Scholars of this history 128

Scholar 1947– ○ Living

An archival military historian of the Pacific War

Frank argued the atomic bombs moved the emperor and set the surrender in motion, while Soviet intervention is 'the factor that weighs heavily on enforcing compliance with the surrender' of Japan's armed forces.

Richard B. Frank is an American lawyer and military historian of the Pacific War in World War II. His work follows operations, policy, and the decisions of Japanese leaders from Guadalcanal to the end of the Japanese Empire. Downfall is especially important for its analysis of Japan’s surrender as a contested outcome shaped by military collapse, the atomic bombings, and the Soviet entry into the war.

Scholar 1947–현재 ○ Active historian

A historian who connects war’s military outcomes to its psychological meaning

“Militarily, it was the moment when the balance significantly shifts, but symbolically it was when the Soviet people suddenly began to believe in themselves.”

Richard Overy is a British historian of the Second World War and Nazi Germany whose work examines the structures and consequences of modern war. He has treated military operations alongside economic mobilisation, social experience, and political psychology as forces shaping the course of conflict. On Stalingrad, he argues that the Soviet victory did not yet make Germany’s defeat certain in strategic terms, but marked a symbolic and psychological turning point: Soviet society began to believe in itself, while the message that Germany was vulnerable spread around the world. His approach links material conditions of war to changes in collective perception rather than treating them as competing explanations.

Scholar 1947–

The Oxford economic historian who reassessed Soviet industrialization as one of the most successful development stories of the 20th century

"Soviet economic performance is usually dismissed as a failure. In contrast, I argue, the Soviet economy performed well. Japan was certainly the most successful developing economy of the twentieth century, but the USSR ranked just behind it."

Oxford economic historian Robert C. Allen argued in his 2003 book *Farm to Factory: A Reinterpretation of the Soviet Industrial Revolution* that Soviet industrialization was one of the most successful development stories of the 20th century. His recalculation found that consumption per head rose by roughly 30% between 1928 and 1937, directly reversing the classic studies by Abram Bergson and Janet Chapman that had concluded consumption declined. Using a simulation model, he also presented a counterfactual showing that a continuation of NEP without collectivization would have produced similar GDP growth rates, making his work a key reference in debates over the costs and achievements of Stalinist industrialisation.

Scholar 1932– ○ Living

The historian who recast Vichy collaboration

“The Vichy regime had its own active project to remake France after the defeat of June 1940.”

Robert Paxton is an American historian of modern Europe whose work examines Vichy France and the social and political conditions of fascism. By reading German occupation records alongside French sources, he showed that Vichy was not merely a passive instrument of Germany but a collaborator pursuing its own project of national reorganization. Co-authored with Michael Marrus, Vichy France and the Jews argued that Vichy's early anti-Jewish statutes originated in French policy rather than direct German orders, reshaping French historiography and public memory. His work made collaboration and resistance legible through the interaction of state institutions, social forces, and wartime conditions, while leaving room for debate over particular interpretations.

Scholar 1947– ○ Living

A contentious biographer of Soviet history

He introduced his Trotsky biography with the words: 'If Mercader's ice axe didn't finish Trotsky off, I hope my book does.'

Robert Service is a British historian of the Soviet Union whose work ranges across the political history from the Revolution to Stalin's death. His biographies of Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky interpret individual choices alongside the structures of the revolutionary state. His account of Beria's elimination as a struggle shaped not only by Beria's crimes but also by his post-Stalin reform proposals has made him a significant, contested voice in the historiography.

Scholar ○ Natural death

A historian who traced revolutionary pluralism and the making of Stalinism

Against models of communism as an immutable system, Daniels argued that the movement was an evolutionary product of circumstances.

Robert Vincent Daniels was an American historian and educator who traced competing possibilities within the Russian Revolution and Soviet politics. His landmark book The Conscience of the Revolution examined early Communist pluralism, resisting the idea that Stalin’s collectivization and concentration of power were inevitable outcomes of the revolution. Daniels distinguished the Opposition’s industrialization program from Stalin’s violent implementation, while cautioning against exaggerating foreign-policy differences between the factions. His later scholarship and textbooks brought debates in Soviet history to generations of students.

Scholar 1940–

The historian who argued the USSR built nations, not destroyed them, the 'revenge of the past' thesis

In sixth grade I gave a report on how the Soviet Union had defeated fascism and built cities the size of San Francisco since the war. My teacher blanched. From that day until I graduated, I was known as Comrade Suny.

An Armenian-American historian who transformed the paradigm of Soviet nationalities studies. In his 1993 book The Revenge of the Past, he overturned the Cold War consensus that the Soviet system repressed and Russified nationalities, arguing instead that Soviet nationality policy, through territorial demarcation, language codification, and ethnic bureaucracies, institutionalized and built national identities, ultimately creating the very nations that would destroy the Union. This 'revenge of the past' thesis became the dominant paradigm in post-Soviet nationalities research. He is also noted for major studies of each South Caucasus nation and won the Deutscher Memorial Prize for his 2020 biography of Stalin.

