Activities and affiliations

Political and party leadership Azerbaijan state institutions 1938–2000 ○ Prostate cancer

The pan-Turkist dissident who became Azerbaijan's first democratically elected president

On a November 1992 visit to Ankara he visited Atatürk's grave at Anıtkabir and wrote in the memorial book that he was a soldier of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.

Azerbaijani politician, born 24 June 1938 in Kalaki, Nakhchivan, died 22 August 2000 in Ankara. Trained in Arabic philology at Baku State University, he took a Candidate degree in history in 1969, was known from the 1970s as a Turkist and anti-communist, and was arrested in January 1975 by the State Security Committee, serving until July 1976 at the Qaradagh stone quarry. A founder and chairman of the Popular Front from 1989, he organized a National Defence Council in January 1990 in the crisis that culminated in the anti-Armenian Baku pogrom and Black January. Elected president in June 1992, he was ousted in June 1993 amid Karabakh defeats and Huseynov's revolt; Heydar Aliyev succeeded him. He returned to Baku in 1997 and led the opposition until his death.

Scholarship and theory 1938–

The British political scientist who argued Gorbachev's individual leadership was the decisive factor in transforming the Soviet system

Only rarely does an individual leader make a fundamental difference. Gorbachev was such a leader.

Emeritus Professor of Politics at Oxford and a leading scholar of Soviet and Russian politics. In The Gorbachev Factor (1996), he established the 'individual leader' thesis against structural determinism, arguing that Gorbachev's personal convictions and political choices were the decisive force behind the transformation of the Soviet system and the end of the Cold War. The thesis became one pole of the subsequent historical debate and remains among the most influential interpretations of perestroika.

Political and party leadership Congolese Party of Labour (PCT) 1938–1977 ✕ Assassinated

Founding of the Congolese people’s republic

At his January 1970 swearing-in, Ngouabi vowed "fidelity to the Congolese people, to the revolution, and the Congolese Labour Party."

A military and political leader of Congo-Brazzaville. He led the establishment of the Congolese Labour Party and people’s republic in 1969, organizing Marxist-Leninist one-party institutions. His assassination in 1977 was followed by military-party succession struggles.

Literature and arts 1938–1980 ✕ Car crash

Historian and playwright who foresaw the Soviet collapse by 1984

“This trial inspires neither respect nor fear in me. The process of intellectual liberation that has begun is irreversible.” — final statement at Sverdlovsk court, November 1970

A historian and absurdist playwright, he predicted the Soviet system's inherent collapse in his essay "Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?" (1970). Imprisoned twice for dissident activity, he was forced into exile in 1976 and continued writing in the West.

Literature and arts 1938–1980 ○ Heart attack

The voice the state silenced, but a million tapes couldn't

28 July 1980, during the Moscow Olympics. Vysotsky's body lay in the Taganka Theatre foyer as over 100,000 people formed a line kilometers long. Police estimated 108,000. Not a single Hamlet ticket holder asked for a refund.

A Taganka Theatre actor and the Soviet Union's greatest bard, who wrote over 700 songs for the seven-string guitar, officially barred from airwaves yet ubiquitous on copied reel-to-reel tapes. His 1971 Hamlet, an intellectual rebel in a black sweater, became a generational emblem, while his songs borrowed the masks of criminals, frontoviki, and alcoholics to speak social taboos in raw street vernacular. He was that rarest phenomenon: adored by the masses and by Brezhnev, who listened to his songs by telephone from a hospital bed. When he died at 42 during the 1980 Moscow Olympics, over 100,000 mourners filled Taganka Square, proving the scale of the voice the state had tried to erase.

Industry and production Soviet Union state institutions 1938–2010 ○ Natural causes

Last Soviet gas minister who turned his ministry into Gazprom

When the Orsk party committee sought to pull him from the factory floor into the apparatus, Chernomyrdin later recalled: 'I felt I was a production man and wanted to stay at my native factory. But life decided otherwise.' He considered himself a production man, not a party functionary, all his life.

Born into an Orenburg Cossack family, Chernomyrdin rose from mechanic at the Orsk oil refinery to director of the Orenburg gas-processing plant, and in 1985 became the Soviet Union's Minister of the Gas Industry. While minister he also served on the CPSU Central Committee (1986–1990) and as a deputy in both the USSR and RSFSR Supreme Soviets, emerging as a central figure in late-Soviet energy administration. In 1989 he abolished his own ministry and transformed it into Gazprom, the state gas concern that would become the world's largest gas monopoly, a pioneering conversion of a Soviet planned-economy ministry into a state-owned corporation that became the cornerstone of Russia's post-Soviet economy.

