United Kingdom

Foreign statesman 1869–1940 ○ Natural death

The appeasement architect whose bid to avoid war helped open the way to it

Returning from Munich in 1938, he declared the agreement to mean “peace for our time.”

Neville Chamberlain was a British Conservative politician whose career combined domestic administrative reform with finance before he became prime minister. Seeking to avoid another European war and gain time for rearmament, he pursued appeasement, but the strategy failed to restrain Nazi Germany's expansion. His government's acceptance of the Munich settlement in 1938, and its limited response to Soviet proposals for collective security, formed part of the international conditions surrounding the 1939 crisis and the Nazi-Soviet Pact. After declaring war on Germany following the invasion of Poland, he resigned in 1940 amid criticism of the Norway campaign.

Foreign statesman 1874–1965 ○ Died of a stroke

Britain's wartime prime minister who divided Europe with Stalin on a half-sheet of paper

I wrote on a half-sheet: Romania—Russia 90%, others 10%; Greece—Britain 90%, Russia 10%; Yugoslavia 50–50… I pushed this across to Stalin. He took his blue pencil, made a large tick, and passed it back.

As Britain's wartime prime minister (1940–1945), Churchill led the Allied victory against Nazi Germany and returned to office from 1951 to 1955. In October 1944 he met Stalin in Moscow and scribbled the secret 'percentages agreement' dividing the Balkans into spheres of influence; at Yalta he pressed for free elections in Poland but could not prevent Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. An imperialist and anti-communist, his 1946 'Iron Curtain' speech at Fulton gave the Cold War its defining metaphor. Hailed as the greatest Briton of the 20th century for his wartime leadership, his legacy is contested over colonial policy, the Bengal famine, and area bombing.

Foreign statesman 1880–1967 ○ Natural death

A naval reformer sent to negotiate without authority

When the Soviet side asked about negotiating authority, Drax's mission could make no decision without government approval.

Reginald Drax was a Royal Navy admiral who argued for more active tactics and reform of naval command, while holding major staff and operational posts between the world wars. In August 1939 he led the British military mission to Moscow, sent with the French delegation to discuss cooperation with the Soviet Union but without written authority to negotiate. His mission's slow arrival in an outdated merchant ship and inability to commit the British government exposed the limits and mistrust surrounding the talks to prevent war with Germany, which ultimately failed.

Foreign statesman 1881–1951 ○ Natural death

A pragmatic statesman who carried trade-union power into postwar diplomacy

At the 1946 Moscow conference, after Molotov’s repeated attacks, Bevin rose and shouted, “I've had enough of this I 'ave!”

Ernest Bevin was a Labour politician and trade-union organizer who rose from poverty to lead Britain’s largest union. His wartime management of labour shaped a postwar diplomacy that treated reconstruction as a question of organized work and state capacity. As Foreign Secretary, he and Georges Bidault organized the European response to Marshall’s Harvard speech, linking British security and western European cooperation to American aid and an Atlantic alliance. His firm anti-communism and defence of imperial interests also show how the postwar international order combined reconstruction with continuing forms of power.

Non-Soviet revolutionary 1882–1960 ○ Natural causes

Left communist who broke from her mother's WSPU to stand with East End working women, buried among Ethiopian patriots

"The Bolsheviks have begun to desert communism." In her 1922 Open Letter to Lenin, Pankhurst broke with Moscow. Expelled from the CPGB for refusing to surrender the Workers' Dreadnought, she chose free debate over party discipline.

British suffragette, left communist, and anti-colonial activist. Broke from her mother Emmeline's WSPU to organise working-class women in London's East End. Founded the Workers' Socialist Federation, debated Lenin at the 1920 Comintern Congress, then became a leading council communist critic of Bolshevism. Devoted her last 25 years to Ethiopian anti-fascist solidarity: her paper New Times and Ethiopia News influenced pan-Africanism and the Rastafari movement. The only foreigner buried among patriots at Holy Trinity Cathedral, Addis Ababa.

