Activities and affiliations

Scholarship and theory 1954–

Political scientist who argued the Soviet collapse was produced by the event-driven tide of nationalism, not structural inevitability

"Nationalism needs to be understood not only as a cause of action, but also as the product of action": Beissinger argued that events do not merely reflect structures but reconstitute them.

An American comparative political scientist who used event data to demonstrate the relationship between nationalist mobilization and state collapse in the USSR. In his 2002 book Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State, he argued that the Soviet dissolution was not structurally inevitable but resulted from the accumulating 'tidal' effect of nationalist protest diffusing across republics, where events in one context reshaped possibilities in another. Contrasting with Ronald Suny's structural account, Beissinger's position holds that the contagion of nationalist movements and the contingency of events can overwhelm institutional constraints, a framework he later extended to the study of color revolutions and urban rebellion.

Scholarship and theory 1955–

A political scientist who analyzed Soviet dissolution through the paradoxes of federalism

In Dissolution, Walker contends that the USSR's full collapse was an outcome that surprisingly few desired, with confusion over the meaning of "sovereignty" during perestroika casting a "fog of war" that hurried disintegration.

Edward W. Walker is an American political scientist who studies national politics, federalism, secession, and ethnic conflict in the Soviet and post-Soviet spaces. At Berkeley he led the program on Soviet and Eurasian studies while examining the links between communist systems and post-communist politics. His major book, Dissolution, argues that Soviet federalism both integrated the union republics and supplied institutions and legitimizing narratives of sovereignty that made secession conceivable when central control weakened.

Scholarship and theory 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.

Scholarship and theory 1956–

A historian of the Holodomor’s mechanisms and memory

In 2009 he urged keeping, not toppling, monuments to the communist figures behind the Holodomor, setting a 'black board' beside each reading that its subject created the Holodomor and that his policy was criminal.

Vasyl Marochko is a Ukrainian historian whose work examines the countryside of the 1920s and 1930s and the Holodomor. He treats the famine not as an abstract disaster but as the outcome of state policies combining grain requisitioning with control over rural society. His calculation that blacklisting covered 252 of the Ukrainian SSR’s 405 districts shows the scale at which food deprivation and administrative isolation were imposed on peasants.

Scholarship and theory 1957–

A historian who placed 1956 within Cold War international politics

In his interpretation, the 1956 Revolution was not a breakthrough that ended the Cold War, but an event in world politics that consolidated its stalemate.

Csaba Békés is a Hungarian historian of modern Hungary and Cold War international politics who analyzed the 1956 Revolution as a meeting point of domestic revolt and world politics. His work traces the international conditions and choices through which the revolution consolidated, rather than overturned, the Cold War stalemate. Through documentary editions and multi-archive research, he connected Hungary's experience to the history of the socialist bloc and the global Cold War.

Scholarship and theory 1957–

Israeli-born political economist who established the causal-mechanism framework linking the Soviet-Afghan war to the USSR's collapse

Reuveny and Prakash contended that "the war in Afghanistan was a key factor, though not the only cause, in the breakdown of the Soviet Union," the claim that became the field's standard causal framework.

Rafael Reuveny is an Israeli-born scholar of international political economy and professor at Indiana University's School of Public and Environmental Affairs. His 1999 article 'The Afghanistan War and the Breakdown of the Soviet Union,' co-authored with Aseem Prakash, demonstrated that the Soviet-Afghan war accelerated the USSR's dissolution through four causal pathways: perception effects, military effects, legitimacy effects, and glasnost effects. It became the standard framework for the causal-mechanism debate on the war's role in the Soviet collapse. His broader research spans economic globalization, climate migration, the resource-conflict nexus, and modeling the collapse of historical civilizations.

Scholarship and theory 1957–

Harvard historian who argued Chernobyl was a direct cause of the Soviet collapse

The fall of the Soviet Union would be grossly incomplete without the Chernobyl story.

A historian who serves as the Mykhailo Hrushevsky Professor of Ukrainian History at Harvard University and directed the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (2013–2025), Plokhy has devoted his career to the intellectual, cultural, and international history of Eastern Europe and the Cold War. His 2018 book Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy won the Baillie Gifford Prize and argued that the nuclear disaster catalyzed glasnost, mobilized Ukraine's independence movement, and was a direct cause of the Soviet Union's collapse. Through works including The Last Empire, The Gates of Europe, and The Russo-Ukrainian War, he has reshaped the historiography of the Soviet dissolution and East Slavic national identity, becoming the most influential synthesizer of Chernobyl's place in modern history.

