People of the Revolution and the USSR

United Kingdom state institutions 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.

1934–

A British historian of modern Soviet history

For Stalin, the 'creation of the idea of the perpetual enemy' was indispensable.

Martin McCauley is an Irish-born historian of Soviet and East European politics. A former senior lecturer at UCL's School of Slavonic and East European Studies, he wrote widely on Stalinism, the Khrushchev era, the Cold War, and the rise and fall of the Soviet Union. He interpreted the 20th Party Congress speech both as an effort to restore a functioning Party, freeing officials from fear of repression, and as a move in Khrushchev's struggle to weaken rivals.

1935–2010 ○ Died

The British economic historian whose archival work recast postwar European recovery and integration

He read the 1947 crisis as a dollar payments crisis rooted in the strength of Europe's investment and production boom. As noted in the body, this is a paraphrase, and it drew sharp dissent from scholars who held that the Marshall Plan was economically necessary.

Born in Stoke-on-Trent on 19 January 1935, the only child of a Post Office employee, he read history at University College London and took a first-class degree in 1956, then a PhD at the LSE in 1960 under W. N. Medlicott on the German armaments industry in the Second World War. After posts at Edinburgh, the University of East Anglia and Stanford, he was Professor of European Studies at UMIST (1971–1983), Professor at the European University Institute (1983–1986) and Professor of Economic History at the LSE (1986–1996). Appointed official historian at the Cabinet Office in 1993, he wrote the first volume of the official history, and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1987. He taught again at the EUI from 1996 to 2002 and died on 28 September 2010, aged 75, after a three-year illness; he was buried in Highgate Cemetery.

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.

1941–

British historian whose 'Castro' argued US hostility pushed Cuba toward socialism

His 1990 'Castro' is cited as a leading statement of the thesis that US hostility pushed Cuba toward communism and dependence on the USSR, casting Castro as a nationalist and anti-imperialist in the vein of José Martí.

A British historian born in 1941, Professor Emeritus of Contemporary Spanish Studies at the London School of Economics. He took an MA in Latin American Studies at the University of London's Latin American Institute and a doctorate in history at the LSE, and held a Senior Lectureship at Goldsmiths, University of London. Appointed to an LSE Readership in Contemporary Spanish Studies in 1996, he became Assistant Director of the Cañada Blanch Centre for Contemporary Spanish Studies and later Professor in the Department of Government and the European Institute, and has been Emeritus Professor in the Government Department since 2006. He describes his research interests as centring on contemporary Spanish history, with the political career of Fidel Castro, the Cuban Revolution and Cuba-United States relations as another area of expertise.

1947–

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.

1947–

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.

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.

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.

1952–

A historian connecting Chernobyl to modern Eastern European history

Forty years on he wrote, "In a way, Chernobyl created glasnost."

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.

1954–

A historian who clarified the political conflicts of modern France

Le Monde has called him "one of the best historians of the French twentieth century."

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.

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.

1959–

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.

1960–

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.

1965–

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.

1968–

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, born in 1968 in Somerset, England. He began in London magazines and newspapers, became editor-in-chief of The Face and U.S. correspondent for The Sunday Telegraph Magazine, and has written for The New Yorker, Wired and The New York Times. Midnight in Chernobyl draws on hundreds of hours of interviews conducted over more than ten years, plus letters, unpublished memoirs and declassified archives, to trace how propaganda, secrecy and myth obscured the catastrophe. It won the 2020 William E. Colby Award and the 2020 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, and in 2024 Challenger won the Kirkus Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He studied history in college but calls himself a journalist and writer rather than a historian.

1968–

British journalist and writer who tracked Angola's 1977 massacre through interviews

Her posting as BBC correspondent in Luanda from 1998, reporting on the civil war, was what set her on the later investigation of the events of 27 May 1977.

British journalist and writer born in London. She studied African politics and history at SOAS, University of London, then worked for the BBC World Service from 1996 to 2007, based in and travelling across Angola, Ivory Coast, Mali and Ghana. Reporting on Angola's civil war as BBC correspondent in Luanda from 1998 prompted her later investigation of the events of 27 May 1977. Her book In the Name of the People: Angola's Forgotten Massacre (2014) relied on interviews in London, Lisbon and Angola because almost no archival or official documents on the massacre survive; it is not an academic history but an account of her research process that makes her own political opinions and self-questioning part of the narrative. She later published the fragmentary memoir This Is the Place to Be (2016) and the novel Spent Light (2024), and has taught creative writing at Royal Holloway.

1970–

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

A historian of de-Stalinization's memory politics, she served as historical consultant to Armando Iannucci's satire of the post-Stalin power struggle, The Death of Stalin (2017).

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.

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.

Oxford research fellow and historian of Britain's Special Operations Executive

In the historiography of wartime Albania, The Wildest Province (2008) was described as by far the most comprehensive work on the subject, telling the story of SOE's Albanian missions from deployment in 1943 to withdrawal in early 1945 from interviews and declassified files.

Roderick Bailey is a British historian at the University of Oxford, where he is a Wellcome Trust-funded research fellow specialising in the history of medicine, modern conflict, and the study of resistance, intelligence and clandestine warfare. He took an MA (1997) and PhD (2004) at the University of Edinburgh and an MPhil (1998) at the University of Cambridge, and has held posts at Oxford's Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine (2013-2016), the Faculty of History (2016-2018) and the Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities (from 2017). In April 2012 he was appointed by the Prime Minister as official historian of SOE's secret war against Mussolini's Italy; his books include The Wildest Province (2008) and Target: Italy (2014).