Government and administration Uzbekistan state institutions 1938–2016 ○ Natural causes

An authoritarian state-builder who made sovereignty his political principle

Uzbekistan voted to remain in the Union in 1991, yet Karimov declared independence later that same year.

Islam Karimov was a politician who moved from economic administration in the Soviet system to become Uzbekistan’s first president. During the negotiations over the Union’s future, he placed Uzbekistan’s sovereignty and freedom of choice above preserving a common Soviet state, and after independence made that principle central to state-building. His government pursued industrial capacity and political consolidation, but hardened into authoritarian rule that restricted opposition and the press and responded harshly to Islamist movements and mass protest. Karimov is therefore remembered both as the founder of a sovereign post-Soviet Central Asian state and as a ruler who sacrificed political pluralism to preserve it.

Social movements and organizing Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks 1938–2017 ○ Renal failure

First Secretary of the Baku Party Committee who blocked buses from entering Baku, shifting the violence to Sumgait

“I realized that it was a pogrom. I ordered all roads to the city blocked from these settlements. The order was executed. The buses went to Sumgait.”

A Soviet and Azerbaijani party and state official who rose through the construction sector to become First Secretary of the Baku City Party Committee in 1983. In February 1988, as buses carrying Azerbaijani refugees expelled from Armenia converged on Baku, he ordered the city's access roads blocked; the measure kept violence out of Baku but diverted the bus convoys to Sumgait, where the pogrom erupted days later. After the dissolution of the USSR, he served as the first president of independent Azerbaijan's football association (1992–2003), steering the country into UEFA and FIFA membership.

Political and party leadership Affiliation unconfirmed 1938–2019 ○ Natural death

Founder of the MFM, the left party of the 1972 student-revolution generation

As the MFM was at last admitted to the front, Ratsiraka declared, 'There is no longer any reason to exclude the MFM.'

A sociology professor at Madagascar's agricultural college, Rakotonirina entered politics through Monja Jaona's MONIMA and helped organize the May 1972 protests that brought down the Tsiranana regime. In December 1972 he founded the Maoist left party MFM (Militants for Power to the Little People), which championed the poor, peasants and slave-descendants; after Ratsiraka dissolved the party and placed him under house arrest in 1976, he brought the MFM into the FNDR the following year and as head of the CSR's economic commission managed the nationalized enterprises. He later turned to liberalism, led the 1991 pro-democracy movement, and in 2009 was arrested as the prime minister named by the exiled president.

Scholarship and theory 1938–2020 ○ Natural causes

The Leningrad chemistry lecturer whose 'I Cannot Forsake My Principles' became the manifesto of anti-perestroika forces

"Our media are lying about Stalin now. They are blackening our history."

A Leningrad chemist and CPSU member who, on 13 March 1988, published 'I Cannot Forsake My Principles' in Sovetskaya Rossiya, a full-throated defense of Stalin and an attack on perestroika. The article, drafted with the backing of Central Committee secretary Yegor Ligachev, was denounced by Pravda as the 'manifesto of anti-perestroika forces' and became the shock that drove Gorbachev to radicalize political reform ahead of the 19th Party Conference. After 1991 she founded the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks (VKPB) and served as its general secretary, but neither she nor her party ever gained significant traction in post-Soviet Russia.

Scholarship and theory 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.

Government and administration Soviet Union state institutions 1938–2022

The last Soviet leader caught between a renewed union and independence

He supported a new union treaty from the view that the federation should exist for the republics.

Ayaz Mutalibov was a politician who rose from the Soviet Azerbaijani bureaucracy to become the republic’s last Communist leader and its first president. At the 1991 Novo-Ogaryovo 9+1 talks, he supported a renewed union that would guarantee republican sovereignty, arguing that the federation should exist for the republics, and he took an active position on the status of autonomous republics. His government confronted the Nagorno-Karabakh war and mounting domestic struggles, which ultimately destroyed its political base. Ousted in 1992, he lived in exile in Moscow, returned to Azerbaijan in 2012, and died in Baku in 2022.

Scholarship and theory 1938–2023 ○ Natural causes

A historian who reopened the question of responsibility in the Stalin era

His work returned the responsibility of perpetrators, obscured by the official memory of the Thaw, to the archives.

