a foundational point of reference despite factual and interpretive criticisms. His later work ranged across Cuba, the Spanish empire and world history, while his political career moved from Labour to the Conservatives and then the Liberal Democrats.

Liberalism and republicanism 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.

Liberalism and republicanism 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.

Liberalism and republicanism 1955–

British historian who coined 'refolution' to define the peaceful revolutions of 1989

Meeting Václav Havel in a Prague basement pub on 23 November 1989, he offered this prediction: 'In Poland it took ten years, in Hungary ten months, in East Germany ten weeks: perhaps in Czechoslovakia it will take ten days!'

British historian, Oxford professor of European studies, and Guardian columnist who has chronicled the contemporary history of Central and Eastern Europe and the collapse of communist regimes. As an eyewitness to the revolutions of 1989 in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague, he recorded the unfolding of civil resistance in The Magic Lantern (1990) and coined the term 'refolution', a fusion of reform and revolution, to characterize the peaceful, negotiated nature of these systemic transitions. Called a 'historian of the present' by George Kennan, he has spent four decades writing on European freedom and democracy; his 2017 Charlemagne Prize and other international honours reflect work that has shaped both scholarly debate and policymaking.