Foreign statesman 1883–1963 ○ Natural death

The Allied strategist who put preparation before a premature landing

In 1943, he argued that a landing in France was unsafe without sufficient troops, landing craft, and air superiority.

Alan Brooke was the field marshal who coordinated Britain's professional army leadership and much of Allied grand strategy during the Second World War. In 1943 he judged a cross-Channel invasion unsafe without enough troops, landing craft, and air superiority, and supported Mediterranean operations aimed at removing Axis forces from North Africa and Italy. His caution was not a simple rejection of Normandy, but an argument to build the logistical and air conditions for a viable assault. His postwar war diaries preserved sharp judgments of Winston Churchill and the Allied commanders.

Foreign statesman 1883–1967 ○ Died of pneumonia

The laconic reformer who replaced Churchill mid-Potsdam and built Britain's postwar welfare state

After winning the 1945 election, Attlee stood in silence with George VI at Buckingham Palace before volunteering, "I've won the election." The King replied, "I know. I heard it on the Six O'Clock News."

Clement Attlee was the man who replaced Winston Churchill as British prime minister in the middle of the Potsdam Conference, after Labour's landslide victory in July 1945. He had served loyally as Churchill's deputy in the wartime coalition, but voters chose the unassuming reformer over the war hero and his promise of a welfare state. His government created the National Health Service, nationalised major industries, and began dismantling the British Empire by granting independence to India and Pakistan. Abroad, he championed the Marshall Plan and NATO, aligning Britain firmly with the United States as the Cold War took shape.

Foreign statesman 1887–1976 ○ Natural death

Commander of the Allied ground forces in Normandy

At a Normandy briefing on 12 June 1944, he told the troops: “We have got to go off and do a job together very soon now.”

Bernard Montgomery was a British field marshal shaped by First World War experience and an intense commitment to troop training. In the Second World War he rebuilt the Eighth Army before leading it at El Alamein, then commanded Allied operations in Sicily and Italy. Recalled to Britain for the Normandy invasion, he commanded the 21st Army Group and all Allied ground forces in the opening phase, pressing to enlarge the initial assault and secure a broad lodgement. His methodical, tightly controlled style reduced some risks but also drew criticism for slowing operations and accepting costly battles.

Non-Soviet revolutionary 1890–1960 ○ Cerebral haemorrhage

Stalin's personally approved CPGB General Secretary who led the party for 25 years

10 May 1920, Port of London. Pollitt convinced dockers not to load the SS Jolly George with munitions bound for Poland, then at war with Soviet Russia. The ship sailed empty on 15 May.

Founding member and General Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain for over 25 years, the most significant British communist of the 20th century. He persuaded London dockers to block munitions bound for Poland in the 1920 Hands Off Russia campaign. Appointed General Secretary with Stalin's personal approval, he was the party's secret 'Code Holder' in direct radio contact with Moscow. He supported the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War and co-authored The British Road to Socialism, committing the CPGB to a parliamentary path. When Khrushchev denounced Stalin in 1956, Pollitt refused to take down Stalin's portrait from his living room.

Foreign statesman 1892–1944 ✕ Killed in plane crash

An air commander who made army cooperation central to Allied air power

Trafford Leigh-Mallory was a British air chief marshal whose command style grew from First World War experience in reconnaissance and cooperation with ground forces. During the Battle of Britain, he advocated large fighter formations against the quicker defensive methods of Hugh Dowding and Keith Park, and the dispute became entangled with changes in Fighter Command leadership. As commander-in-chief of the Allied Expeditionary Air Force for Overlord, he coordinated the air plan to delay German reinforcements and disrupt transport, while accepting the grave civilian costs of attacks in France. After Normandy he was appointed to command air forces in Southeast Asia, but died with his wife in a plane crash in the French Alps.

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.

