Activities and affiliations

Scholarship and theory 1927–2008 ○ Died

The historian who first reconstructed the Cuban Missile Crisis from Soviet archives

The American historian Robert Byrnes called him 'one of the most competent Soviet specialists on US history in the twentieth century.'

The historian who laid the academic foundations of American history studies in the postwar Soviet Union. A graduate of Leningrad State University's international relations program, he spent his entire career at the Leningrad Institute of History, producing over three hundred works spanning oil politics, the American Revolution, and US-Soviet relations. With Timothy Naftali, he was the first to mine the Soviet Communist Party and Kremlin archives to reveal the inside story of the Cuban Missile Crisis: their 1997 'One Hell of a Gamble' became a turning point in Cold War historiography, and their 2006 'Khrushchev's Cold War' won the Duke of Westminster's Medal for Military Literature from the Royal United Services Institute.

Scholarship and theory Soviet Union state institutions 1927–2013 ○ Natural causes

Founder of Soviet economic sociology; her 1983 report lit the intellectual fuse of perestroika

"As one of just eleven academician-economists receiving a high salary from the state, I consider myself personally responsible to the people for the state of the economy and society" — 1983

Born in Kyiv, she abandoned physics for economics after reading Marx's Capital. At Novosibirsk's Akademgorodok, her rural research pioneered Soviet economic sociology, and in 1983 she wrote a report diagnosing how planned economies breed alienation and rigidity. The KGB seized every copy, but the leaked text, the 'Novosibirsk Manifesto', became an intellectual catalyst for perestroika. She was president of the Soviet Sociological Association, founding director of VTsIOM, and a People's Deputy who worked with Sakharov and Yeltsin.

Scholarship and theory 1927–2014 ○ Natural causes

Architect of Khrushchev's reforms and pioneer of Soviet political science

"I was sure I could fly. Climbed a fence, spread my arms, flew… fell and dislocated my arm. It became the symbol of my life." — on defying authority

The theorist who established political science as an independent discipline in the USSR. He inserted the 'all-people's state' thesis into the 1961 Party Program and bridged reform communism from the thaw through perestroika.

Scholarship and theory 1927–2015 ○ Natural causes

An economist of socialist economic integration and reform

He later argued that stagnation in the Soviet economy gave perestroika its first impulse.

Oleg Bogomolov was a Soviet economist and academic institution-builder who studied international economic relations within the socialist world. His comparative work on Hungarian and Yugoslav reforms examined both the rigidity of planned management and the possible uses of market mechanisms. In 1983, when Yuri Andropov initiated preparations for economic reform, Bogomolov joined the relevant commission and supplied expertise to its deliberations. He later argued for gradual reform that combined markets with social protection, widening the economic options considered during perestroika.

Scholarship and theory Affiliation unconfirmed 1929–1999 ○ Natural causes

The philosopher who gave perestroika its humanist foundations: from defending genetics to founding the science of Man

"I criticize the very concept of 'Party science.' Politics concerns only the philosophical interpretation of science, not the evaluation of science itself" — Genetics and Dialectics, 1968

A Marxist philosopher who dismantled Lysenkoism on philosophical grounds. As Gorbachev's advisor, he placed 'authentic humanism' at the core of perestroika and pioneered bioethics and the interdisciplinary study of Man. Served as Pravda editor-in-chief and Politburo member.

Scholarship and theory 1929–2010 ○ Natural causes

A historian who reconstructed the Cold War’s hidden record

As his father's personal secretary, he recorded the Cuban negotiations, and the documents he later donated revealed that tactical nuclear weapons remained in Cuba after the missile withdrawal.

Sergo Mikoyan was a Soviet and Russian historian of Latin America and Soviet foreign policy, as well as the son of Anastas Mikoyan. His experience accompanying his father to Cuba in 1962, together with his personal records, helped reveal that Soviet tactical nuclear weapons remained on the island after the public missile withdrawal and that the negotiations deepened the rift with the Cuban leadership. As editor of the journal Latin America, he helped shape the field and later joined collaborative Soviet-American research on the Cold War.

Scholarship and theory 1929–2016 ○ Natural causes

Soviet economist who identified two incompatible regulators, plan and quasi-market, as the core contradiction of the Kosygin reform

"An enterprise cannot simultaneously have two heterogeneous regulators. Just as a car cannot have two drivers with two steering wheels," summing up the failure of the Kosygin reform in The Planned System in Retrospect (2000).

