Israel

Scholar 1920–2012 ○ Natural causes

Historian who interpreted the Kronstadt uprising as the last stand of Soviet democracy

One day a discussion had to be broken off at 11am; when Getzler returned five hours later, he resumed exactly where he had left off, without a single lubricating word of linkage: 'And seventhly, Lenin…'

Born in Berlin to a Polish-Jewish immigrant family, Getzler was deported by the Nazis to Poland, resettled in a Siberian gold-mining settlement by Soviet authorities, and eventually emigrated to Australia, where he earned a history degree and taught at the University of Adelaide. His 1967 biography of Yuli Martov recovered the Menshevik leader as a serious democratic alternative to Lenin, and his Kronstadt 1917–1921 (1983) used fleet muster rolls to show that 93.9% of the Petropavlovsk and Sevastopol crews had enlisted before 1918, proving the rebels were veteran revolutionaries and not peasant conscripts in White-Guard disguise. He became professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1971, insisted that individual and group choices shaped Soviet history, and in his later years marched against Israeli settlement policy into his eighties.

Scholar 1932– ○ Professor emeritus

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.