Activities and affiliations

Scholarship and theory 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.

Scholarship and theory 1917–2012

Historian of revolution’s social foundations and later memory

Born in Alexandria in 1917 and raised in Vienna and Berlin, he wrote the ‘long 19th century’ trilogy, beginning with The Age of Revolution, on the making of industrial capitalism and nationalism.

A British Marxist historian who taught at Birkbeck for many years, Hobsbawm treated the French and Industrial Revolutions together in The Age of Revolution. Echoes of the Marseillaise examined the French Revolution’s reception in later politics and historical writing. The course uses his work to consider class, social structures and changing revolutionary legacies. His interpretations must be distinguished from contemporary primary sources and from other historians’ readings.

Scholarship and theory 1917–2015 ○ Natural causes

A Cold War historian who dissected the Stalin era

The revised The Great Terror argued that the opening of the archives still left its central challenge standing.

Robert Conquest was a British historian and poet who studied Soviet political violence and collectivization. His 1968 book The Great Terror used published documents and émigré testimony to present the Great Purge as a system of state terror rather than merely a series of Moscow trials, and established the period’s English-language name. His estimates of the victims and his totalitarian interpretation were partly supported by later archival releases and research, while their scale and causal claims remained contested. His work in anticommunist information activity and literature also makes him a figure at the intersection of historical scholarship and Cold War politics.

Scholarship and theory 1918–1990 ○ Died

The thinker who found a new continent in Marx: founder of structural Marxism

“Ideology 'hails' the individual — like a policeman shouting 'Hey, you there!' — and the moment one turns around, one becomes a subject.” — 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses'

French Marxist philosopher who argued an 'epistemological break' separates Marx's scientific works from his early humanism, founding structural Marxism through concepts of ideological state apparatuses (ISAs) and overdetermination. As philosophy professor at the École Normale Supérieure, he taught a generation of French intellectuals: Derrida, Foucault, Bourdieu, and Badiou among them. He sought to fill the theoretical vacuum of Stalinism, and despite tensions with the Communist Party and lifelong mental illness, he pushed postwar Marxism to the center of philosophy. His strangling of his wife Hélène Rytmann during a psychotic episode in 1980 long overshadowed his intellectual legacy.

Scholarship and theory 1920–2012 ○ Natural causes

Historian who interpreted the Kronstadt uprising as the last stand of Soviet democracy

One day a discussion had to be broken off at 11am; when Getzler returned five hours later, he resumed exactly where he had left off, without a single lubricating word of linkage: 'And seventhly, Lenin…'

Born in Berlin to a Polish-Jewish immigrant family, Getzler was deported by the Nazis to Poland, resettled in a Siberian gold-mining settlement by Soviet authorities, and eventually emigrated to Australia, where he earned a history degree and taught at the University of Adelaide. His 1967 biography of Yuli Martov recovered the Menshevik leader as a serious democratic alternative to Lenin, and his Kronstadt 1917–1921 (1983) used fleet muster rolls to show that 93.9% of the Petropavlovsk and Sevastopol crews had enlisted before 1918, proving the rebels were veteran revolutionaries and not peasant conscripts in White-Guard disguise. He became professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1971, insisted that individual and group choices shaped Soviet history, and in his later years marched against Israeli settlement policy into his eighties.

Scholarship and theory 1920–2013 ○ Natural causes

An independent statistician who recalculated Yugoslavia’s wartime losses

In 1985, he presented Yugoslavia’s wartime losses as separate figures for actual and demographic losses.

Bogoljub Kočović was a Serb jurist and statistician from Sarajevo who studied Yugoslavia’s population and wartime losses. In his 1985 book, he compared the 1921, 1931, and 1948 censuses and estimated about 1.014 million actual losses and 1.985 million demographic losses in Yugoslavia during the Second World War. His work offered an independent estimate distinct from the state figure of 1.706 million and became a central source in the historiographical dispute over the war’s victims.

Scholarship and theory 1920–2016 ○ Natural causes

A historian who clarified the Resistance's moral choices and the war's layered character

In A Civil War, he analysed the Resistance as a struggle that was at once patriotic, civil, and a class war.

Claudio Pavone was an Italian historian and archivist whose work examined fascism, the Resistance, and the continuities of state institutions. His own participation in the Resistance during the Second World War shaped both his historical questions and his civic outlook. His major study A Civil War analysed the struggle of 1943–45 as an overlapping patriotic war, civil war among Italians, and class war, placing political choice and moral tension at the centre of scholarly debate. He also helped organize the Central State Archive and direct the General Guide to the Italian State Archives.

Scholarship and theory 1921–1982 ○ Natural causes

Intellectual architect of Brezhnev-era détente

"The war taught me how to live… Everything that was experienced over these last six army years must become the foundation for an interesting, creative, and beautiful life." — From his frontline diary, published posthumously.

