Scholars of this history 128

Scholar 1892–1982 ○ Died of natural causes

Author of the 14-volume History of Soviet Russia; diagnosed a "latent incompatibility" between NEP markets and planning

'There was a latent incompatibility between the principles of the New Economic Policy and the principles of planning.' From Foundations of a Planned Economy (1969).

A British historian and former diplomat, he authored the 14-volume A History of Soviet Russia (1950–1978), a comprehensive account of Soviet political, economic, and social life from 1917 to 1929. In international relations, The Twenty Years' Crisis (1939) helped lay the foundations of classical realism, while What Is History? (1961) redefined the historian's craft as interpretation rather than the accumulation of facts. On the NEP, he judged that there was 'a latent incompatibility between the principles of the New Economic Policy and the principles of planning,' an assessment that became one of four major historiographical positions on the policy's viability. He remained a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, until his death.

Scholar 1909–1987 ○ Natural death

A painstaking archival historian of the Spanish Civil War

He went to Spain to report a war and became the historian who spent a lifetime assembling the record of a defeated revolution.

Burnett Bolloten was a reporter who covered the Spanish Civil War and a historian who traced the power struggle and suppression of revolution within the Republican camp. Initially sympathetic to the Communist Party, he became convinced through his study of the May Days of 1937 and the repression of the POUM that Communist forces had curtailed the Republic’s revolutionary alliance. Over decades he assembled refugee testimony and extensive press and documentary materials, producing The Spanish Revolution and the posthumously published The Spanish Civil War, works that became central to debates over the conflict’s political history.

Scholar 1912–2001 ○ Natural death

The Canadian political scientist who chronicled the Prague Spring

He named the Prague Spring an “interrupted revolution,” leaving the possibility of reform as a historical question.

Gordon Skilling was a Canadian political scientist and a leading scholar of Czechoslovak modern history and politics. In Czechoslovakia's Interrupted Revolution, he interpreted the Prague Spring as a reforming revolution cut short by outside intervention rather than a doomed experiment, offering a durable framework for debate about the potential of reform communism. At the University of Toronto he helped build an institutional base for East European studies while combining scholarship with solidarity for Czechoslovak democratic forces.

Scholar 1912–2001 ○ Natural death

The demographer who recalculated Yugoslavia’s wartime losses

Vladimir Žerjavić was a Croatian economist and demographer who became known for studying Yugoslavia’s population and wartime losses after a career in economic-development consulting. Comparing censuses with expected population trends, he sought to distinguish actual deaths from broader demographic loss and estimated about 1.027 million wartime deaths in Yugoslavia in 1989. His figures prompted renewed scrutiny of established narratives about victims of the Yugoslav Partisans and other forces, as well as postwar reprisals, while critics disputed aspects of his data and method.

Scholar 1917–2007

A liberal historian who became an insider chronicler of power

After the Bay of Pigs, he recalled, “I bitterly reproached myself” for not speaking more forcefully in the decisive meetings.

Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. was a historian and public intellectual who examined American liberalism and presidential power. As a special assistant in John F. Kennedy’s administration, he worked on Latin America and speechwriting, opposed the Bay of Pigs plan, and later acknowledged his own silence in decisive meetings. He was not a member of the Executive Committee during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but helped Adlai Stevenson prepare the U.S. presentation to the United Nations. His 1965 A Thousand Days fixed a polished story of Kennedy’s crisis leadership in public memory, while later scholars recovered the Cuban and Soviet agency, secret bargains, and structural dangers that narrative left in shadow.

Scholar 1917–2015 ○ Natural death

A Cold War historian who dissected the Stalin era

The revised The Great Terror argued that the opening of the archives still left its central challenge standing.

Robert Conquest was a British historian and poet who studied Soviet political violence and collectivization. His 1968 book The Great Terror used published documents and émigré testimony to present the Great Purge as a system of state terror rather than merely a series of Moscow trials, and established the period’s English-language name. His estimates of the victims and his totalitarian interpretation were partly supported by later archival releases and research, while their scale and causal claims remained contested. His work in anticommunist information activity and literature also makes him a figure at the intersection of historical scholarship and Cold War politics.