Counter-revolutionary forces 1892–1984 ○ Natural death

The air commander who made strategic bombing central to total war

Arthur Harris was the Royal Air Force commander who led Bomber Command during the Second World War and made area bombing of German cities a central instrument of British strategy. He improved the operational scale and effectiveness of the campaign while remaining responsible for a method that killed civilians and destroyed urban life. Before the Normandy landings, Harris resisted diverting bombers from the pressure on German industry to the Transportation Plan, yet in March 1944 he ordered the initial attacks on French railway centres that put the plan into action. That tension exposed the conflict between an air force command defending its independent strategic campaign and the Allied demand for direct support to the invasion.

Foreign statesman 1894–1965 ○ Died of pneumonia

Australia's Foreign Minister who led the small and medium powers' fight against the great-power veto at San Francisco

On the emergency subcommittee with Stettinius and Gromyko, Evatt displayed 'an attitude of conciliation' and proposed the draft that on 20 June broke the deadlock over the General Assembly's powers of discussion.

An Australian Labor politician and jurist, Evatt was appointed the youngest-ever High Court justice at 36 and later served as Attorney-General and Minister for External Affairs under the Curtin and Chifley governments. At the 1945 San Francisco Conference he led the small and medium powers' resistance to the Security Council veto, submitting 38 amendments, and sat on the emergency subcommittee with Stettinius and Gromyko that resolved the deadlock over the General Assembly's powers of discussion. As President of the UN General Assembly in 1948 he guided the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and chaired the Ad Hoc Committee on Palestine that paved the way for the partition plan. He became Labor leader in 1951 but the party split over communism and three successive election defeats drove him from politics in 1960.

Foreign statesman 1897–1977 ○ Natural death

A British diplomat of war and decolonisation

At the 1945 San Francisco Conference, the foreign ministers of the four sponsoring Allied powers took turns chairing the plenary sessions, with Eden among them.

Anthony Eden was a British Conservative statesman whose First World War service reinforced his commitment to the League of Nations and collective security. He served three times as foreign secretary amid the rise of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, and during the Second World War acted as Winston Churchill’s principal diplomatic lieutenant in negotiations with the Soviet Union and the other Allies over the postwar order. Representing Britain at Yalta and at the 1945 San Francisco Conference, he helped shape the emerging international institutions, yet as prime minister he pursued the Suez invasion, exposing both the limits of British imperial power and Britain’s dependence on the United States.

Scholar 1900–1975 ○ Natural death

The meteorologist whose forecast shaped an invasion

On the night of 4 June 1944, Stagg forecast a brief improvement lasting into the dawn of 6 June.

James Stagg was a Scottish meteorologist of the British Met Office who became the senior weather adviser at Allied Supreme Headquarters during the Second World War. He combined ship observations, reconnaissance reports and intelligence with the work of British and American forecasting teams, connecting meteorology to operational command. On 4 June 1944 he identified a brief improvement after the storm, making 6 June appear viable for the Normandy landings and defining an acceptable risk rather than waiting for ideal weather. He returned to the Met Office after the war and published Forecast for Overlord in 1971.

Writers and artists 1903–1950 ○ Tuberculosis · London

The democratic socialist who came back wounded from the POUM militia and dissected the language of totalitarianism

Homage to Catalonia, on reaching Barcelona in December 1936: “It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle.”

Born Eric Arthur Blair. Five years in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma and his reportage on destitution in Paris and London made him a writer; in December 1936 he went to Spain, joined the POUM militia through the Independent Labour Party, spent four months on the Aragon front and was shot through the throat at Huesca. The street fighting he witnessed in Barcelona while convalescing in May 1937, and the outlawing of the POUM that followed, broke him with Soviet communism for good, and he crossed the border with his wife with a warrant out for him as a Trotskyist. Homage to Catalonia, his account of it, sold 683 copies in its first six months. Orwell called himself a democratic socialist to the end, and Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four anatomize the hardening of a revolution into a new rule, and the language that holds it up.

