People of the Revolution and the USSR

1917–2007

A liberal historian who became an insider chronicler of power

After the Bay of Pigs, he recalled, “I bitterly reproached myself” for not speaking more forcefully in the decisive meetings.

Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. was a historian and public intellectual who examined American liberalism and presidential power. As a special assistant in John F. Kennedy’s administration, he worked on Latin America and speechwriting, opposed the Bay of Pigs plan, and later acknowledged his own silence in decisive meetings. He was not a member of the Executive Committee during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but helped Adlai Stevenson prepare the U.S. presentation to the United Nations. His 1965 A Thousand Days fixed a polished story of Kennedy’s crisis leadership in public memory, while later scholars recovered the Cuban and Soviet agency, secret bargains, and structural dangers that narrative left in shadow.

1921–2019 ○ Natural causes

An American historian who interpreted the Spanish Republic and Civil War

In 1948 an FBI agent pressed Jackson to inform on his classmates; "I told them that I had not considered that to be any of my business," he recalled.

Gabriel Jackson was an American historian, Hispanist, and journalist who made modern Spanish history his central field. His 1965 book, The Spanish Republic and the Civil War, was an early English-language synthesis of the Second Republic and the war, including the conflicts within the Republican camp. Jackson viewed the Republic’s institutional reformers and the PCE’s wartime strategy relatively sympathetically, while treating the POUM and revolutionary left as politically impractical, a position that became one pole in later historiographical debate. McCarthyism delayed his academic career, but he later taught modern European history at UC San Diego and continued writing on Spain after retiring to Barcelona.

1924–2004 ○ Natural causes

A historian who forecast the Soviet collapse

Writing as “Z,” he predicted that Gorbachev could not overcome communism's contradictions, then later acknowledged the essay.

Martin Malia was an American historian of Russia and European intellectual history who taught and researched at Berkeley. In The Soviet Tragedy, he argued that socialism's comprehensive attempt to abolish capitalism also undermined economic and political freedom, making the Soviet system structurally resistant to self-correction. In 1990 he published the essay “To the Stalin Mausoleum” under the pseudonym Z, predicting that Gorbachev's reforms could not overcome communism's internal contradictions. His interpretation became a powerful pole in explanations of the Soviet collapse, while critics argued that it reduced socialism's historical possibilities to a defect in ideology itself.

1924–2012 ○ Natural causes

Pioneer of Mao studies, author of The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung and editor of the ten-volume Mao’s Road to Power

A Mao scholar who weighed Mao's merits against his faults, setting land reform against the executions of the Campaign against Counter-Revolutionaries, the starvation after the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. He cared less about judging Mao than about his thought's future influence.

A Minnesotan trained in physics who worked on the Manhattan Project before turning to political science, he taught in Paris and directed the Contemporary China Institute at SOAS in London. His 1963 The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung was the first systematic Western analysis of Mao’s thought grounded in the original texts, arguing that it was not a copy of Soviet Marxism but a distinct adaptation to Chinese conditions. In his later years at Harvard’s Fairbank Center he edited Mao’s Road to Power, the unexpurgated collection of Mao’s writings from 1912 to 1949.

1926–2010 ○ Natural causes

A historian who traced revolutionary pluralism and the making of Stalinism

Against models of communism as an immutable system, Daniels argued that the movement was an evolutionary product of circumstances.

Robert Vincent Daniels was an American historian and educator who traced competing possibilities within the Russian Revolution and Soviet politics. His landmark book The Conscience of the Revolution examined early Communist pluralism, resisting the idea that Stalin’s collectivization and concentration of power were inevitable outcomes of the revolution. Daniels distinguished the Opposition’s industrialization program from Stalin’s violent implementation, while cautioning against exaggerating foreign-policy differences between the factions. His later scholarship and textbooks brought debates in Soviet history to generations of students.

1929–2018 Died

A scholar who quantified the Soviet economy's hidden flows

Even when official sales fell, samogon continued to be consumed outside the statistics.

Vladimir Treml was an American economist who used indirect indicators to estimate income and consumption missing from official Soviet statistics. He analyzed actual alcohol consumption, including samogon, and vodka's share of state budget revenue, showing why retail-sales figures understated drinking in Soviet society. His 1982 book Alcohol in the USSR: A Statistical Study brought this work together and was kept in restricted library collections in the Soviet Union.