Yuri Zhukov was a Soviet and Russian historian who studied Stalin’s era and Soviet political history at the Institute of Russian History. Working with archival materials, he helped reopen debate over Nikita Khrushchev’s responsibility as an executor and political beneficiary of the Great Terror, including the circulation of a 1938 Ukrainian arrest request attributed to Khrushchev. At the same time, his ‘different Stalin’ interpretation minimized Stalin’s responsibility for mass repression and drew sharp criticism from historians, making his work a revealing case in the politics of post-Soviet historical memory.

Security, intelligence and policing Soviet Union state institutions 1938–2025 → Defected 1985, death sentence in absentia

The highest-ranking KGB officer to defect, and the key source on the 1983 war scare

My colleagues in the PR Line regarded RYAN with some skepticism, yet none wanted to lose face at the Centre by contradicting the First Chief Directorate's assessment.

The highest-ranking KGB officer ever to defect to the West, a colonel of the First Chief Directorate who for eleven years from 1974 doubled as MI6 agent "Ovation". As London rezident he was the key source who relayed Operation RYAN and the Soviet leadership's alarm over Able Archer 83 to British and American intelligence, testimony widely credited with easing the nuclear danger of 1983. Betrayed by CIA mole Aldrich Ames, he was recalled to Moscow, drugged and interrogated, then smuggled out in the boot of a diplomatic car in 1985 and sentenced to death in absentia for treason.

Political and party leadership Yemeni Socialist Party (YSP) 1939–1986

Leader of South Yemen’s Socialist Party

Founder and chief ideologue of the Yemeni Socialist Party, he was South Yemen's de facto leader from 1978 to 1980 and died in the 1986 civil war.

A South Yemeni revolutionary leader central to the Yemeni Socialist Party’s formation in 1978. He left power in 1980 and stayed in the USSR, then returned and opposed Ali Nasir Muhammad. He died during the armed party conflict in 1986.

Political and party leadership Yemen state institutions 1939–

South Yemeni policy conflict and the 1986 crisis

Before leaving he declared 'I have made too many concessions already. I will not make any more'; two months later the Aden civil war erupted.

After serving as South Yemen’s prime minister, he became party and state leader in 1980. He favored pragmatic adjustments in foreign relations and economic management, while conflict with Ismail’s faction intensified. He lost power after the 1986 Aden fighting and fled to North Yemen.

Military command Angola state institutions 1939–1977 ✕ Executed after capture; exact date unconfirmed

Angolan political-military leader and co-leader of the Nitista current with Nito Alves

On 20-21 May 1977 the MPLA Central Committee removed him and Nito Alves on fractionism charges; the abortive coup of 27 May followed.

An Angolan soldier, politician and anticolonial ideologue. Influenced by his Marxist-oriented family, he abandoned medical studies for the MPLA, coordinated its clandestine Luanda committee, and was nicknamed 'Filósofo'. In January 1970 he enlisted in the Portuguese colonial army on a military-intelligence mission to seize weapons and was imprisoned until the Carnation Revolution freed him in 1974. Elected the youngest Central Committee member at the July 1974 Lundoji conference, he was named FAPLA national political commissioner and deputy chief of staff in March 1975. He attended the 25th CPSU Congress with Nito Alves and was a leader of the orthodox-communist Nitista current. Removed in May 1977, he was captured and executed.

Political and party leadership Affiliation unconfirmed 1939–1979 Disappeared after 1977 detention; death disputed

Ethiopian Marxist leader of MEISON and drafter of the Derg's national-democratic program

His August 1977 arrest and subsequent disappearance mark the Derg's turn from the EPRP onto its own former MEISON collaborators. His death around 1979 is reported by several sources but unconfirmed in date and circumstance.

Ethiopian Marxist politician who led and chaired the All-Ethiopia Socialist Movement (MEISON). Born in Arjo, Welega (Oromia); he studied in France in the early 1960s, taking a Marxism closer to the Soviet model, and after the revolution began he returned and co-founded the Progressive Book Store with Negede Gobeze. In December 1975 the Derg secretly created the Provisional Office for Mass Organizational Affairs (POMOA) and made him chairman; he drafted the Program for the National Democratic Revolution, announced by Mengistu on 20 April 1976. He was captured outside Addis Ababa on 26 August 1977 and held in the Old Gebbi, and Human Rights Watch records that he disappeared after several months in prison. His reported death around 1979 remains unconfirmed in date and circumstance. Also known as Haile Fida Kuma, he is remembered as the 'Father of Qubee Afaan Oromo'.

Political and party leadership Affiliation unconfirmed 1939–1993 ✕ Shot dead under disputed circumstances

The nationalist dissident who became Georgia's first democratically elected president

"All my life I was in the opposition and fought against the government. Now I am the government": said in an interview after becoming chairman of the newly elected Supreme Council, 1990.