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.

Foreign statesman 1915–1995 ○ Natural death

A practical architect of nuclear diplomacy

With Kissinger, he turned the Soviet draft into a counterproposal that preserved alliance obligations.

Thomas Brimelow was a British diplomat and Soviet specialist who worked where Cold War alliance politics met arms diplomacy. During the negotiation of the 1973 Agreement on the Prevention of Nuclear War, he helped Henry Kissinger reshape the Soviet proposal for an unconditional renunciation of nuclear weapons into a narrower text preserving alliance obligations and covering third countries. His role showed British Foreign Office expertise entering the heart of American strategy toward the USSR, while also revealing how the language of détente could preserve nuclear deterrence and great-power realpolitik.

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 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.'

Writers and artists 1927–2006 ○ Natural causes

A communist journalist who chose the scene over the party line

At a workers’ council election, hearing “we have absolutely no experience of electing people,” he thought: “So much for ‘people’s democracy.”

Peter Fryer was an English Marxist writer and journalist who sought both truth within the communist movement and international solidarity. In Hungary in 1956 he reported a workers’ and students’ uprising, but the Daily Worker censored or suppressed his dispatches, and he answered with Hungarian Tragedy. The conflict led to his expulsion from the Communist Party and contributed to the crisis that split British communism, after which he became a major historian of Black Britain.

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 1935–2010 ○ Died

The British economic historian who upended the narrative of postwar recovery by arguing the Marshall Plan was not economically necessary

"The alleged economic crisis of the summer of 1947 in Western Europe did not exist, except as a shortage of foreign exchange caused by the vigor of the European investment and production boom."

The British economic historian Alan Milward was the most influential revisionist scholar of postwar Western European reconstruction and integration. In his 1984 work *The Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1945-1951*, he argued that the Marshall Plan was not economically necessary for recovery: the 'crisis' of 1947 was not economic collapse but a dollar shortage caused by a vigorous investment and production boom, and under the counterfactual of freezing consumption at 1947 levels, most recipients could have paid for their imports without aid. His later book *The European Rescue of the Nation-State* (1992) argued that European integration was not a supranational ideal but a political choice to rescue individual nation-states after the fascist challenge.

Scholar 1968– ○ Living

A journalist who traced the structure of disaster

His Chernobyl narrative traces the structures of design and silence surrounding the explosion, not merely the moment of impact.

Adam Higginbotham is a British journalist and nonfiction writer who moved from magazine editing and international reporting to narrative histories of major disasters. His best-known book, Midnight in Chernobyl, reconstructs the 1986 reactor accident not as a technical failure alone but as a crisis shaped by design, bureaucracy, secrecy, and the experiences of workers and residents. The book helped define the English-language historiographical landscape on Chernobyl in 2018–2019, bringing the tension between state secrecy and individual efforts to establish the truth to a broad readership. He later continued this work with a history of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.

Scholar 1960–현재 ○ Active

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.

Scholar 1938–

The British political scientist who argued Gorbachev's individual leadership was the decisive factor in transforming the Soviet system

Only rarely does an individual leader make a fundamental difference. Gorbachev was such a leader.

Emeritus Professor of Politics at Oxford and a leading scholar of Soviet and Russian politics. In The Gorbachev Factor (1996), he established the 'individual leader' thesis against structural determinism, arguing that Gorbachev's personal convictions and political choices were the decisive force behind the transformation of the Soviet system and the end of the Cold War. The thesis became one pole of the subsequent historical debate and remains among the most influential interpretations of perestroika.

Scholar 1952–현재 ○ Living

A historian connecting Chernobyl to modern Eastern European history

David Marples is a Canadian historian at the University of Alberta who studies the modern history and politics of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine. He was an early analyst of Chernobyl’s social and political consequences, beginning with Chernobyl and Nuclear Power in the USSR, published in the year of the accident, and later work on nuclear policy, safety, and the responses of states and affected communities. His research expanded to national history, famine, and the Soviet collapse, while treating Chernobyl as an important influence on the USSR’s crisis without reducing that collapse to a single cause.

