Activities and affiliations

Military command Soviet Union state institutions 1955–

The Tamanskaya Division battalion chief of staff who turned ten tanks to defend the White House during the August coup

I decided that whatever order I was given, I wouldn't shoot anyone.

A Soviet Army major serving as chief of staff of a tank battalion in the Guards Tamanskaya Motor Rifle Division. On 19 August 1991, he led ten tanks to the Kalinin Bridge near the White House under GKChP orders, but after meeting Vice President Alexander Rutskoi, he turned his tanks around to defend the Russian parliament. The tank from his battalion, No. 110, was the one Boris Yeltsin climbed to deliver his historic speech, an image that became the symbol of the coup's defeat. After the coup he was ostracized within the division, left the army in 2000, and spent the 1990s scraping by on security and funeral-agent jobs.

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.

Social movements and organizing Affiliation unconfirmed 1956–

Estonian former political prisoner who survived the Soviet camps and co-organized the first open rally of the Baltic independence movement

The Hirvepark demonstration, Ahonen said, 'broke open the path for the expression of opinion,' an historic turn he called 'the icebreaker effect.'

Heiki Ahonen was born in 1956 in Pärnu, Estonia. His grandfather was shot by the NKVD, his father imprisoned in the camps, and his mother deported to Siberia: every member of his family was repressed. Joining the underground resistance in 1977, he distributed samizdat and fed information on Soviet human rights violations to Western journalists; convicted of anti-Soviet agitation in 1983, he served five years in the Perm labour camps. Released in early 1987, he co-organised the Hirvepark rally that August, the first open mass demonstration demanding disclosure of the Nazi-Soviet pact's secret protocols, breaking the dam for the Baltic independence movement; then was forcibly expelled by the KGB, spent a decade in exile, and came home as the founding director of the Museum of Occupations.

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.

Economy, finance and planning Russian Federation state institutions 1956–2009 ○ Heart attack

Architect of shock therapy, the economist who dismantled the planned economy and laid the first stones of Russian capitalism

3 October 1993, live on television: "At this hour we cannot rely only on police and security forces. Muscovites, all Russians who cherish democracy and freedom, gather at the Mossovet building!" — thousands poured into the streets.

Grandson of writers Arkady Gaidar and Pavel Bazhov. After Moscow State University, he edited the economic sections of Kommunist and Pravda, arguing for market reform from within the party press. In November 1991 he became Yeltsin's Deputy PM and Minister of Economy and Finance; on 2 January 1992 he liberalised prices and launched privatisation, converting the Soviet planned economy into a market system. He served as Acting PM (June–December 1992) and during the 1993 constitutional crisis went on live television to call Muscovites into the streets. His reforms averted famine and collapse but wiped out millions' savings, a legacy that remains Russia's most polarising policy debate.

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.

Social movements and organizing Solidarity (Solidarność) 1957–

The shipyard worker who helped launch independent unionism

“We had been preparing for the strike for seven days, and the day came when it had to begin here in the shipyard.”

Jerzy Borowczak was a young Gdańsk shipyard worker who helped open the way to Poland's independent trade-union movement in 1980. With Bogdan Felski and Ludwik Prądzyński, he launched the strike on 14 August, demanding Anna Walentynowicz's reinstatement, higher wages, and a memorial to the victims of 1970. He continued resisting after martial law, enduring internment and dismissal before returning to the shipyard in 1989.

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.

Science and technology Soviet Union state institutions 1960–1986 ✕ Radiation exposure

The 25-year-old senior reactor control engineer who pressed the AZ-5 button at Chernobyl's Unit 4

While studying control-rod documentation, Toptunov told his friend Sasha Korol that 'in certain circumstances, the rods could accelerate rather than slow the reaction': three months later, that insight became reality under his own finger on the AZ-5 button.

Leonid Toptunov was the Senior Reactor Control Engineer (SIUR) at Chernobyl's Unit 4, a 25-year-old technician at the control panel during the night of the 26 April 1986 disaster. Only three months into independent duty and facing his first shutdown, he pressed the AZ-5 emergency shutdown button under pressure from deputy chief engineer Anatoly Dyatlov, but a design flaw in the RBMK control rods caused a reactivity surge that triggered the explosion; he returned to the control room afterward to manually open water supply valves, absorbing a lethal 1,300 rem before dying in a Moscow hospital on 14 May.

Literature and arts 1961–1996 ○ Heart attack

The composer whose five 'Fatherland' songs became the emotional engine of the Singing Revolution

He silenced the band and, barehanded before 300,000 people, conducted the crowd as they sang 'I am Estonian and will remain Estonian.'

An Estonian composer and musician whose 'Five Patriotic Songs' cycle channeled the independence aspirations of the Singing Revolution in the late 1980s, uniting the masses in emotion. His 1987 protest ballad 'No Land Is Alone', written in solidarity with the anti-phosphorite mining movement, became the prelude to the Revolution; the five songs premiered at the Tartu Pop Festival in May 1988 and reached their peak at the 'Eestimaa Laul' concert in September, where 300,000 gathered at the Tallinn Song Festival Grounds. He died of a heart attack in 1996 at the age of 35, leaving nearly 200 works across diverse genres, but history remembers him above all as the composer of Estonia's independence movement.

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.

Science and technology Soviet Union state institutions 1962–1986 ✕ Acute radiation syndrome

The first firefighter at Chernobyl, who climbed onto the roof of Unit 3 without being told of the radioactive danger

'Everything turned out okay. We will live until we're a hundred'... from a letter to his wife, written from his Moscow hospital bed as radiation destroyed his body.

Volodymyr Pravyk was a Soviet firefighter and lieutenant in the MVD who commanded the Third Watch of Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant's Fire Brigade No. 2 (ВПЧ-2). When Reactor 4 exploded on 26 April 1986, his unit was first to respond: within two minutes Pravyk was on the scene, and at 01:56 he led a team onto the roof of Unit 3 to prevent the fire from spreading to the still-operational reactor, working in fields later estimated at over 6,000 roentgens per hour. He received the highest confirmed radiation dose of any Chernobyl victim, 1,520 REM (nearly triple a lethal dose), and died of acute radiation syndrome in Moscow on 11 May 1986, never having been told of the radioactive danger.

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.