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 1920–2013 ○ Natural death

An independent statistician who recalculated Yugoslavia’s wartime losses

In 1985, he presented Yugoslavia’s wartime losses as separate figures for actual and demographic losses.

Bogoljub Kočović was a Serb jurist and statistician from Sarajevo who studied Yugoslavia’s population and wartime losses. In his 1985 book, he compared the 1921, 1931, and 1948 censuses and estimated about 1.014 million actual losses and 1.985 million demographic losses in Yugoslavia during the Second World War. His work offered an independent estimate distinct from the state figure of 1.706 million and became a central source in the historiographical dispute over the war’s victims.

Scholar 1920–2016 ○ Natural death

A historian who clarified the Resistance's moral choices and the war's layered character

In A Civil War, he analysed the Resistance as a struggle that was at once patriotic, civil, and a class war.

Claudio Pavone was an Italian historian and archivist whose work examined fascism, the Resistance, and the continuities of state institutions. His own participation in the Resistance during the Second World War shaped both his historical questions and his civic outlook. His major study A Civil War analysed the struggle of 1943–45 as an overlapping patriotic war, civil war among Italians, and class war, placing political choice and moral tension at the centre of scholarly debate. He also helped organize the Central State Archive and direct the General Guide to the Italian State Archives.

Scholar 1921–2019 ○ Natural death

An American historian who interpreted the Spanish Republic and Civil War

Gabriel Jackson was an American historian, Hispanist, and journalist who made modern Spanish history his central field. His 1965 book, The Spanish Republic and the Civil War, was an early English-language synthesis of the Second Republic and the war, including the conflicts within the Republican camp. Jackson viewed the Republic’s institutional reformers and the PCE’s wartime strategy relatively sympathetically, while treating the POUM and revolutionary left as politically impractical, a position that became one pole in later historiographical debate. McCarthyism delayed his academic career, but he later taught modern European history at UC San Diego and continued writing on Spain after retiring to Barcelona.

Scholar 1922–2000 ○ Died

Soviet military historian who first broke the official silence on Winter War casualties, revealing 53,522 dead

In issue 22 of Ogoniok (1989), his article 'Neznamenitaya voina' (The Un-famous War) became the first public challenge to Molotov's 1940 figure of 48,475 dead, revealing the true toll of 53,522.

A military historian who fought in the Great Patriotic War and served in the Soviet Military Administration in Germany, Semiryaga devoted his career to the war history of the USSR. In 1989, in the magazine Ogoniok, he became the first to publicly break the official Soviet line on Winter War losses, revealing 53,522 dead; he went on to publish the secret protocol to the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and Katyn massacre documents for the first time, opening long-sealed archives. His final major work, published posthumously, tackled the last Soviet taboo: collaborationism under Nazi occupation.

Scholar 1924–2004 ○ Natural death

A historian who forecast the Soviet collapse

Writing as “Z,” he predicted that Gorbachev could not overcome communism's contradictions, then later acknowledged the essay.

Martin Malia was an American historian of Russia and European intellectual history who taught and researched at Berkeley. In The Soviet Tragedy, he argued that socialism's comprehensive attempt to abolish capitalism also undermined economic and political freedom, making the Soviet system structurally resistant to self-correction. In 1990 he published the essay “To the Stalin Mausoleum” under the pseudonym Z, predicting that Gorbachev's reforms could not overcome communism's internal contradictions. His interpretation became a powerful pole in explanations of the Soviet collapse, while critics argued that it reduced socialism's historical possibilities to a defect in ideology itself.

Scholar 1925–2021 ○ Natural causes

The British economic historian who built the seven-volume chronicle of Soviet industrialisation

In his final volume he wrote: "While my view of Soviet history has changed… when the details of history are in conflict with preconceived ideas, the latter should give way… I remain on the Left, believing… that a better organization of society is possible."

A British economic historian. He co-authored Foundations of a Planned Economy with E. H. Carr and carried Carr's work forward into the 1930s, completing the seven-volume The Industrialisation of Soviet Russia. In The Years of Hunger (2004), co-authored with Stephen Wheatcroft, he used post-Soviet archives to estimate famine deaths at 5.5–6.5 million and argued the famine was not a planned genocide but the result of procurement-first policy, harvest failure, and belated leadership response. A member of the Communist Party of Great Britain in his youth, he left after the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary and remained on the Left, holding that 'a better organization of society is possible.'