Scholarship and theory 1958–

The Cold War historian who read the Soviet collapse as 'a perfect storm and a hapless captain': a man-made disaster

He summarised the Soviet collapse in one image: 'a perfect storm and a hapless captain.' The USSR did not have to fall; Gorbachev's missteps turned a crisis into a catastrophe.

A Moscow-born Cold War historian, Zubok studied at Moscow State University's history faculty and earned his PhD at the Soviet Academy of Sciences' Institute for the US and Canada in 1985. He moved to the United States in 1994, worked as a fellow at the National Security Archive at George Washington University, became a tenured professor at Temple University, and since 2013 has been professor of international history at the London School of Economics. His 2021 book Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union argues that the USSR's dissolution was not inevitable: Gorbachev's mishandled reforms turned a crisis into a catastrophe, a thesis crystallised in the phrase 'a perfect storm and a hapless captain.' The book was a finalist for the 2022 Cundill History Prize.

Scholarship and theory 1959–

The British historian who named the Spanish Civil War 'the war before the lights went out'

The Spanish Civil War was, in a sense, the war before the lights went out, the war that could have changed the course of European and world history if power actors had behaved in different ways.

Born in Liverpool and holding a DPhil from Oxford, she is Professor Emeritus of Modern European History at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her 2002 study The Spanish Republic at War became a standard work, and her 2005 The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction sold over 50,000 copies and was translated into five languages. Through the frame of a democratic Republic abandoned by the Western powers' Non-Intervention policy, her work recasts the Spanish Civil War as both the first international battlefield against European fascism and the last anti-fascist war before Cold War orthodoxies set in.

Scholarship and theory 1959–

The VPK's chronicler, the historian who dissected the Soviet military-industrial complex

He wrote: "The history of the Soviet VPK is a continuous cycle of war and preparation for war — and in that sense, the history of the entire Soviet economy."

A Russian historian who first systematically mapped the Soviet military-industrial complex. His 1996 monograph on the VPK in the 1920s–1950s remains foundational, and his collaboration with Cambridge scholars Barber and Harrison earned international recognition. Born to a peasant family in the Kirov region, he taught village school before studying at Moscow State University and joining the Institute of Marxism-Leninism in 1988. After the Soviet collapse he continued at the Russian Academy of Sciences, interspersed with advisory roles in the Presidential Administration and banking posts at Sberbank.

Scholarship and theory 1959–

An archival historian of Stalin's political power

In the conclusion of his Stalin biography, Khlevniuk warned that "a significant portion of Russian society seeks recipes for the present by looking to the Stalinist past."

Oleg Khlevniuk is a Russian historian and documentary editor whose work focuses on Soviet political history, the Gulag, and Stalin's rule. Drawing on state-archive materials and party and government records, he explains the Great Terror as a centrally directed system rather than a spontaneous eruption from below. His research stresses Stalin's directives and personal control over the terror's decisions and implementation, while distinguishing carefully between what the documents establish and what they leave uncertain. Through monographs and published source collections, he has also challenged the myths surrounding Stalin in Russian public discourse.

Scholarship and theory 1959–

A historian who wove revolutionary social history into human experience

He said he tried to present the revolution not as a march of abstract social forces, but as a human event of complicated individual tragedies.

Orlando Figes is a British historian of Russia who interprets revolution and Soviet society through both social history and individual experience. His major work, A People's Tragedy, covers 1891 to 1924 and makes the contingency of 1917, popular action, and the formation of Bolshevik power part of a single narrative. It has been placed between revisionist social history and the totalitarian school, while also being criticised for its bleak reading of revolution and violence. In The Whisperers, he used oral testimony and family archives to reconstruct private life under Stalinism.

Scholarship and theory 1959–2015 ○ Natural causes

A historian who widened the blockade story from heroism to everyday ethics

Iarov’s research invited readers to see blockade survivors not through a hero-or-perpetrator binary, but through records of choice and survival.