Scholar 1937– ○ Living

A historian whose break with communism led to conservative anti-communism

Declassified Moscow archives prompted a new examination of the Soviet role in the Spanish Civil War.

Ronald Radosh is an American historian and writer who grew up in a Communist family and passed through the Communist Party USA and the New Left. Reexamining the Rosenberg case led him to revise his earlier belief in their innocence and consolidated his turn toward anti-communist conservatism. With Mary Habeck and Grigory Sevostianov, he edited Spain Betrayed, using Moscow archives to present a critical interpretation of Soviet policy and Comintern influence in the Spanish Civil War.

Scholar 1980–

Cold War historian who traced the Sino-Soviet split to inequality within the alliance and clashing national interests

ideological disagreements only served as a cover for the power struggle… in which ideology was merely a means to an end.

Sergey Radchenko is a Soviet-born British historian of the Cold War, known for his work on Sino-Soviet relations. His first book, Two Suns in the Heavens (2009), argued that the split was driven less by ideology than by the structural inequality of the alliance and Chinese resentment, becoming the major counter-argument to Lorenz Lüthi's ideology-centered interpretation.

Scholar 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.

Scholar 1941–

Revisionist trailblazer who reconstructed Soviet social history 'from below'

'Nothing fails like failure, and for historians approaching the revolution's centenary the disappearance of the Soviet Union casts a pall.' ('What's Left?', LRB, 2017)

The Australian-born historian who led the revisionist school of Soviet studies. In the 1970s and 1980s, with works like Education and Social Mobility, The Russian Revolution, Stalin's Peasants, and Everyday Stalinism, she pioneered a 'history from below' that read the Soviet system through the eyes of workers, peasants, and city-dwellers rather than the state and its leaders. In her 2017 LRB essay 'What's Left?', she surveyed the centenary histories of the October Revolution and mapped the three dominant frameworks (the totalitarian model, revisionist social history, and the post-1991 consensus that the revolution was a 'historical dead end'), arguing that the revolution's path to Stalinism was the product of social dynamics, not inevitability, a stance that unsettled both Cold War orthodoxy and its Marxist critics.

Scholar 1950–현재 ○ Active historian

A historian who reread Sino-Soviet relations through Cold War archives

Shen Zhihua is a historian of the Cold War, the Soviet Union, and Sino-Soviet relations who led the Center for Cold War International History Studies at East China Normal University. He expanded the documentary basis of Chinese Cold War scholarship by personally collecting declassified Russian materials and editing large archival compilations. His work explains the Sino-Soviet split through the interaction of state interests and competition within the international communist movement, questioning accounts that reduce China’s choices to ideological solidarity alone. His studies of the Korean War and the Sino-Soviet alliance trace the calculations of China, the Soviet Union, and Korea, bringing a major Chinese interpretation of the Cold War to an international readership.

Scholar 1965–현재 ○ Living

A historian of power's intimate worlds

He turned Beria's presence at Stalin's deathbed, and the evidence around the poisoning theory, into a historical question rather than a settled legend.

A British historian and writer, he is known for combining political history with vivid portraits of rulers and their private worlds. Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar reconstructed Stalin's rule and inner circle from newly available documents and testimony, including evidence concerning Beria at Stalin's death and the theory that Stalin was poisoned. He later broadened his scope with Young Stalin, Jerusalem: The Biography, and The Romanovs, bringing the long history of revolution, empire, and dynasty to a wide readership.

Scholar 1934–

America's most prominent historian arguing the Second Republic's radicalization brought on the Spanish Civil War

The very expression 'historical memory' is an oxymoron, a fundamental contradiction in terms. Memory is intrinsically individual, subjective, and very frequently fallacious.

America's leading historian of modern Spain, Payne taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison for 37 years and shaped the conservative interpretation of the Spanish Civil War through over twenty books on the Second Republic, Franco, and European fascism. His central thesis holds that the collapse of the Second Republic stemmed not from right-wing conspiracy but from the revolutionary radicalization of the Socialist-led left, reading the Civil War as a clash of revolution and counterrevolution. Since the 2000s, critics including Ángel Viñas, Helen Graham, and Paul Preston have charged his later work with excessive benevolence toward Francoism, yet Payne's revisionist framework remains an indispensable pole in Civil War historiography.

Scholar 1947–

Australian economic historian who reconstructed Soviet famine and repression statistics from the archives

"We do not absolve Stalin from responsibility for the famine… But the story which has emerged in this book is of a Soviet leadership which was struggling with a famine crisis which had been caused partly by their wrongheaded policies, but was unexpected and undesirable."

