People of the Revolution and the USSR

1950–

Economic historian who argued partial reform would only destroy the planning system

'Analyses of "Gorbachev's economists" never mention the words "charlatan" or "ignoramus."'

A Soviet-born economist who emigrated to the United States, trained at Novosibirsk University and the University of Pennsylvania. In his 1988 article 'Lessons of the 1965 Soviet Economic Reform,' he argued that resistance from central ministries and Gosplan to the Kosygin reform was not mere bureaucratic self-interest but a rational recognition that partial market reform would destroy the central planning system without putting any workable alternative in its place. Together with Michael Ellman he edited The Destruction of the Soviet Economic System; this systemic incompatibility thesis became a key argument in the historiographical debate over why Soviet reforms consistently failed.

1957–

Harvard historian who argued Chernobyl was a direct cause of the Soviet collapse

The fall of the Soviet Union would be grossly incomplete without the Chernobyl story.

A historian who serves as the Mykhailo Hrushevsky Professor of Ukrainian History at Harvard University and directed the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (2013–2025), Plokhy has devoted his career to the intellectual, cultural, and international history of Eastern Europe and the Cold War. His 2018 book Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy won the Baillie Gifford Prize and argued that the nuclear disaster catalyzed glasnost, mobilized Ukraine's independence movement, and was a direct cause of the Soviet Union's collapse. Through works including The Last Empire, The Gates of Europe, and The Russo-Ukrainian War, he has reshaped the historiography of the Soviet dissolution and East Slavic national identity, becoming the most influential synthesizer of Chernobyl's place in modern history.