People of the Revolution and the USSR

1936–

A popular historian who reconstructed Russia’s tragedies through archives and drama

In 1989 Radzinsky became the first in the USSR to publish Yakov Yurovsky's note and the executioners' testimony, letting them recount the murder of the imperial family second by second.

Edvard Radzinsky is a Russian historian, playwright, and broadcaster who brought the country’s history and tragic figures to a wide audience. Trained at the Moscow Archive Institute, he began in theatre before writing biographies of Nicholas II, Rasputin, Stalin, and other figures. In his 1997 Stalin biography, he used newly accessible records and testimony to argue that Beria may have poisoned Stalin, a claim that remains an interpretation in an unresolved debate rather than established fact. His vivid, psychological histories became widely read, while professional historians criticized aspects of his sourcing and interpretation.

1936–

The historian whose archival discoveries rewrote the study of the Tito-Stalin split

When sources that had been 'absolutely inaccessible' before finally opened, he recalled that he, a historian, entered 'a completely new era', regretting only that it came only in his mid-fifties.

A Soviet and Russian historian specializing in modern Yugoslav history and Cold War international relations in Eastern Europe. From 1966 at the Institute of Slavic Studies, he was among the first to exploit newly opened Soviet archives in the late 1980s, unearthing records of Stalin's meetings with Yugoslav and Bulgarian communist leaders (1946–1948) that laid the documentary foundation for the post-Cold War reassessment of the Tito-Stalin split. His several hundred publications include the co-edited volume The Establishment of Communist Regimes in Eastern Europe, 1944–1949 (1997) with Norman Naimark and the annotated Cominform conference minutes, earning him international recognition.

1938–2023 ○ Natural causes

A historian who reopened the question of responsibility in the Stalin era

His work returned the responsibility of perpetrators, obscured by the official memory of the Thaw, to the archives.

Yuri Zhukov was a Soviet and Russian historian who studied Stalin’s era and Soviet political history at the Institute of Russian History. Working with archival materials, he helped reopen debate over Nikita Khrushchev’s responsibility as an executor and political beneficiary of the Great Terror, including the circulation of a 1938 Ukrainian arrest request attributed to Khrushchev. At the same time, his ‘different Stalin’ interpretation minimized Stalin’s responsibility for mass repression and drew sharp criticism from historians, making his work a revealing case in the politics of post-Soviet historical memory.

1941–

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.

1943–

Economist who began with NEP studies and framed the Kosygin-reform debate

The reform stalled, the country entered a period of stagnation, and that stagnation ultimately predetermined the decline of the socialist economy in the USSR.

Yuri Goland is a Russian economist whose work began with the study of the Soviet New Economic Policy (NEP) and monetary reform. After graduating from Moscow State University's physics faculty, he worked for decades in physical-sciences research before turning to economics in the 1990s, focusing on reconstructing the history of NEP-era policy debates. In 2010 he co-authored with Alexander Nekipelov 'The Kosygin Reform: A Missed Chance or a Mirage?', which crystallized the central question of post-Soviet historiography on the reform.

1944–

A mathematical demographer who made mortality and life expectancy legible

His calculation that male life expectancy rose by 3.2 years to 65 in 1987 translated the policy debate into the language of mortality.

Evgeny Andreev is a demographer who combined mathematical rigor with practical statistical work to study mortality in Russia and the Soviet Union. His decomposition method made it possible to trace changes in life expectancy by age and cause of death, while his calculation of a 3.2-year rise in male life expectancy to 65 by 1987 became a key measure of the health outcome associated with the anti-alcohol campaign. His research on alcohol-related mortality placed policy effects within longer statistical and methodological contexts rather than reducing them to a simple political narrative.

1944–

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.

1946–2009 ○ Natural causes

Russian general-major and insider historian of the Afghan war

He wrote Tragedy and Valour of Afghanistan (1995) from his vantage point as closest aide in the Operational Group in Afghanistan, drawing on little-known and secret archival material and on the testimony of participants.