A Soviet and Russian economist, Olsevich graduated from Moscow State University's economics faculty and taught political economy at the Urals Polytechnic Institute. From 1965 until his death he worked at the Institute of Economics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, where he led the sector for critical study of foreign economic theories; in his later years he concentrated on the theory of economic transformation and the history of Russian economic thought. In The Planned System in Retrospect (2000), co-authored with Paul Gregory, he identified the core contradiction of the 1965 Kosygin reform as the incompatibility of two heterogeneous regulators, the directive plan and the quasi-market, within a single enterprise, founding the 'two regulators' school of reform analysis.

Scholarship and theory 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.

Scholarship and theory 1929–2019 ○ Natural causes

The statistician who made Soviet war losses countable

In a 2002 Vojenno-istoricheskii zhurnal article he wrote that "a historian must rejoice and grieve together with his people."

Grigori Krivosheyev was a Soviet military officer and military historian who rose to deputy chief of the General Staff. From 1988 he led a team that quantified Soviet and Russian military losses from declassified records, producing the 1993 study that made his name widely known. Its estimate of 126,875 irretrievable Soviet losses in the Winter War became a standard reference, although later researchers identified gaps and possible duplication and proposed higher totals.

Scholarship and theory 1930–1990 ○ Heart attack

The philosopher who spoke consciousness aloud

"The heroic consciousness knows that the devil plays with us when we do not think precisely. So think precisely."

A Soviet Georgian philosopher. Moving from Marx to Kant and Proust, he explored consciousness and freedom through a non-dogmatic lens. He co-founded the Moscow Logical Circle, made the lecture his philosophical medium, and most of his work survives only as recordings.

Scholarship and theory 1930–2004 ○ Natural causes

Brezhnev's foreign-affairs speechwriter who put détente into prose, then became its sharpest television commentator

At a party someone asked, 'Have you read Brezhnev's latest speech?' Bovin replied, 'What do you mean, read it? I wrote it.' The next day he was transferred to Izvestia.

The principal architect of Brezhnev-era foreign policy rhetoric, Bovin led the CPSU Central Committee International Department's consulting group (1963–1972) and personally drafted the prose of détente, peaceful coexistence, and arms control. His formulations became Brezhnev's official maxims. His skeptical stance on the 1968 Warsaw Pact intervention in Czechoslovakia led to his transfer from the Party apparatus to Izvestia, where over twenty years as political commentator and host of the weekly TV programme International Panorama he became the Soviet Union's most trusted voice on world affairs. Appointed the USSR's first ambassador to Israel in December 1991, he served one week as a Soviet envoy before continuing as Russia's ambassador until 1997.

Scholarship and theory 1930–2019 ○ Natural causes

Harvard sinologist whose Origins of the Cultural Revolution trilogy and Mao’s Last Revolution dissected China’s elite politics

A journalist in London through 1961 who covered Chinese developments from afar, he first reached mainland China only in 1972; he went on to study elite Chinese politics from the founding of the People's Republic through the Cultural Revolution.

A Briton born in India, he was a journalist and a Labour MP before becoming a scholar, and founded and edited The China Quarterly. The three volumes of The Origins of the Cultural Revolution (1974–1997) traced the line struggles inside the top leadership from the Hundred Flowers of 1956 to 1966, showing the Cultural Revolution as the outcome of political conflicts accumulated since the failure of the Great Leap rather than a personal whim of Mao. Mao’s Last Revolution (2006, with Michael Schoenhals) is the standard narrative of 1966–1976. He was a professor at Harvard and director of its Fairbank Center.

Scholarship and theory 1931–2006 ○ Natural causes

Historian who pioneered the history of Russian and American anarchism

Named a distinguished professor in 1982, his announcement quoted him: 'Every good person deep down is an anarchist.'

Born in Brooklyn to Jewish immigrant parents from Odessa, Avrich was a pioneering historian who spent his entire career teaching the history of Russian and American anarchism at Queens College. His Kronstadt, 1921 (1970) demolished the Bolshevik claim that the rebellion was a White-Guard conspiracy, and he later conceded that Getzler's muster-roll figures were more current than his own. He worked to recover anarchists as 'pioneers of social justice' rather than amoral and violent militants, and bequeathed a 20,000-item archive to the Library of Congress.

Scholarship and theory 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.

Scholarship and theory 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.

Scholarship and theory Affiliation unconfirmed 1932–

Gorbachev's chief economic adviser and the market-reform architect of perestroika

Perestroika is a revolutionary renewal of the whole of Soviet society — growth cannot be separated from democratization and glasnost. (1988)

Armenian mathematical economist born in Tbilisi. As director of Novosibirsk's IEiOPP (1966–1984), he shaped the economics of Siberian development and the BAM railway, and founded the journal EKO. In 1985 he became Gorbachev's chief economic adviser, proposing enterprise autonomy, market elements, and foreign trade opening within the planned economy. He was Academician-Secretary of the Academy's Economics Department (1986–1989) and after the Soviet collapse served as rector of the Academy of National Economy (1989–2002), training Russia's post-Soviet managerial class.