Georgian philologist and dissident, son of the celebrated writer Konstantine Gamsakhurdia. In 1977 he co-founded the Georgian Helsinki Group with Merab Kostava, exposing Soviet human rights abuses to the world, and was repeatedly imprisoned. In April 1989, as co-leader of the Independence Committee, he organized mass peaceful demonstrations and hunger strikes in Tbilisi; the Soviet military's bloody crackdown on them decisively radicalized Georgian opinion toward independence. Leading the Round Table-Free Georgia coalition, he won the first multiparty elections in 1990 and was elected Georgia's first president in May 1991 with 87% of the vote, only to be overthrown in an armed coup seven months later, flee to Chechnya, and die under disputed circumstances in western Georgia in December 1993.

Economy, finance and planning Angola state institutions 1939–1996 ✕ Suicide in Luanda

Designer of Angolan economic planning and MPLA theorist

Appointed economy minister in November 1975 and, from 1976, minister of the plan and second deputy prime minister, he was a designer of Angolan economic planning. He gave up his government and party posts after the repression of 27 May 1977.

Carlos Alberto da Rocha Oliveira Dilolwa (2 December 1939, Sumbe – 16 November 1996, Luanda) was an Angolan economist, anticolonial activist and university professor, and a theorist of socialist economics counted among the MPLA's leading intellectuals. He joined the MPLA in 1961 under the influence of Viriato da Cruz, adopting the war name Dilolwa, and founded and taught at the 1st Revolutionary Instruction Centre at Dolisie before being sent to East Berlin in 1963 to study economics. In 1974 he entered the MPLA Central Committee and Political Bureau and joined the 'delegation of 26' received in Luanda on 8 November 1974. Appointed economy minister in November 1975, he served from 1976 as minister of the plan and second deputy prime minister. He gave up his government and party posts after the repression of 27 May 1977 and from November 1978 taught at the Faculty of Economics in Luanda.

Security, intelligence and policing Soviet Union state institutions 1939–2000 ✕ Suicide

The Deputy Prosecutor General whose TV broadcast lit the fuse of the Sumgait pogrom

On 27 February 1988, on Central Television, he named the two youths killed in the Askeran clash as Azerbaijanis; that night the Sumgait pogrom erupted.

A Soviet military jurist of Belorussian birth, Alexander Katusev was appointed Deputy Prosecutor General of the USSR in 1987 and led high-profile corruption investigations in Uzbekistan. His name entered history on 27 February 1988, when he appeared on Central Television and named two Azerbaijani youths killed in a clash near Askeran, specifying their nationality; the broadcast became the immediate spark for the Sumgait pogrom that evening. As Chief Military Prosecutor (1989–1991), he investigated and debunked the Panfilov Twenty-Eight myth in his essay 'Another's Fame,' but was forced into retirement after the August coup.

Political and party leadership Yemeni Socialist Party (YSP) 1939–2026 ○ died in exile

The last leader of South Yemen

Sentenced to death by Ali Nasir Muhammad in the January 1986 clashes, he survived and rose to General Secretary of the Yemeni Socialist Party.

A South Yemeni revolutionary who led the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen through its final years as General Secretary of the Yemeni Socialist Party. An ally of Abdul Fattah Ismail, he survived the January 1986 fighting in Aden, and after Ali Nasir Muhammad's forces were defeated he took over the party and state. He became the first vice-president of unified Yemen in 1990, but resigned in 1993 and proclaimed the short-lived Democratic Republic of Yemen during the 1994 civil war; in exile he led the southern independence movement al-Hirak.

Government and administration Yemen state institutions 1939–

South Yemen's last head of state and the united republic's first prime minister

When the January 1986 gunfire broke out he was visiting India; he then negotiated a settlement in the USSR before returning to take the presidency.

A Hadhrami electrical engineer who rose through the National Liberation Front to become a minister and prime minister of South Yemen. After the January 1986 Aden fighting, he became president and steadied the state; as South Yemen's last head of state he led the 1990 unification and became the first prime minister of united Yemen. In the 1994 civil war he served as premier of the breakaway southern government, then went into exile.

Government and administration Mozambique state institutions 1939–

Mozambican rehabilitation and peace

"Peace and stability in the SADC region are essential preconditions for our economic development and integration"

A FRELIMO leader and post-independence foreign minister, he succeeded Machel as president in 1986. He pursued the 1987 Economic Rehabilitation Program and later multiparty transition. The 1992 peace agreement marked a major turning point in ending war and rebuilding the economy.