Aleksandr Lyakhovsky was a Russian military figure and military-historical writer, born in Tbilisi on 5 February 1946 and dead in Moscow on 3 February 2009. He graduated with the gold medal from the Baku Higher Combined-Arms Command School in 1968 and took part in the events in Czechoslovakia, then graduated with distinction from the Frunze Military Academy in 1977 and spent eight years at the General Staff Main Operations Directorate on military cooperation with African countries. From 1987 to 1989 he served in the USSR Defence Ministry Operational Group in Afghanistan as the closest aide to its head, Varennikov, until the withdrawal ended, and in 1990 became first deputy chief of the Operations Directorate of the Ground Forces Main Staff. He retired to the reserve in 2002 at the rank of general-mayor.

1947–1998

The KGB-veteran writer who published Yezhov's case file wrapped in novelistic reconstruction

While still on active duty, writing spy novels under the pseudonym 'Vasily Timofeyev', he unearthed Yezhov's interrogation records before their declassification and reproduced them verbatim in his biography.

A Russian writer who came out of the Soviet state-security service (KGB). Drawing on investigation files before their formal declassification, he wrote the biography Yezhov: The Story of the "Iron" Stalinist People's Commissar (2001, "Special Archive" series). The book was an early publication of Yezhov's interrogation records and trial file, but it splices novelistic reconstructions of the interrogation room between the documents, blurring the line between source and fiction.

1950–2023 ○ Died

The institutional economist who crystallized the 50-year debate over the Kosygin reform in a single book title

In 1977, when he defended his candidate's dissertation on the 'Asiatic mode of production,' the Academy of Social Sciences under the CPSU Central Committee, the official reviewer, submitted an evaluation whose essence was: 'This is not Marxism.'

An institutional economist of Tatar origin born in Moscow, he graduated with honours from the MSU economics faculty and taught political economy there, attracting attention with a controversial dissertation on the 'Asiatic mode of production' that the Academy of Social Sciences under the CPSU Central Committee denounced as 'not Marxism.' In 1993 he helped Kuzminov found the Higher School of Economics (HSE), serving as its first department chair, first vice-rector, and first full professor, becoming a central architect of the Russian institutional-economics school. As editor of the 2017 collective monograph 'Missed Chance or Last Valve? On the 50th Anniversary of the Kosygin Reforms of 1965,' he crystallized the polarized historiographical debate: reform as a lost opportunity for the planned economy versus its last safety valve, in a single title.

1954–

The archival historian of Stalin's state antisemitism who argued the 1953 deportation was a myth

Stalin's Jewish deportation became a kind of Loch Ness Monster: many claimed to have seen it, but no one has ever presented a single piece of incontrovertible evidence.

Russia's leading historian of the Stalin era, who set the scholarly standard through his archival excavation of Soviet state antisemitism. His books In the Clutches of the Red Pharaoh (1994) and Stalin's Secret Policy: Power and Antisemitism (2001) are the monumental reference works that documented the full scope of late-Stalinist persecution of Jews, including the Doctors' Plot and the anti-cosmopolitan campaign. In his 2003 article 'Deportation: A Mystification,' he provoked fierce debate by arguing the widely accepted claim that Stalin planned a mass deportation of Jews was like the Loch Ness Monster: a story many claimed to have seen but for which no archival evidence existed, a position that now stands as the central counterpoint to Brent and Naumov's Stalin's Last Crime.

1958–

The Cold War historian who read the Soviet collapse as 'a perfect storm and a hapless captain': a man-made disaster

He summarised the Soviet collapse in one image: 'a perfect storm and a hapless captain.' The USSR did not have to fall; Gorbachev's missteps turned a crisis into a catastrophe.

A Moscow-born Cold War historian, Zubok studied at Moscow State University's history faculty and earned his PhD at the Soviet Academy of Sciences' Institute for the US and Canada in 1985. He moved to the United States in 1994, worked as a fellow at the National Security Archive at George Washington University, became a tenured professor at Temple University, and since 2013 has been professor of international history at the London School of Economics. His 2021 book Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union argues that the USSR's dissolution was not inevitable: Gorbachev's mishandled reforms turned a crisis into a catastrophe, a thesis crystallised in the phrase 'a perfect storm and a hapless captain.' The book was a finalist for the 2022 Cundill History Prize.