Scholar 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.

Scholar 1954– ○ Living

A historian who clarified the political conflicts of modern France

Julian Jackson is a British historian of twentieth-century France who has traced the conditions and consequences of political choices from the Depression and Popular Front to the Occupation and Gaullism. His study The Popular Front in France examined the relationship between reform and rearmament, democratic defence and mass mobilisation across political, social and cultural dimensions, becoming a major reference point in debate over the period. He later broadened his work to the French defeat of 1940, the German Occupation, postwar homosexual politics and May 1968.

Scholar 1949–

the British economic historian whose three-position taxonomy of NEP's failure shaped the historiographical debate

Why did NEP fail? I should like to distinguish three ways in which this question has been answered: rational abandonment, irrational or political decision, and constrained choice.

Mark Harrison is a British economic historian who studied economics at Cambridge and modern history at Oxford, and taught at the University of Warwick from 1975, researching the Soviet economy for over four decades. His 1980 paper 'Why Did NEP Fail?' identified three positions in the historiographical debate (rational abandonment, irrational or political decision, and constrained choice), a taxonomy that has structured assessments of NEP ever since. His work expanded into the economics of warfare, state secrecy, and coercion, earning the Alec Nove Prize for Accounting for War (1996) and producing Secret Leviathan (2023), a landmark study of information control under Soviet communism.

Scholar 1950– ○ Living

An archival journalist who reconstructed the Cold War's most dangerous crises

He recast the Cuban Missile Crisis not as a summit-room myth, but as an hour-by-hour crisis compounded by accidents.

Michael Dobbs is a British-born journalist and nonfiction author who reported from the front lines of the Cold War's end and other international conflicts. As a Washington Post correspondent and bureau chief in Eastern Europe, Paris, and Moscow, he chronicled the collapse of the socialist bloc and its international consequences. One Minute to Midnight cross-checked American, Soviet, and Cuban sources to reconstruct the Cuban Missile Crisis hour by hour, showing that the danger of nuclear war was far greater than familiar summit-room myths suggested. His method shifts attention from great-power leaders alone to commanders, civilians, and accidents that could magnify a crisis.

Scholar 1959– ○ Living

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.

Scholar 1970–현재 ○ Active scholar

A historian of de-Stalinization, memory, and cultural change

Polly Jones is a British historian of Russian and Soviet culture whose work examines memory politics in authoritarian societies. Her research shows that after the 1956 Secret Speech, de-Stalinization was not only a reform directed from above but also a negotiated process in which writers and citizens navigated censorship and official memory. Her monograph and edited work analyse cultural and social change in the Khrushchev era, the myths and memories of the Stalinist past, and the tension between the Thaw's ideals and its lived responses.

Scholar 1947– ○ Living

A contentious biographer of Soviet history

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.

Foreign statesman 1932–

From ambassador to Moscow during perestroika to author of Afgantsy, the British diplomat who knew Russia from the inside

'On Christmas Day 1991 we were still wearing our funny hats and eating our mince pies when Mikhail Gorbachev came on television to tell the world that he had resigned as President of the Soviet Union,' recalling the end from Moscow.

British diplomat and author who served as ambassador to the Soviet Union (1988–1991) and then to the Russian Federation (1991–1992), witnessing perestroika, the August 1991 coup, the rise of Yeltsin, and the Soviet collapse from the inside. On close personal terms with Gorbachev, he later served as foreign policy adviser to Prime Minister John Major and chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee. His 2011 book Afgantsy, the key revisionist account of the Soviet-Afghan War, argues that the Soviet 40th Army was never defeated on the battlefield and withdrew in good order, challenging the Western 'Soviet Vietnam' narrative and recasting the war as a failure of intelligence and political judgment, not of arms.

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 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 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 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.