Activities and affiliations

Social movements and organizing Free Trade Unions of the Coast (WZZ) 1952–2002 ○ Natural causes

The shipyard nurse who, when the regime declared the strike over, held workers back and turned it into a solidarity strike

"You betrayed them. Now the authorities will crush us like bedbugs." To Wałęsa, the moment he declared the strike over.

A nurse at the Gdańsk Lenin Shipyard, she joined the founding of the Free Trade Unions of the Coast (WZZ) in 1978 and wrote for its underground paper The Coastal Worker on workplace safety and occupational disease, becoming one of the most determined opposition activists on the Baltic coast. On 16 August 1980, after management granted pay rises and Wałęsa declared the strike over, Pienkowska and Anna Walentynowicz physically blocked the shipyard gates and appealed to workers not to abandon the other factories that had joined them in solidarity, turning a local settlement into a movement-wide solidarity strike. Her intervention made the Inter-Enterprise Strike Committee (MKS) possible; she drafted demand number 16 on healthcare reform among the Twenty-One Demands and became a signatory of the Gdańsk Agreement on 31 August.

Scholarship and theory 1952–

An economist who reads international monetary order through history

He read the Marshall Plan not simply as an aid project, but as a structural adjustment program that changed postwar Europe’s economic order.

Barry Eichengreen is an American economist and economic historian who connects the history of international monetary and financial systems to contemporary policy problems. His work on the gold standard showed how the structure and management of an international monetary regime helped transmit the Great Depression. In his study of the Marshall Plan, he emphasized that the conditions attached to aid, not simply its volume, pushed Western Europe’s postwar mixed economies toward more markets and less control. That argument made him an important reference point in debates over whether reconstruction succeeds through cash, institutional conditions, or their combination.

Scholarship and theory 1952–

Balkan historian whose Albania at War brought Albania's wartime experience into European historiography

Albania at War recast the occupation as fragmentation and internal division, a power struggle ending in the communists' rise and Enver Hoxha's regime; the war, he concluded, pulled Albania out of one isolation only to push it into another.

Historian of the Balkans and Albania, born 27 January 1952. He took his Ph.D. at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1982, was professor of history and chair of the Department of History at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne, and is now professor emeritus there. He is a foreign member of the Albanian Academy of Sciences. Neither his citizenship nor his national origin is documented. His books include King Zog and the Struggle for Stability in Albania (1984), Albania at War, 1939–1945 (1999) and Balkan Strongmen (2006); he co-edited Albanian Identities (2002) with Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers and co-wrote A Concise History of Albania (2022) with Oliver Jens Schmitt.

Scholarship and theory 1952–2014

Portuguese historian of the colonial war and of Angola's 1977 purge

Died in Lisbon on 30 October 2014; her husband and co-author Álvaro Mateus had died about a year earlier, in August 2013.

Portuguese historian. Born in Viana do Castelo in 1952; she died in Lisbon on 30 October 2014. Her research covered Portuguese colonialism, the colonial war and the political police; her doctoral work became A PIDE/DGS na guerra colonial 1961-1974 (2004), a reference study showing the PIDE was more brutal than assumed, worked closely with the Army in the colonies, and persisted in Africa after being dissolved in Portugal itself, siding with those who obstructed decolonisation. With her husband and co-author Álvaro Mateus (a former PCP militant, d. 2013) she published on Angola and Mozambique, including Purga em Angola (2007) on 27 May 1977, in which she held President Agostinho Neto responsible for the killing of Nito Alves's supporters. She interviewed former political prisoners; recordings and transcripts are held at the Torre do Tombo.

Scholarship and theory 1952–

A historian connecting Chernobyl to modern Eastern European history

Forty years on he wrote, "In a way, Chernobyl created glasnost."

David Marples is a Canadian historian at the University of Alberta who studies the modern history and politics of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine. He was an early analyst of Chernobyl’s social and political consequences, beginning with Chernobyl and Nuclear Power in the USSR, published in the year of the accident, and later work on nuclear policy, safety, and the responses of states and affected communities. His research expanded to national history, famine, and the Soviet collapse, while treating Chernobyl as an important influence on the USSR’s crisis without reducing that collapse to a single cause.

Scholarship and theory 1952–

The scholar who read 1989 as liberal democracy's endpoint

In 1989 he wrote: “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, but the end of history as such.”