1931–2012 ○ Natural causes

Historian whose Mao’s China and After judged the Chinese revolution critically from within the Marxist tradition

He brought Mao-era China into US classrooms from 1968, then spent his later years recording how the reform era slid into what he called bureaucratic capitalism.

From Detroit, he taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His first book, Li Ta-chao and the Origins of Chinese Marxism (1967), showed how nationalism and faith in the peasantry combined as Marxism was received in China. Mao’s China and After, first published in 1977, became the standard textbook history of the People’s Republic, reading Maoism through the tension between socialist ideals and the modernisation of a backward country. He criticised the repression of the Mao years while judging that the marketisation of the reform era had abandoned socialism’s promise.

1932–

The historian who recast Vichy collaboration

“The Vichy regime had its own active project to remake France after the defeat of June 1940.”

Robert Paxton is an American historian of modern Europe whose work examines Vichy France and the social and political conditions of fascism. By reading German occupation records alongside French sources, he showed that Vichy was not merely a passive instrument of Germany but a collaborator pursuing its own project of national reorganization. Co-authored with Michael Marrus, Vichy France and the Jews argued that Vichy's early anti-Jewish statutes originated in French policy rather than direct German orders, reshaping French historiography and public memory. His work made collaboration and resistance legible through the interaction of state institutions, social forces, and wartime conditions, while leaving room for debate over particular interpretations.

1933–2023

U.S. political scientist and Ethiopia specialist

Under the Mengistu government he worked on asylum and amnesty cases for emigres, helping dozens avoid torture and death; in 2018 he received the Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Star of Honour.

American political scientist and Ethiopia specialist who was professor and then professor emeritus at Oklahoma State University. Sources disagree on when he joined the Peace Corps in Addis Ababa: the obituary and the Ethiopian Crown Council say 1963, publisher and library biographies say 1964. He later directed the Educational Resources Center in New Delhi, was dean of continuing education at Austin College and a senior visiting fellow at the University of Tulsa, and taught at OSU from 1988 to 2008. Under the Mengistu government he worked on asylum and amnesty cases for Ethiopian emigres, helping dozens avoid torture and death, and in 2018 he received the Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Star of Honour. His books include Ethiopia: A Post-Cold War African State (1999) and The Lion of Judah in the New World (2011).

1934–2026 ○ Natural causes

The revisionist historian who overturned the Cold War coup thesis with archival evidence

Rather, I would emphasize the party's internally relatively democratic, tolerant and decentralised structure and method of operation, as well as its responsiveness to the prevailing mass mood.

A leading American historian of the revisionist school on the Russian Revolution. One of the first Western researchers granted access to Soviet archives from the 1960s, his 1976 work The Bolsheviks Come to Power demonstrated empirically that the October Revolution was not a minority coup but was carried out with broad popular support for peace, land, and bread, directly challenging the Cold War coup thesis identified with Richard Pipes. His finding that the Bolshevik Party of 1917 was 'a relatively open, democratic, and decentralized organization' reshaped the paradigm of revolution studies, and he was respected for accepting conclusions contrary to his own political convictions on the strength of the archival record.

1934–

America's most prominent historian arguing the Second Republic's radicalization brought on the Spanish Civil War

The very expression 'historical memory' is an oxymoron, a fundamental contradiction in terms. Memory is intrinsically individual, subjective, and very frequently fallacious.

America's leading historian of modern Spain, Payne taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison for 37 years and shaped the conservative interpretation of the Spanish Civil War through over twenty books on the Second Republic, Franco, and European fascism. His central thesis holds that the collapse of the Second Republic stemmed not from right-wing conspiracy but from the revolutionary radicalization of the Socialist-led left, reading the Civil War as a clash of revolution and counterrevolution. Since the 2000s, critics including Ángel Viñas, Helen Graham, and Paul Preston have charged his later work with excessive benevolence toward Francoism, yet Payne's revisionist framework remains an indispensable pole in Civil War historiography.

1938–2020 ○ Lung cancer

American Russia scholar who argued through Bukharin's biography that the Soviet Union had reformable alternatives and collapse was avoidable

"At each of the most fateful moments, the rise of Stalin, the fall of Khrushchev, the end of the Soviet Union, there was an alternative."