Sergei Iarov was a historian of Russian twentieth-century social history and workers’ political consciousness who made the everyday life and moral choices of besieged Leningrad a central subject. Rather than explain blockade society through heroic resistance or administrative mobilization alone, he reconstructed from sources the interwoven experiences of solidarity, conformity, and strategies of survival under hunger. His books Blockade Ethics and Everyday Life in Besieged Leningrad placed the contradictions of human action in catastrophe at the centre of public memory.

Scholarship and theory 1959–

The structural analyst of the Soviet collapse who argued the system was not dying

Even though Soviet socialism had clearly lost the competition with the West, it was lethargically stable and could have continued muddling on for quite some time.

American historian who reshaped Soviet studies through a structural-institutional lens, analyzing Stalinism as a full 'civilization' in Magnetic Mountain (1995) and earning a Pulitzer finalist nod for his multi-volume Stalin biography. In Armageddon Averted (2001), he argued the Soviet Union remained 'lethargically stable' as late as 1985 and that Gorbachev's reforms, not inherent systemic failure, drove the collapse, reorienting the entire debate. He directed Russian and Eurasian studies at Princeton for 33 years and now serves as Kleinheinz Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, shaping American strategic thinking on Russia and China.

Scholarship and theory 1960–

The historian-journalist who chronicled Baltic independence

“I used to joke that the one thing that would make Balts feel more kindly about their Russian minorities would be mass immigration; that is no longer a joke.”

Anatol Lieven is a British journalist, author, and policy analyst whose work combines reporting from political flashpoints with historical context. As The Times correspondent permanently based in the Baltics from 1990 to 1993, he covered the upheaval surrounding the restoration of independence and turned that experience into The Baltic Revolution. The book examined class structure, ethnic tensions, and the competing possibilities for democracy and citizenship after the Soviet collapse. Lieven warned that the recovery of national identity could become exclusionary nationalism, while also treating the conflict between unconditional citizenship and the Baltic states’ conditional laws as a historical tension rather than a simple moral formula.

Scholarship and theory 1961–

Author of the “People’s Trilogy”, who used provincial party archives to put the Great Famine’s death toll at 45 million

A Dutch historian of modern China, author of The People's Trilogy, which won the Samuel Johnson Prize.

A Dutch historian who taught at SOAS in London before becoming a professor at the University of Hong Kong. Mao’s Great Famine (2010), drawing on provincial party archives opened in the 2000s, estimated that at least 45 million people died of hunger, violence and overwork during the Great Leap and argued that the famine was the result of state violence rather than natural disaster or planning error; it won the Samuel Johnson Prize. The Tragedy of Liberation (1949–1957) and The Cultural Revolution (1962–1976) completed the trilogy. His figures and interpretation are contested; other scholars put the famine’s toll between 15 and 36 million.

Scholarship and theory 1961–

The Moscow history teacher who read the Great Terror through its regional statistics

He holds that Stalin's single best deed was that in October 1941 he did not leave Moscow.

A historian who has studied the Stalin-era security organs while working as a history teacher and school head in Moscow. After a first study of the struggle inside the NKVD leadership (2006) he published The "Bloody Dwarf" against the Leader of the Peoples: The Yezhov Conspiracy (2009) and Stalin and the NKVD (2013), reconstructing how the Great Terror was carried out through its regional statistical variation and through the networks of Chekist clans such as Yevdokimov's 'North Caucasians'. He is the author of the two monographs in this reference library.

Scholarship and theory 1961–

A historian who recalculated the Winter War casualty record

Where the Winter War's official loss figures had drifted broadly for fifty years, he recounted the dead one by one from a name-level database, arriving at some 138,000 Red Army dead and a loss ratio more than five times that of the Finns.

Yuri Kilin is a Petrozavodsk historian whose research examines Karelia and the Soviet Union’s foreign and military policy. He led a 2006–2009 project that critically reconciled official records of Red Army losses in the Winter War and reopened the question of how the dead should be counted. His 2012 figure of 138,533 Soviet dead became the latest major revision in the debate over the war’s human cost.

Scholarship and theory 1963–

A Cold War historian who recast the Berlin Wall's origins

Of East Germany pushing the reluctant Soviets into building the Berlin Wall, she compressed the dynamic into one line: "the tail wagged the dog."