Francis Fukuyama is an American political scientist and scholar of international politics who has compared the formation of states, institutions, and political orders. His 1989 essay “The End of History?” interpreted the end of the Cold War and the spread of liberal democracy as a point reached in humanity’s ideological evolution, making it one of the defining claims in debates over what 1989 meant. He expanded the argument in The End of History and the Last Man (1992), while later work stressed state capacity, the rule of law, and accountability, qualifying any simple early optimism.

Economy, finance and planning Affiliation unconfirmed 1952–

Architect of the 500 Days Program: perestroika economist who drafted a rapid transition from planned economy to market

During coal-mine research in the 1970s, a collapse trapped him and four workers waist-deep in ice water for ten hours. Three died in hospital after rescue. Yavlinsky later recalled: "We were saved, but three out of five died in hospital."

Soviet economist and politician from Lviv. After graduating from the Plekhanov Institute and researching coal-mine labour, he became head of the Joint Economic Department of the USSR Council of Ministers in 1989 under Leonid Abalkin. In 1990, with Mikhail Zadornov and Aleksei Mikhailov, he authored the 500 Days Program (a roadmap for transitioning from a planned to a market economy in under two years) and was appointed Deputy Chairman of the RSFSR Council of Ministers. When Gorbachev compromised with Nikolai Ryzhkov's alternative, Yavlinsky resigned in October 1990; he founded the EPICenter think tank and later launched Yabloko in 1993, becoming a fixture of Russia's liberal opposition.

Political and party leadership Affiliation unconfirmed 1952–

Cambodia's long-serving prime minister

In 1979, at the age of 26, he became Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of the People's Republic of Kampuchea, the world's youngest foreign minister.

A Cambodian politician and former military officer. He joined the Khmer Rouge in 1970 and served as a battalion commander before defecting in 1977 to fight alongside Vietnamese forces. After the regime fell in 1979 he became Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of the People's Republic of Kampuchea, and in 1985 succeeded Chan Sy as Prime Minister. He remained in power for decades and now serves as president of the Senate and acting head of state.

Scholarship and theory 1952–

An Estonian legal scholar who challenged the Soviet official narrative in the language of law

On the Yakovlev commission, he argued that the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic was legally null and void.

Igor Gräzin is an Estonian legal scholar and politician whose work has ranged across legal theory, philosophy of law, and comparative jurisprudence. Elected to the Congress of People's Deputies of the Soviet Union in 1989, he served on the Yakovlev commission examining the secret protocols and the legal meaning of the Baltic states' incorporation. His intervention brought legal expertise into the political struggle over sovereignty and historical memory during the Soviet Union's final crisis.

Political and party leadership Affiliation unconfirmed 1952–

The Reformed pastor whose attempted eviction in Timișoara sparked the Romanian Revolution

The crowd forgot the initial reason for their resistance, and in general terms they opposed the regime itself.

A Hungarian Reformed pastor from Cluj, he openly criticised Ceaușescu's systematisation programme (the planned destruction of rural villages) and denounced human rights abuses in a secretly recorded interview with Hungarian television, making himself a target of the Securitate. On 16 December 1989, when parishioners gathered at his Timișoara parsonage to block his forced eviction, the protest swelled into an anti-regime uprising that became the direct trigger of the Romanian Revolution. After the revolution he was elected bishop of the Reformed Diocese of Királyhágómellék in Oradea, dedicated himself to rebuilding the church and Hungarian-language education, and served as a Member of the European Parliament from 2007 to 2019.

Government and administration Russian Federation state institutions 1952–

A ruler who recast the loss of the Soviet Union as a narrative of state restoration

“The collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.”

Vladimir Putin is a Russian politician and former Soviet security officer who rose to national power amid the crises of the 1990s. Alternating between the presidency and premiership, he strengthened federal and presidential authority while making the restoration of Russia’s international influence a central narrative of rule. In 2005, he called the Soviet collapse “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century,” a remark that condensed his memory of dissolution as a Russian experience of loss and dislocation. His rule also narrowed political competition and independent media while expanding the state’s military interventions abroad.

Science and technology Soviet Union state institutions 1953–1986 ○ Radiation exposure

Soviet nuclear engineer and Unit 4 shift supervisor who directed the response and died of radiation exposure

"I did everything correctly. I don't understand why it happened."