Stephen F. Cohen was the American Sovietologist who built the most sustained scholarly case against the inevitability of the Soviet collapse. His landmark 1973 biography Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution recast Nikolai Bukharin's program (gradual collectivization, continuation of the NEP, intra-party pluralism) as a viable alternative to Stalinism, challenging the totalitarian school's insistence that Leninism led inexorably to Stalin. Cohen championed Gorbachev's perestroika as proof that the system was reformable, helped rehabilitate Bukharin's memory in the USSR, and after 1991 condemned America's 'failed crusade' (the triumphalist treatment of post-Soviet Russia as a defeated power). In his final decade, vilified as pro-Putin, he argued that U.S. media coverage of Russia had become more ideological than during the Cold War, and remained the field's most stubborn contrarian.

1940–

Political scientist whose analysis of the Cuban Missile Crisis reshaped the study of foreign-policy decision-making

We now know things that Kennedy didn't know. The Soviet Union had deployed 100 tactical nuclear weapons to Cuba, and the local Soviet commander could have launched them without additional codes or commands from Moscow.

American political scientist whose 1971 book Essence of Decision revolutionized the study of foreign-policy decision-making by introducing three analytical models: rational actor, organizational process, and bureaucratic politics. As founding dean of the Harvard Kennedy School (1977–1989), he built it into a world-class public-policy institution, and as Assistant Secretary of Defense under President Clinton, he led nuclear disarmament negotiations with former Soviet states, earning the Defense Department's highest civilian honor. His assessment that Kennedy believed the odds of nuclear war during the crisis were 'between 1 in 3 and even' became the empirical starting point for all subsequent scholarship on how close the world came to catastrophe.

1941–

The post-revisionist historian who, after the Soviet archives opened, argued Stalin bore primary responsibility for the Cold War

It took Stalin, responding predictably to his own authoritarian, paranoid, and narcissistic predisposition, to lock the chain of causation into place.

An American Cold War historian whose 1972 first book, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, founded the post-revisionist school by arguing that neither superpower bore sole responsibility. After the Soviet archives opened in the 1990s, his 1997 We Now Know reversed course: using newly available documents, Gaddis contended that Stalin's personality and decisions were the decisive cause of the Cold War, a shift widely seen as a return to the orthodox interpretation. He won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for his authorized biography of George F. Kennan, and as Yale's Robert A. Lovett Professor was hailed by The New York Times as 'the dean of Cold War historians.' His intellectual arc from post-revisionism back toward orthodoxy is itself a map of how Cold War history has been rewritten as evidence has emerged.

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.

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.

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.

1945–

The US diplomatic historian who reframed the Korean War as a substitute for World War III and led the post-revisionist challenge to Cumings

"In many ways, the Korean War was the dress rehearsal for World War III. Since we avoided that third global war, veterans of Korea should have a sense they were involved in a very important event that was absolutely critical to shaping the world of today."

A US diplomatic historian and the leading post-revisionist scholar of the Korean War, Stueck argued in his 1995 The Korean War: An International History that the conflict functioned, by its timing, course, and outcome, as a substitute for World War III. Drawing on archives from seven countries, he pushed back against Bruce Cumings's revisionist framing of the war as primarily a civil conflict, re-situating it within the international politics of the Cold War. Over three decades at the University of Georgia, he established the diplomatic-history paradigm of Korean War studies and helped move the conflict from the 'forgotten war' to a central theater of Cold War history.

1946–

The American historian whose Beria biography revealed the paradox of Stalin's executioner as unlikely reformer

The New York Times described her as "the West's foremost scholar" of the KGB.

Amy Knight is an American historian of the Soviet Union and Russia, described by The New York Times as "the West's foremost scholar" of the KGB. Her 1993 biography Beria: Stalin's First Lieutenant was the first comprehensive scholarly study of Lavrentii Beria in English, drawing on newly opened Soviet archives to reveal a more complex figure than the caricature of a sadistic police chief: a man who, in the power vacuum after Stalin's death, sought to liberalize the Soviet system before Khrushchev crushed him. Knight's work spans from the Kirov murder to Putin-era political killings, but the Beria paradox remains her defining contribution: the argument that the Gulag's architect became, briefly and fatefully, an unlikely voice for reform.