Hope M. Harrison is an American historian of Germany, Russia, and Cold War international politics. Her major study, Driving the Soviets Up the Wall, reconstructs Soviet-East German relations through East German and Soviet archival sources. Challenging accounts that treated the 1961 border closure as Nikita Khrushchev's decision alone, she argues that Walter Ulbricht repeatedly pressured Moscow as the GDR faced political and economic crisis. Her interpretation highlights how a smaller socialist state and tensions within an alliance could shape Cold War high politics.

Scholarship and theory 1963–

A historian tracing what the Leningrad Affair left unresolved

Noting that the purge lists overlapped with the cadres Kuznetsov had promoted during the siege, he concludes: 'This is not the "Leningrad" Affair but the "Kuznetsov" Affair.'

Kirill Boldovsky is a Russian historian of late Soviet and contemporary Russian political history. His work examines the Leningrad party apparatus before and after the Leningrad Affair alongside the history of the siege, distinguishing what surviving records establish from what remains unknown. By connecting institutional history with the politics of memory, he presents the affair not simply as a purge but as a conflict over party power, regional rule, and historical knowledge.

Scholarship and theory 1963–

The historian who redefined the USSR as an 'affirmative action empire' rather than a 'prison of nations'

The 15 countries that emerged from the USSR largely didn't exist in 1917; they were a consequence of the Soviet organization of the country on national principles.

A Canadian-born historian who reshaped the study of Soviet nationality policy. His 2001 book The Affirmative Action Empire recast the early USSR not as a 'prison of nations' that suppressed its minorities, as the Pipes school had argued, but as the world's first state to systematically practice mass affirmative action for non-Russian peoples: a thesis that has become the most influential English-language framework on the subject. The George F. Baker III Professor of Russian Studies at Harvard, he also directs the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI).

Scholarship and theory 1964–

A historian of Soviet and Eastern European memory

De-Stalinization after the Twentieth Congress took “two steps forward, then one step back.”

Anne Applebaum is an American historian and journalist whose work examines communism, authoritarianism, and civil society in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Gulag: A History reconstructed the camp system from the Revolution to its collapse through archival research and testimony, winning the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. In Iron Curtain and Red Famine, she explored the Sovietization of postwar Eastern Europe and the Ukrainian famine, arguing that the Twentieth Congress made de-Stalinization a movement of both release and renewed control.

Scholarship and theory 1965–2019 ○ Natural causes

A historian of the 1950s-60s USSR and the Russian church schism

Pyzhikov noted that the Twenty-Second Congress resolution gave almost four times as much space to the Anti-Party Group as to criticism of Stalin's personality cult.

Aleksandr Vladimirovich Pyzhikov (27 November 1965, Ramenskoye, Moscow Oblast - night of 16-17 September 2019, Moscow) was a Russian historian and state official who died of a pulmonary embolism. He defended his candidate dissertation in 1998 and his doctoral dissertation in 1999, and was Deputy Minister of Education of the Russian Federation in 2003-2004. In his final years he became widely known for research on the 17th-century schism of the Russian Church and the Old Believers; his argument that the Old Believers played an important role in the revolutionary events of the early 20th century and in the formation of the Soviet order divided Old Believer circles. He also provoked controversy with conspiratorial civilizational claims such as denying the reality of the Tatar-Mongol yoke.

Scholarship and theory 1965–

A historian who reads the Soviet collapse as elite power struggle

In a 2021 interview he formulated the Soviet dissolution as the result not of an anti-nomenklatura revolution but of its incompleteness and inconsistency, treating the Moscow–Kyiv–Minsk core’s political struggle as decisive rather than peripheral national movements alone.

Aleksandr Vladlenovich Shubin (born 18 July 1965, Moscow) is a Russian historian and left-wing public figure. He graduated from the Moscow State Pedagogical Institute in 1989 after Air Force service in 1984–1985, worked at the Institute of World History of the Russian Academy of Sciences from 1992, took his doctorate in history in 2000, and has taught at the State Academic University for the Humanities since 2003 and the Russian State University for the Humanities since 2007. His research covers socialist thought, revolutionary and anarchist movements, Soviet history and twentieth-century international relations; he is the author of about 25 monographs and served as an adviser to Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov in 1997–1998.