A Soviet nuclear engineer born in Novosibirsk, he graduated from the Moscow Power Engineering Institute in 1976, joined the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in September 1979 and became shift supervisor of Reactor Unit 4 on 10 July 1984. During the safety test on the night of 26 April 1986 he gave the order to shut down the reactor and the AZ-5 button was pressed at 01:23:39, though witness testimony differs on who physically pressed it. He remained at Unit 4 until about 8 a.m., calling the fire brigade and ambulance and having feedwater valves opened by hand, and absorbed a lethal dose of over 15 Gy. He died of acute radiation syndrome in Moscow Hospital No. 6 on 11 May 1986, aged 33, with some English-language sources recording 10 May; he was posthumously awarded the 3rd-degree Order For Courage in 2008.

Social movements and organizing Affiliation unconfirmed 1953–

The tram driver who carried the strike beyond the shipyard

On 15 August 1980, she stopped her tram near the Baltic Opera, helping set Gdańsk’s public-transport strike in motion.

Henryka Krzywonos was a Gdańsk tram driver and trade-union activist who connected action inside the shipyard with workers across the city. On 15 August 1980 she stopped her tram, helping launch the public-transport strike and spread the news that encouraged solidarity action in other workplaces. She represented transport workers in the Inter-Enterprise Strike Committee, signed the August Agreement, and later aided internees and distributed underground publications during martial law. Her later work running a family children’s home and serving in parliament linked shop-floor action with care and institutional politics.

Scholarship and theory 1954–

A journalist-historian of Cold War crises

In his Berlin 1961, Kempe records General Lucius Clay's retort to President Kennedy at the height of the Checkpoint Charlie tank standoff: "Mr. President, we're not worried about our nerves. We're worrying about those of you people in Washington."

Frederick Kempe is an American journalist and author whose German family background and European reporting shaped his work on Cold War politics and transatlantic affairs. His major book, Berlin 1961, combines newly declassified American, Soviet, and German documents with interviews to reconstruct the building of the Berlin Wall and the October tank confrontation at Checkpoint Charlie. The book interprets Kennedy's crisis management as weakness and places Khrushchev's decisions within their political constraints, an asymmetry that an independent review challenged and made part of the work's historiographical significance.

Scholarship and theory 1954–2011 ○ Liver cancer

Nanjing University historian whose How the Red Sun Rose dissected the Yan’an rectification movement

His How the Red Sun Rose (2000) reconstructed the Yan'an Rectification Movement from party documents and memoirs, treating it as the process through which Mao consolidated personal authority and fixed the party's later methods.

Born in Nanjing, he grew up watching his father persecuted as a “rightist” during the Cultural Revolution and taught modern Chinese history at Nanjing University. How the Red Sun Rose: The Origins and Development of the Yan’an Rectification Movement, published in Hong Kong in 2000, reconstructed the movement of 1942–1945 from published sources alone, showing how Mao concentrated the party’s power in himself through thought reform, cadre screening and the “rescue campaign”, and set the template for later political campaigns. Banned on the mainland but widely read there, he died of liver cancer in 2011.

Scholarship and theory 1954–

The archival historian of Stalin's state antisemitism who argued the 1953 deportation was a myth

Stalin's Jewish deportation became a kind of Loch Ness Monster: many claimed to have seen it, but no one has ever presented a single piece of incontrovertible evidence.

Russia's leading historian of the Stalin era, who set the scholarly standard through his archival excavation of Soviet state antisemitism. His books In the Clutches of the Red Pharaoh (1994) and Stalin's Secret Policy: Power and Antisemitism (2001) are the monumental reference works that documented the full scope of late-Stalinist persecution of Jews, including the Doctors' Plot and the anti-cosmopolitan campaign. In his 2003 article 'Deportation: A Mystification,' he provoked fierce debate by arguing the widely accepted claim that Stalin planned a mass deportation of Jews was like the Loch Ness Monster: a story many claimed to have seen but for which no archival evidence existed, a position that now stands as the central counterpoint to Brent and Naumov's Stalin's Last Crime.

Scholarship and theory 1954–

A historian who reshaped the history of Vichy and wartime memory

In 2017 the historian of wartime memory was himself detained for ten hours at Houston's airport, nearly deported after U.S. border agents questioned the stipend for his lecture.