1959–

The VPK's chronicler, the historian who dissected the Soviet military-industrial complex

He wrote: "The history of the Soviet VPK is a continuous cycle of war and preparation for war — and in that sense, the history of the entire Soviet economy."

A Russian historian who first systematically mapped the Soviet military-industrial complex. His 1996 monograph on the VPK in the 1920s–1950s remains foundational, and his collaboration with Cambridge scholars Barber and Harrison earned international recognition. Born to a peasant family in the Kirov region, he taught village school before studying at Moscow State University and joining the Institute of Marxism-Leninism in 1988. After the Soviet collapse he continued at the Russian Academy of Sciences, interspersed with advisory roles in the Presidential Administration and banking posts at Sberbank.

1959–

An archival historian of Stalin's political power

In the conclusion of his Stalin biography, Khlevniuk warned that "a significant portion of Russian society seeks recipes for the present by looking to the Stalinist past."

Oleg Khlevniuk is a Russian historian and documentary editor whose work focuses on Soviet political history, the Gulag, and Stalin's rule. Drawing on state-archive materials and party and government records, he explains the Great Terror as a centrally directed system rather than a spontaneous eruption from below. His research stresses Stalin's directives and personal control over the terror's decisions and implementation, while distinguishing carefully between what the documents establish and what they leave uncertain. Through monographs and published source collections, he has also challenged the myths surrounding Stalin in Russian public discourse.

1959–2015 ○ Natural causes

A historian who widened the blockade story from heroism to everyday ethics

Iarov’s research invited readers to see blockade survivors not through a hero-or-perpetrator binary, but through records of choice and survival.

Sergei Iarov was a historian of Russian twentieth-century social history and workers’ political consciousness who made the everyday life and moral choices of besieged Leningrad a central subject. Rather than explain blockade society through heroic resistance or administrative mobilization alone, he reconstructed from sources the interwoven experiences of solidarity, conformity, and strategies of survival under hunger. His books Blockade Ethics and Everyday Life in Besieged Leningrad placed the contradictions of human action in catastrophe at the centre of public memory.

1961–

The Moscow history teacher who read the Great Terror through its regional statistics

He holds that Stalin's single best deed was that in October 1941 he did not leave Moscow.

A historian who has studied the Stalin-era security organs while working as a history teacher and school head in Moscow. After a first study of the struggle inside the NKVD leadership (2006) he published The "Bloody Dwarf" against the Leader of the Peoples: The Yezhov Conspiracy (2009) and Stalin and the NKVD (2013), reconstructing how the Great Terror was carried out through its regional statistical variation and through the networks of Chekist clans such as Yevdokimov's 'North Caucasians'. He is the author of the two monographs in this reference library.

1961–

A historian who recalculated the Winter War casualty record

Where the Winter War's official loss figures had drifted broadly for fifty years, he recounted the dead one by one from a name-level database, arriving at some 138,000 Red Army dead and a loss ratio more than five times that of the Finns.

Yuri Kilin is a Petrozavodsk historian whose research examines Karelia and the Soviet Union’s foreign and military policy. He led a 2006–2009 project that critically reconciled official records of Red Army losses in the Winter War and reopened the question of how the dead should be counted. His 2012 figure of 138,533 Soviet dead became the latest major revision in the debate over the war’s human cost.

1963–

A historian tracing what the Leningrad Affair left unresolved

Noting that the purge lists overlapped with the cadres Kuznetsov had promoted during the siege, he concludes: 'This is not the "Leningrad" Affair but the "Kuznetsov" Affair.'

Kirill Boldovsky is a Russian historian of late Soviet and contemporary Russian political history. His work examines the Leningrad party apparatus before and after the Leningrad Affair alongside the history of the siege, distinguishing what surviving records establish from what remains unknown. By connecting institutional history with the politics of memory, he presents the affair not simply as a purge but as a conflict over party power, regional rule, and historical knowledge.