India

Non-Soviet revolutionary 1887–1954 ○ Heart attack

The Indian Marxist who debated Lenin on colonial revolution

"You are so young! I expected a grey-bearded wise man from the East." — Lenin's first words to the 27-year-old Indian revolutionary upon meeting him at the Kremlin, 1920.

Bengali Marxist. He debated Lenin on the colonial question at the 1920 Comintern Congress and founded the Mexican Communist Party (the first outside Russia) as well as the CPI. Expelled from the Comintern, he served six years in British prisons before turning to Radical Humanism.

Foreign statesman 1889–1964 ○ Heart attack

India's first prime minister and co-founder of the Non-Aligned Movement

'Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge… At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.' (Independence eve address, 14 August 1947)

A towering leader of the Indian independence movement, he became independent India's first prime minister in 1947 and held the office until his death in 1964. He anchored the new republic in parliamentary democracy, secularism, and planned economic development, while charting a foreign policy of non-alignment that refused subordination to either Cold War bloc. With Tito he issued the 1954 joint statement that first defined 'non-alignment' as a positive, active policy, not passive neutrality, and went on to co-found the Non-Aligned Movement through the 1956 Brioni Declaration and the 1961 Belgrade summit. The Sino-Indian War of 1962 shook his domestic standing, yet he is remembered as the architect of the Indian republic.

Non-Soviet revolutionary 1896–1974 ○ Natural causes

CPGB founding member, chief theoretician for half a century, and pioneer of Marxist historiography on India

After Khrushchev's 1956 Secret Speech, Dutt told the CPGB Political Bureau: 'On Stalin's sun there were, unsurprisingly, some spots.' The Soviet system, he added, had 'demonstrated the ability of a socialist society to recognise and correct its mistakes.'

Founding member of the Communist Party of Great Britain and its chief theoretician for half a century, a Marxist historian and journalist. His Fascism and Social Revolution (1934) analysed fascism as an extreme form of monopoly-capitalist crisis, his India Today (1940) pioneered Marxist historiography on India, and he served as CPGB General Secretary in 1939–1941, replacing Harry Pollitt over the party's anti-war line at the outbreak of World War II.

Foreign statesman 1909–1974 ○ Natural death

The quiet diplomat who mediated a superpower nuclear standoff

“Neither would wish to be remembered by history, if any history survived, as having jointly precipitated the end of human civilization.”

U Thant was a Burmese teacher, civil servant and diplomat who became the third UN Secretary-General during the Cold War, when decolonization and international negotiation were reshaping the organization. During the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, he appealed to John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev, proposed a face-saving link between turning back Soviet ships and removing missiles from Cuba, then travelled to Cuba to discuss verification with Fidel Castro. His mediation lowered the danger of nuclear war, yet the UN's quiet diplomacy was long overshadowed by superpower-centered accounts of the crisis. He also directed peacekeeping in the Congo and pursued negotiations to end the Vietnam War, exposing the tension between an international institution's moral obligations and great-power politics.

Scholar 1966–

The Bangladeshi-American historian who founded the modern archival study of the Soviet space program

Born in Dhaka to an academic family, Siddiqi earned his Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon and became the first historian to systematically exploit post-Soviet Russian archives for the study of the Soviet space program, transforming it into a rigorous academic field. His 2000 NASA publication Challenge to Apollo remains the definitive archival history of the Soviet human spaceflight effort; The Wall Street Journal named it one of the five best books on space exploration, and it endures as the standard reference. In The Red Rockets' Glare (2010) he broadened his inquiry into the cultural history of Russian cosmic imagination from the 19th century through Sputnik, and he is now completing a study of the Gulag's intersection with Soviet science and technology as professor of history at Fordham University.

Scholar 1968–현재 ○ Active

A health economist who traced causal links in public policy

His study redirected the question of Russia’s mortality crisis from transition alone to the campaign’s end.

Jay Bhattacharya is an Indian-born American physician and health economist whose work connects medical evidence to questions of public policy and population well-being. His research examined how government programs, economic conditions, and biomedical innovation shape health outcomes. His 2013 study of the Gorbachev Anti-Alcohol Campaign argued that the campaign’s end, rather than the transition to capitalism alone, explained a large share of Russia’s early-1990s mortality crisis, shifting the terms of the post-Soviet debate. His later public interventions, especially during COVID-19, made him a contested figure in disputes over epidemiology, state restrictions, and scientific authority.