People of the Revolution and the USSR

1909–1987 ○ Natural causes

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.

1950–

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.