Soviet international relations scholar and historian. He served as director of IMEMO, the USSR's premier foreign-policy think tank, from 1966 until his death in 1982. His institute produced the classified analyses that shaped Soviet arms-control negotiating positions, long-range forecasts of Western economies, and the theoretical underpinnings of 'developed socialism' in foreign affairs. A full member of the CPSU Central Committee from 1981, he directly shaped the substance of Soviet détente policy, consistently arguing within the party leadership for the necessity of constructive relations with the West.

Scholarship and theory 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.

Scholarship and theory 1922–2000 ○ Died

Soviet military historian who first broke the official silence on Winter War casualties, revealing 53,522 dead

In issue 22 of Ogoniok (1989), his article 'Neznamenitaya voina' (The Un-famous War) became the first public challenge to Molotov's 1940 figure of 48,475 dead, revealing the true toll of 53,522.

A military historian who fought in the Great Patriotic War and served in the Soviet Military Administration in Germany, Semiryaga devoted his career to the war history of the USSR. In 1989, in the magazine Ogoniok, he became the first to publicly break the official Soviet line on Winter War losses, revealing 53,522 dead; he went on to publish the secret protocol to the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and Katyn massacre documents for the first time, opening long-sealed archives. His final major work, published posthumously, tackled the last Soviet taboo: collaborationism under Nazi occupation.

Scholarship and theory Affiliation unconfirmed 1923–2010 ○ Natural causes

The USSR's preeminent Americanist who built a think-tank on Arbat Street, not in Akademgorodok, and designed détente

"Our major secret weapon is to deprive you of an enemy" — Arbatov explaining the end of the Cold War to American scientists at UC Irvine, December 1988

The Americanist who shaped every Soviet leader's US policy from Brezhnev to Gorbachev. He founded the Institute of the USA and Canada (ISKAN) in 1967, directed it for 28 years, and laid the intellectual groundwork for SALT and détente.

Scholarship and theory 1923–2018 ○ Natural causes

The Cold War's leading conservative interpreter of Russian history who framed October as a coup

What occurred in October 1917 was a classical modern coup d'état accomplished without mass support... a surreptitious seizure of the nerve centres of the modern state, carried out under false slogans.

Polish-born American historian who became the intellectual architect of the 'totalitarian school' of Soviet studies. His magisterial two-volume history argued that the October Revolution was a coup by a tiny band of power-hungry intellectuals, not a popular uprising, and that Bolshevik rule was repressive and authoritarian from its inception. As head of Team B (1976) and Reagan's NSC Director of Soviet Affairs (1981–82), he translated his scholarship into policy, helping to shape the hard-line turn that many credit with hastening the Soviet collapse.

Scholarship and theory 1924–1983 ○ Illness

Czech Marxist philosopher who coined the phrase "socialism with a human face"

In his final years Richta tried to form a prognostic team that, in his own words, "would rid us of the political curse and allow us to officially examine society."

A Czech Marxist philosopher and sociologist who developed the concept of the 'scientific-technological revolution' and led a 60-author collective to produce Civilization at the Crossroads (1966). The work argued that centralized planning was obsolete in the age of science and technology, providing the theoretical foundation for the Prague Spring's Action Programme; Richta coined its defining slogan, 'socialism with a human face.' After the Warsaw Pact invasion of August 1968, he accommodated himself to Gustáv Husák's normalization regime, directing the Institute for Philosophy and Sociology while purging former colleagues and, in 1977, joining the press campaign against Charter 77 and Jan Patočka.

Scholarship and theory Affiliation unconfirmed 1924–2001 ○ Natural causes

Founder of Soviet political science and brains of perestroika's political reform

"Gorbachev, me, all of us were double-thinkers — we had to balance truth and propaganda in our minds all the time. It was the choice between dissidence and surrender."

Armenian-born political scientist and Doctor of Law from Baku. He founded the Soviet Political Science Association and led it for 17 years, pioneering the theory of socialist democracy and becoming one of the earliest Soviet theorists to acknowledge interest-group pluralism within society. As Gorbachev's aide, he designed the constitutional reform that abolished the Party monopoly, introduced competitive elections, and created the Soviet presidency. After the USSR's collapse he wrote the memoir The Price of Freedom and also published science fiction under the pseudonym Georgy Shakh.

Scholarship and theory 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.

Scholarship and theory 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.

Scholarship and theory Affiliation unconfirmed 1925–1961 ○ Illness

The psychiatrist who diagnosed colonialism itself as the disease

“For Europe, for ourselves and for humanity, comrades, we must set afoot a new man.” — The Wretched of the Earth, 1961

Psychiatrist and anti-colonial revolutionary from Martinique. His Black Skin, White Masks (1952) dissected the psychological violence of colonialism; The Wretched of the Earth (1961) theorized the liberation struggle. Joined the Algerian FLN and died of leukemia at thirty-six.