An Australian economic historian and researcher of Soviet social, economic, and demographic history. With Robert W. Davies he co-authored The Years of Hunger (2004), using post-Soviet archives to estimate famine deaths at about 4.5–6.5 million and to argue that the famine was not an intentional genocide but a tragedy produced by forced grain procurement, weather disasters, and reckless industrialisation. His 1990 article 'More Light on the Scale of Repression and Excess Mortality in the Soviet Union in the 1930s' began a career-long effort to correct inflated Western figures, later extending to comparative work on German and Soviet repression.

Scholar 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.

Scholar 1963–현재

The historian who redefined the USSR as an 'affirmative action empire' rather than a 'prison of nations'

The 15 countries that emerged from the USSR largely didn't exist in 1917; they were a consequence of the Soviet organization of the country on national principles.

A Canadian-born historian who reshaped the study of Soviet nationality policy. His 2001 book The Affirmative Action Empire recast the early USSR not as a 'prison of nations' that suppressed its minorities, as the Pipes school had argued, but as the world's first state to systematically practice mass affirmative action for non-Russian peoples: a thesis that has become the most influential English-language framework on the subject. The George F. Baker III Professor of Russian Studies at Harvard, he also directs the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI).

Scholar 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.

Scholar 1941– ○ Active scholar

A historian who recast the international history of Japan's surrender

Japan's surrender in August 1945 cannot be explained by the atomic bomb alone.

Tsuyoshi Hasegawa is a Japanese-American historian of modern Russian and Soviet history, the Cold War, and Russo-Japanese relations. His work ranges across the Russian Revolution, Soviet-Japanese relations, and the international history of the Pacific War's end, linking diplomacy to social and political change. His major book, Racing the Enemy, reopened debate over Japan's surrender by arguing that the Soviet declaration of war and invasion in August 1945, not the atomic bombings alone, decisively altered Japan's strategic options.

Scholar 1941– ○ Active scholar

An ethnologist who challenged the nation as a fixed essence

He described the nation as a powerful metaphor that political actors compete to monopolize.

Valery Tishkov is a Russian ethnologist and social anthropologist known for studying ethnicity, nationalism, and interethnic conflict. He treated nations less as naturally given communities than as categories mobilized and reconstructed by political actors and elites, an approach crystallized in Ethnicity, Nationalism and Conflict in and after the Soviet Union: The Mind Aflame. As Minister for Nationalities in 1992, he connected scholarly analysis of ethnicity to the governing problems of a multiethnic state and the prevention of conflict. His constructivist interpretation became one pole of debate over whether nationalism is chiefly elite-made or also an autonomous expression of popular experience.

Scholar 1956– ○ Active scholar

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.

Scholar 1944– ○ Living

A historian who traces the Russian question through Soviet history

Over the years I became convinced that the Leningrad Affair cannot be understood in essence apart from the history of the 'Russian question' throughout the existence of Soviet Russia, from 1917 to this day.

Vladimir Dmitrievich Kuznechevsky is a Russian historian and Doctor of Historical Sciences who studies the political history of the Soviet Union and Russia. His writings examine Stalin-era power and the nationalities policy of the state, most notably interpreting the Leningrad Affair as a conflict over the status of the Russian republic and Russian leadership cadres. This approach treats the affair not simply as a struggle for office but as part of the unresolved “Russian question” within the Soviet system, making his work a significant and contested historiographical intervention.

Scholar 1950–

Economic historian who argued partial reform would only destroy the planning system

'Analyses of "Gorbachev's economists" never mention the words "charlatan" or "ignoramus."'

A Soviet-born economist who emigrated to the United States, trained at Novosibirsk University and the University of Pennsylvania. In his 1988 article 'Lessons of the 1965 Soviet Economic Reform,' he argued that resistance from central ministries and Gosplan to the Kosygin reform was not mere bureaucratic self-interest but a rational recognition that partial market reform would destroy the central planning system without putting any workable alternative in its place. Together with Michael Ellman he edited The Destruction of the Soviet Economic System; this systemic incompatibility thesis became a key argument in the historiographical debate over why Soviet reforms consistently failed.

Scholar 1951–

Romanian-American political scientist and authority on the 1989 revolutions

In Bucharest in June 1990, he witnessed miners violently crushing anti-government protesters, an experience he said gave him insight into 'barbarity in its crassest, most revolting form.'

Born into a Romanian communist elite family and defecting in 1981, he is a political scientist who has analysed Stalinism and the collapse of East European communist systems from a comparative politics perspective. His 2003 Stalinism for All Seasons provided a definitive synthesis of Romanian communism, and in 2006 he chaired the Presidential Commission for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship, steering the country's landmark reckoning with its past. His 2009 article on the causes, meanings and consequences of 1989 became a benchmark for scholarship on the revolutions, arguing that ethnic conflict and authoritarian backsliding in the aftermath do not diminish their 'generous message' and colossal impact.