People of the Revolution and the USSR

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.

1929–2016 ○ 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.

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.

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.

1937–

The economist who exposed Soviet growth statistics as an 84-fold exaggeration and recalculated the real record

"The resulting economic mechanism combined all the worst features of both command and market economies": his verdict on the 1965 reform.

He was an economist who began recalculating Soviet official statistics using independent methods in the 1970s, arriving at the explosive finding that national income had grown not by the official 84.4 times but by only 6.6 times between 1928 and 1985. His 1987 article 'The Crooked Figure,' co-authored with Vasily Selyunin in Novy Mir, caused a sensation across Soviet society. He went on to write a multi-volume Economic History of Russia in the Modern Era, offering a dispassionate analysis of the achievements and failures of the Soviet planned economy; of the 1965 Kosygin reform he delivered the verdict that it 'combined all the worst features of both command and market economies.'