Scholarship and theory 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.

Scholarship and theory 1932–

A historian linking Soviet social and Jewish histories

He argued that the war's long-term domestic impact was far more far-reaching than its international implications.

Yaacov Ro'i is an Israeli historian of Soviet Jews, Islam, Middle Eastern policy, and Soviet society. Combining documentary research with social surveys, he traced how state policy shaped national communities and popular political consciousness. The Bleeding Wound analyzes the domestic costs and legacies of the Soviet-Afghan War, using differences between Central Asian and Russian respondents to add evidence to the debate over how far the war contributed to the Soviet collapse.

Scholarship and theory 1933–

Russia's foremost alcohol epidemiologist, whose estimate that the anti-alcohol campaign saved over a million lives anchors the scholarship

"The anti-alcohol campaign saved the lives of more than 1 million individuals." Nemtsov's conclusion from a quarter-century of research.

A pioneer of alcohol epidemiology who graduated from the Moscow Medical Institute, trained as a psychiatrist, and spent his career at the Moscow Research Institute of Psychiatry. Spurred by the 1985 anti-alcohol campaign, he developed methodologies to estimate real alcohol consumption and the scale of alcohol-related mortality, arriving at the benchmark estimate that the campaign saved roughly one million lives. Tracking the waves of alcohol-driven excess mortality through the Gorbachev era and the post-Soviet collapse, his empirical work became a cornerstone of demographic debate on Russia's mortality crisis.

Scholarship and theory 1933–2016 ○ Natural causes

The Soviet historian who laid the foundation of Leningrad Affair studies

His 1989 article 'The So-Called Leningrad Affair' in Voprosy istorii KPSS framed the purge as a factional struggle between the Zhdanov group and the Malenkov-Beria group. For over three decades, this framing remained the starting point of the debate.

A Soviet historian. After graduating with honors from Leningrad State University's History Faculty and working as a teacher and party functionary in Torzhok, he spent 25 years at the Leningrad Institute of Party History from 1966, researching the siege, postwar reconstruction, and the political biographies of party leaders. His 1989 article in Voprosy istorii KPSS, 'The So-Called Leningrad Affair,' was the first to frame the case as a factional struggle between the Zhdanov group and the Malenkov-Beria group with Stalin's sanction, launching the entire post-Soviet historiography. The book of the same name he co-compiled with Viktor Demidov in 1990 sold 200,000 copies and remains the most influential documentary study. He taught as professor at St. Petersburg University from 1991 until his death, training a generation of historians.

Scholarship and theory 1933–2017

An ecologist who tracked Chernobyl’s long-term human costs

His Chernobyl study drew on more than 6,000 sources to estimate long-term harm, challenging accounts centered on the official death toll.

Alexei Yablokov was a Soviet and Russian biologist and environmental policy advocate whose work ranged from zoology and population biology to ecology. He became a prominent public voice on the long-term health and environmental consequences of Chernobyl, and the high mortality estimate in his co-authored study marked one end of the dispute over the disaster’s human toll. His career joined academic research to environmental activism, parliamentary work, and service as a presidential adviser, helping make ecological risk a matter of public policy.

Scholarship and theory 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).

Scholarship and theory 1934–

A British historian of modern Soviet history

For Stalin, the 'creation of the idea of the perpetual enemy' was indispensable.

Martin McCauley is an Irish-born historian of Soviet and East European politics. A former senior lecturer at UCL's School of Slavonic and East European Studies, he wrote widely on Stalinism, the Khrushchev era, the Cold War, and the rise and fall of the Soviet Union. He interpreted the 20th Party Congress speech both as an effort to restore a functioning Party, freeing officials from fear of repression, and as a move in Khrushchev's struggle to weaken rivals.

Scholarship and theory Affiliation unconfirmed 1934–

The jurist who draughted Benin’s 1990 constitution

On 9 August 1990 the constitutional commission he chaired adopted the draft constitution; it was approved by referendum on 2 December 1990 and promulgated on 11 December 1990.

A Beninese jurist and legal scholar born in 1934 at Zinvié, Dahomey. He chaired the National Conference’s constitutional affairs commission in February 1990 and prepared the draft of the constitution of 11 December 1990. He presided over the constituent assembly in 1990–1991, worked at UNESCO, wrote on the political and social history of Dahomey, and served on UN human rights bodies.