People of the Revolution and the USSR

1966–

The Bangladeshi-American historian who founded the modern archival study of the Soviet space program

Even Russian space officials acknowledge Siddiqi as one of the few people worldwide conducting original archival research on the Soviet space program.

Born in Dhaka to an academic family, Siddiqi earned his Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon and became the first historian to systematically exploit post-Soviet Russian archives for the study of the Soviet space program, transforming it into a rigorous academic field. His 2000 NASA publication Challenge to Apollo remains the definitive archival history of the Soviet human spaceflight effort; The Wall Street Journal named it one of the five best books on space exploration, and it endures as the standard reference. In The Red Rockets' Glare (2010) he broadened his inquiry into the cultural history of Russian cosmic imagination from the 19th century through Sputnik, and he is now completing a study of the Gulag's intersection with Soviet science and technology as professor of history at Fordham University.

1968–

A health economist who traced causal links in public policy

His study redirected the question of Russia’s mortality crisis from transition alone to the campaign’s end.

Jay Bhattacharya is an Indian-born American physician and health economist whose work connects medical evidence to questions of public policy and population well-being. His research examined how government programs, economic conditions, and biomedical innovation shape health outcomes. His 2013 study of the Gorbachev Anti-Alcohol Campaign argued that the campaign’s end, rather than the transition to capitalism alone, explained a large share of Russia’s early-1990s mortality crisis, shifting the terms of the post-Soviet debate. His later public interventions, especially during COVID-19, made him a contested figure in disputes over epidemiology, state restrictions, and scientific authority.