Scholarship and theory 1925–2018 ○ Natural causes

The dissident biologist who argued the archives contain no evidence Stalin planned a Jewish deportation

After his 1970 release from the psychiatric hospital: "No honest and principled scholar can be sure of his safety if such grounds can lead to repression in the form of indefinite confinement in a psychiatric hospital."

A Soviet biologist and dissident historian. Born in Tbilisi, he studied at the Timiryazev Agricultural Academy and researched the molecular mechanisms of aging. In 1962 he wrote a samizdat manuscript exposing Trofim Lysenko's pseudoscience, published in the US in 1969 as The Rise and Fall of T.D. Lysenko, which brought international attention to the corruption of Soviet biology. In 1970 he was forcibly confined in a psychiatric hospital and released after protests by Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn, and others; in 1973, while on a scientific visit to London, he was stripped of his Soviet citizenship and spent the rest of his life in exile. His late work Stalin and the Jewish Problem (2003) argued that no archival documents support the claim that the Doctors' Plot was meant to trigger a mass deportation of Soviet Jews.

Scholarship and theory 1925–2021 ○ Natural causes

The British economic historian who built the seven-volume chronicle of Soviet industrialisation

In his final volume he wrote: "While my view of Soviet history has changed… when the details of history are in conflict with preconceived ideas, the latter should give way… I remain on the Left, believing… that a better organization of society is possible."

A British economic historian. He co-authored Foundations of a Planned Economy with E. H. Carr and carried Carr's work forward into the 1930s, completing the seven-volume The Industrialisation of Soviet Russia. In The Years of Hunger (2004), co-authored with Stephen Wheatcroft, he used post-Soviet archives to estimate famine deaths at 5.5–6.5 million and argued the famine was not a planned genocide but the result of procurement-first policy, harvest failure, and belated leadership response. A member of the Communist Party of Great Britain in his youth, he left after the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary and remained on the Left, holding that 'a better organization of society is possible.'

Scholarship and theory 1925–2026 ○ Natural causes

The Marxist historian who put Stalinism on trial

From Let History Judge: "I have never betrayed either my convictions or the ideals of my youth. In this I see my father's influence; he was able to instill in me his commitment to socialism, though my ideas about socialism have of course changed. I could not have written my books other than out of deep conviction."

Soviet Marxist historian and communist publicist. From the 1960s he participated actively in the dissident movement, editing the samizdat journal Political Diary. His magnum opus, Let History Judge (nearly two decades in the making), subjected Stalinism to a meticulous, source-based Marxist critique and led to his expulsion from the CPSU in 1969. He never abandoned his socialist convictions; reinstated in 1989, he served as a People's Deputy, Supreme Soviet member, and Central Committee member. He authored over 35 books, pioneering a tradition of self-critical Marxist historiography within the socialist movement.

Scholarship and theory 1926–1998 ○ Natural causes

Author and technical director of the 'Shelter' that encased Chernobyl's ruined Reactor 4

He personally climbed into a 'bathyscaphe' suspended from a crane hook to survey the ruined reactor.

A Soviet nuclear construction engineer from Tambov, he joined VNIPIET in 1953 after graduating from the Leningrad Institute of Civil Engineering and spent his entire career at that one institute. He led the project to remediate the 1957 Kyshtym disaster, and in 1986 became the author and technical director of the 'Shelter' (Sarcophagus) that sealed Chernobyl's Reactor 4 in just 206 days: he personally surveyed the ruined reactor suspended in a 'bathyscaphe' from a crane hook and devised engineering solutions without world precedent. He later served as general director of VNIPIET (1989–1998), contributing to the recovery from the Arzamas explosion and the Kirovakan earthquake.

Scholarship and theory 1926–2003 ○ Natural causes

A non-dogmatic Marxist who reflected on the Prague Spring

He argued that the Prague Spring was buried again after 1989, following its burial under the Husák regime.

Karel Kosík was a Czech philosopher who reworked Marxism as a philosophy of human praxis and concrete historicity. His major work, Dialectics of the Concrete (1963), placed Marx in dialogue with Heideggerian phenomenology and earned international recognition. A leading intellectual of democratic socialism during the Prague Spring, he was expelled from the Communist Party and excluded from university life during normalization. After 1989, he argued that the memory and emancipatory promise of the reform had been buried first by the Husák regime and again by the neoliberal order, making him central to debates over the event’s legacy.

Scholarship and theory 1926–2005 ○ Natural causes

A committed historian of revolutionary movements

He read Spain’s revolution not as a side episode of the war, but as a defeated social revolution.

Pierre Broué was a French Trotskyist historian and teachers’ activist who studied communism and twentieth-century revolutionary movements. His 1961 history of the Spanish Revolution and Civil War, written with Émile Témime, interpreted the defeat of the revolutionary process through the clash of class forces inside the Republic and Stalinist policy. He combined political commitment with archival and editorial work on Trotsky and the Trotskyist movement.

Scholarship and theory 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.