Theorist 1926–2003 ○ Natural death

A non-dogmatic Marxist who reflected on the Prague Spring

He argued that the Prague Spring was buried again after 1989, following its burial under the Husák regime.

Karel Kosík was a Czech philosopher who reworked Marxism as a philosophy of human praxis and concrete historicity. His major work, Dialectics of the Concrete (1963), placed Marx in dialogue with Heideggerian phenomenology and earned international recognition. A leading intellectual of democratic socialism during the Prague Spring, he was expelled from the Communist Party and excluded from university life during normalization. After 1989, he argued that the memory and emancipatory promise of the reform had been buried first by the Husák regime and again by the neoliberal order, making him central to debates over the event’s legacy.

Scholar 1926–2005 ○ Natural death

A committed historian of revolutionary movements

He read Spain’s revolution not as a side episode of the war, but as a defeated social revolution.

Pierre Broué was a French Trotskyist historian and teachers’ activist who studied communism and twentieth-century revolutionary movements. His 1961 history of the Spanish Revolution and Civil War, written with Émile Témime, interpreted the defeat of the revolutionary process through the clash of class forces inside the Republic and Stalinist policy. He combined political commitment with archival and editorial work on Trotsky and the Trotskyist movement.

Scholar 1927–2008 ○ Died

The historian who first reconstructed the Cuban Missile Crisis from Soviet archives

The American historian Robert Byrnes called him 'one of the most competent Soviet specialists on US history in the twentieth century.'

The historian who laid the academic foundations of American history studies in the postwar Soviet Union. A graduate of Leningrad State University's international relations program, he spent his entire career at the Leningrad Institute of History, producing over three hundred works spanning oil politics, the American Revolution, and US-Soviet relations. With Timothy Naftali, he was the first to mine the Soviet Communist Party and Kremlin archives to reveal the inside story of the Cuban Missile Crisis: their 1997 'One Hell of a Gamble' became a turning point in Cold War historiography, and their 2006 'Khrushchev's Cold War' won the Duke of Westminster's Medal for Military Literature from the Royal United Services Institute.

Scholar 1929–2010 ○ Natural death

A historian who reconstructed the Cold War’s hidden record

As his father's personal secretary, he recorded the Cuban negotiations, and the documents he later donated revealed that tactical nuclear weapons remained in Cuba after the missile withdrawal.

Sergo Mikoyan was a Soviet and Russian historian of Latin America and Soviet foreign policy, as well as the son of Anastas Mikoyan. His experience accompanying his father to Cuba in 1962, together with his personal records, helped reveal that Soviet tactical nuclear weapons remained on the island after the public missile withdrawal and that the negotiations deepened the rift with the Cuban leadership. As editor of the journal Latin America, he helped shape the field and later joined collaborative Soviet-American research on the Cold War.

Scholar 1929–2016 ○ Died of natural causes

Soviet economist who identified two incompatible regulators, plan and quasi-market, as the core contradiction of the Kosygin reform

"An enterprise cannot simultaneously have two heterogeneous regulators. Just as a car cannot have two drivers with two steering wheels," summing up the failure of the Kosygin reform in The Planned System in Retrospect (2000).

A Soviet and Russian economist, Olsevich graduated from Moscow State University's economics faculty and taught political economy at the Urals Polytechnic Institute. From 1965 until his death he worked at the Institute of Economics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, where he led the sector for critical study of foreign economic theories; in his later years he concentrated on the theory of economic transformation and the history of Russian economic thought. In The Planned System in Retrospect (2000), co-authored with Paul Gregory, he identified the core contradiction of the 1965 Kosygin reform as the incompatibility of two heterogeneous regulators, the directive plan and the quasi-market, within a single enterprise, founding the 'two regulators' school of reform analysis.

Scholar 1929–2019 ○ Natural causes

The statistician who made Soviet war losses countable

In a 2002 Vojenno-istoricheskii zhurnal article he wrote that "a historian must rejoice and grieve together with his people."