Henry Rousso is a French historian of France during the Second World War, the Vichy regime, and the changing memory of that past. Born in Cairo to a Jewish family that moved to France after the Suez Crisis, he made the relationship between historical experience and collective memory central to his work. His landmark book The Vichy Syndrome examined how post-Liberation France reconstructed, muted, and confronted collaboration and responsibility, while his term résistancialisme named the myth that exaggerated the Resistance’s size and national unity. His scholarship helped establish the study of contemporary memory as a field that distinguishes historical evidence from political uses of the past while tracing their interaction.

Scholarship and theory 1954–

A historian who clarified the political conflicts of modern France

Le Monde has called him "one of the best historians of the French twentieth century."

Julian Jackson is a British historian of twentieth-century France who has traced the conditions and consequences of political choices from the Depression and Popular Front to the Occupation and Gaullism. His study The Popular Front in France examined the relationship between reform and rearmament, democratic defence and mass mobilisation across political, social and cultural dimensions, becoming a major reference point in debate over the period. He later broadened his work to the French defeat of 1940, the German Occupation, postwar homosexual politics and May 1968.

Scholarship and theory 1954–

A scholar who reread war after withdrawal

"The regime of President Najibullah, however, survived until April 1992, over three years after the Soviet withdrawal," he wrote, against predictions that it would fall within months of the Soviet departure.

Mark N. Katz is an American scholar of international politics whose research covers Russian politics and foreign policy, revolution, and the war on terror. At George Mason University, he taught and wrote on Soviet and Russian policy in the Third World and the international dimensions of revolutionary movements. In a 2011 analysis of the Afghanistan withdrawal, he argued that Soviet military and economic aid sustained Najibullah's regime for more than three years after the troops left, challenging the assumption that withdrawal necessarily meant imminent collapse.

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.

Economy, finance and planning Affiliation unconfirmed 1954–1991 ✕ Killed by stray bullet

The 37-year-old economist killed by a stray bullet while coming to Komar's aid at the barricades

He ran to help Komar, who had jumped onto a BMP. The gunner fired warning shots, but Usov kept running, and a stray bullet struck him.

He was an agricultural economist by training who worked at the Moscow joint venture Ikom, an ordinary citizen until the August 1991 coup. In the early hours of 21 August, at the Tchaikovsky Tunnel, he ran to help Dmitry Komar, who had jumped onto a BMP armored vehicle to cover its observation slits, and was killed by a stray bullet; three days later, President Gorbachev awarded him and the two other victims the title of Hero of the Soviet Union, the last ever conferred.

Political and party leadership Popular Front of Latvia 1955–

The journalist who saved the Daugava River and led the Latvian Popular Front

'Standing up for the Daugava meant the same thing as standing up for an independent Latvia. The fight against the Daugavpils HPP was the start of our revolution.'

A Latvian journalist and politician. In 1986, his article in Literatūra un Māksla, co-written with Arturs Snips, sparked public opposition to the Daugavpils hydroelectric dam; the campaign gathered 30,000 signatures and forced the Soviet Council of Ministers to halt construction in 1987. At the founding congress of the Latvian Popular Front in October 1988 he was elected its first chairman, turning a mass movement born of environmental protest toward the political goal of restoring independence. He served as deputy speaker of the Supreme Council after the Front's 1990 electoral victory, resigned in 1992 and returned to journalism, later leading the Latvian Social Democratic Workers' Party and serving on the Riga City Council.

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.

Political and party leadership Affiliation unconfirmed 1955–

Deputy chairman of the Azerbaijani Popular Front who warned Primakov there would be resistance

Polyanichko told him that at midnight troops would enter the city "whatever the cost." Mammadov replied that the army would meet resistance.

As deputy chairman of the Azerbaijani Popular Front, Etibar Mammadov stood at the forefront of the national independence movement and met with Yevgeny Primakov and Viktor Polyanichko on January 19, 1990, where he was warned that troops would enter Baku. That evening Polyanichko told him the army would go in "whatever the cost"; Mammadov replied there would be resistance, and he later became a key witness to the Kremlin's bloody crackdown on the city. He went on to found the Azerbaijan National Independence Party, finished second in the 1998 presidential election, and remained a durable opposition leader in independent Azerbaijan.