Grigori Krivosheyev was a Soviet military officer and military historian who rose to deputy chief of the General Staff. From 1988 he led a team that quantified Soviet and Russian military losses from declassified records, producing the 1993 study that made his name widely known. Its estimate of 126,875 irretrievable Soviet losses in the Winter War became a standard reference, although later researchers identified gaps and possible duplication and proposed higher totals.

Scholar 1931–2006 ○ Natural causes

Historian who pioneered the history of Russian and American anarchism

Named a distinguished professor in 1982, his announcement quoted him: 'Every good person deep down is an anarchist.'

Born in Brooklyn to Jewish immigrant parents from Odessa, Avrich was a pioneering historian who spent his entire career teaching the history of Russian and American anarchism at Queens College. His Kronstadt, 1921 (1970) demolished the Bolshevik claim that the rebellion was a White-Guard conspiracy, and he later conceded that Getzler's muster-roll figures were more current than his own. He worked to recover anarchists as 'pioneers of social justice' rather than amoral and violent militants, and bequeathed a 20,000-item archive to the Library of Congress.

Scholar 1931–2017 ○ Natural death

The historian who made the Spanish Civil War a global narrative

Hugh Thomas was an English historian whose 1961 The Spanish Civil War made a large, readable survey of the conflict available to an international audience. Drawing on printed diplomatic sources, participant accounts and interviews, he presented the Republican struggle and its internal violence without simply adopting either Communist or anti-Communist polemic. The book became a clandestine bestseller in Francoist Spain, was repeatedly revised, and remained a foundational point of reference despite factual and interpretive criticisms. His later work ranged across Cuba, the Spanish empire and world history, while his political career moved from Labour to the Conservatives and then the Liberal Democrats.

Scholar 1933–2016 ○ Natural causes

The Soviet historian who laid the foundation of Leningrad Affair studies

His 1989 article 'The So-Called Leningrad Affair' in Voprosy istorii KPSS framed the purge as a factional struggle between the Zhdanov group and the Malenkov-Beria group. For over three decades, this framing remained the starting point of the debate.

A Soviet historian. After graduating with honors from Leningrad State University's History Faculty and working as a teacher and party functionary in Torzhok, he spent 25 years at the Leningrad Institute of Party History from 1966, researching the siege, postwar reconstruction, and the political biographies of party leaders. His 1989 article in Voprosy istorii KPSS, 'The So-Called Leningrad Affair,' was the first to frame the case as a factional struggle between the Zhdanov group and the Malenkov-Beria group with Stalin's sanction, launching the entire post-Soviet historiography. The book of the same name he co-compiled with Viktor Demidov in 1990 sold 200,000 copies and remains the most influential documentary study. He taught as professor at St. Petersburg University from 1991 until his death, training a generation of historians.

Scholar 1933–2017

An ecologist who tracked Chernobyl’s long-term human costs

His Chernobyl study drew on more than 6,000 sources to estimate long-term harm, challenging accounts centered on the official death toll.

Alexei Yablokov was a Soviet and Russian biologist and environmental policy advocate whose work ranged from zoology and population biology to ecology. He became a prominent public voice on the long-term health and environmental consequences of Chernobyl, and the high mortality estimate in his co-authored study marked one end of the dispute over the disaster’s human toll. His career joined academic research to environmental activism, parliamentary work, and service as a presidential adviser, helping make ecological risk a matter of public policy.

Scholar 1934–2026 ○ Died of natural causes

The revisionist historian who overturned the Cold War coup thesis with archival evidence

Rather, I would emphasize the party's internally relatively democratic, tolerant and decentralised structure and method of operation, as well as its responsiveness to the prevailing mass mood.

A leading American historian of the revisionist school on the Russian Revolution. One of the first Western researchers granted access to Soviet archives from the 1960s, his 1976 work The Bolsheviks Come to Power demonstrated empirically that the October Revolution was not a minority coup but was carried out with broad popular support for peace, land, and bread, directly challenging the Cold War coup thesis identified with Richard Pipes. His finding that the Bolshevik Party of 1917 was 'a relatively open, democratic, and decentralized organization' reshaped the paradigm of revolution studies, and he was respected for accepting conclusions contrary to his own political convictions on the strength of the archival record.