People

United States state institutions 1929–

Reagan's NSC Soviet expert who assembled the 'Soviet 101' briefing papers and the last US ambassador to the USSR

Matlock recalled, "I've never had a better student than Ronald Reagan. He knew that he didn't know a lot of things, and he wasn't ashamed of it."

Jack Matlock was an American Soviet specialist who fell in love with Russia reading Dostoevsky and spent a 35-year Foreign Service career immersed in US-Soviet relations, beginning with translating Kennedy-Khrushchev messages during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis from the Moscow embassy. As Reagan's NSC senior director for European and Soviet affairs, he assembled the 'Soviet 101' curriculum: 24 briefing papers by CIA and State Department analysts, and role-played Gorbachev in mock summits to prepare Reagan for Geneva. Appointed ambassador to the USSR in 1987, he witnessed the country's final four years and later judged Gorbachev's failure to secure a written SDI-sharing commitment from Reagan at Geneva a 'strategic error.'

1929–2018 Died

A scholar who quantified the Soviet economy's hidden flows

Even when official sales fell, samogon continued to be consumed outside the statistics.

Vladimir Treml was an American economist who used indirect indicators to estimate income and consumption missing from official Soviet statistics. He analyzed actual alcohol consumption, including samogon, and vodka's share of state budget revenue, showing why retail-sales figures understated drinking in Soviet society. His 1982 book Alcohol in the USSR: A Statistical Study brought this work together and was kept in restricted library collections in the Soviet Union.

United States state institutions 1930–

The pragmatic diplomat who engineered the Cold War's final transition

In his November 29, 1989 Malta briefing memo, Baker wrote that Bush should project a "new pace and purpose" while leading as much as Gorbachev.

James Baker was a lawyer and Republican political operator who became central to American conservative politics through his long alliance with George H. W. Bush. After serving as treasury secretary on currency and international finance, he became secretary of state and helped manage the diplomacy of the Cold War's final years, German reunification, and the Gulf crisis. He did not treat Gorbachev's reforms as a matter of faith, weighing them against American interests and allied stability, yet he persuaded Bush to reach toward perestroika and translated that choice into the agenda and working arrangements of the 1989 Malta summit. His cautious realism slowed the inertia of confrontation while turning rapid change into negotiations that Washington could help manage.

1931–2006 ○ Natural causes

Historian who pioneered the history of Russian and American anarchism

Named a distinguished professor in 1982, his announcement quoted him: 'Every good person deep down is an anarchist.'

Born in Brooklyn to Jewish immigrant parents from Odessa, Avrich was a pioneering historian who spent his entire career teaching the history of Russian and American anarchism at Queens College. His Kronstadt, 1921 (1970) demolished the Bolshevik claim that the rebellion was a White-Guard conspiracy, and he later conceded that Getzler's muster-roll figures were more current than his own. He worked to recover anarchists as 'pioneers of social justice' rather than amoral and violent militants, and bequeathed a 20,000-item archive to the Library of Congress.

1931–2012 ○ Natural causes

Historian whose Mao’s China and After judged the Chinese revolution critically from within the Marxist tradition

He brought Mao-era China into US classrooms from 1968, then spent his later years recording how the reform era slid into what he called bureaucratic capitalism.

From Detroit, he taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His first book, Li Ta-chao and the Origins of Chinese Marxism (1967), showed how nationalism and faith in the peasantry combined as Marxism was received in China. Mao’s China and After, first published in 1977, became the standard textbook history of the People’s Republic, reading Maoism through the tension between socialist ideals and the modernisation of a backward country. He criticised the repression of the Mao years while judging that the marketisation of the reform era had abandoned socialism’s promise.

1932–

The historian who recast Vichy collaboration

“The Vichy regime had its own active project to remake France after the defeat of June 1940.”

Robert Paxton is an American historian of modern Europe whose work examines Vichy France and the social and political conditions of fascism. By reading German occupation records alongside French sources, he showed that Vichy was not merely a passive instrument of Germany but a collaborator pursuing its own project of national reorganization. Co-authored with Michael Marrus, Vichy France and the Jews argued that Vichy's early anti-Jewish statutes originated in French policy rather than direct German orders, reshaping French historiography and public memory. His work made collaboration and resistance legible through the interaction of state institutions, social forces, and wartime conditions, while leaving room for debate over particular interpretations.

United States state institutions 1933–2017 ○ Natural causes

An intelligence officer whose restraint mattered at the nuclear brink

Seeing unusual Soviet nuclear readiness, he advised against raising NATO's alert level.

Leonard H. Perroots was a U.S. Air Force general and military intelligence specialist whose career intersected with the management of nuclear danger late in the Cold War. As assistant chief of staff for intelligence, U.S. Air Forces in Europe, during Able Archer 83 in 1983, he observed unusual Soviet nuclear readiness but advised against raising NATO alert levels, avoiding a potentially dangerous escalation. He later directed the Defense Intelligence Agency and left a significant retrospective account of the war scare, illustrating how intelligence judgment can shape decisions at the nuclear brink.

1933–2023

U.S. political scientist and Ethiopia specialist

Under the Mengistu government he worked on asylum and amnesty cases for emigres, helping dozens avoid torture and death; in 2018 he received the Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Star of Honour.

American political scientist and Ethiopia specialist who was professor and then professor emeritus at Oklahoma State University. Sources disagree on when he joined the Peace Corps in Addis Ababa: the obituary and the Ethiopian Crown Council say 1963, publisher and library biographies say 1964. He later directed the Educational Resources Center in New Delhi, was dean of continuing education at Austin College and a senior visiting fellow at the University of Tulsa, and taught at OSU from 1988 to 2008. Under the Mengistu government he worked on asylum and amnesty cases for Ethiopian emigres, helping dozens avoid torture and death, and in 2018 he received the Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Star of Honour. His books include Ethiopia: A Post-Cold War African State (1999) and The Lion of Judah in the New World (2011).

1934–2026 ○ Natural causes

The revisionist historian who overturned the Cold War coup thesis with archival evidence

Rather, I would emphasize the party's internally relatively democratic, tolerant and decentralised structure and method of operation, as well as its responsiveness to the prevailing mass mood.

A leading American historian of the revisionist school on the Russian Revolution. One of the first Western researchers granted access to Soviet archives from the 1960s, his 1976 work The Bolsheviks Come to Power demonstrated empirically that the October Revolution was not a minority coup but was carried out with broad popular support for peace, land, and bread, directly challenging the Cold War coup thesis identified with Richard Pipes. His finding that the Bolshevik Party of 1917 was 'a relatively open, democratic, and decentralized organization' reshaped the paradigm of revolution studies, and he was respected for accepting conclusions contrary to his own political convictions on the strength of the archival record.

1934–

America's most prominent historian arguing the Second Republic's radicalization brought on the Spanish Civil War

The very expression 'historical memory' is an oxymoron, a fundamental contradiction in terms. Memory is intrinsically individual, subjective, and very frequently fallacious.

America's leading historian of modern Spain, Payne taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison for 37 years and shaped the conservative interpretation of the Spanish Civil War through over twenty books on the Second Republic, Franco, and European fascism. His central thesis holds that the collapse of the Second Republic stemmed not from right-wing conspiracy but from the revolutionary radicalization of the Socialist-led left, reading the Civil War as a clash of revolution and counterrevolution. Since the 2000s, critics including Ángel Viñas, Helen Graham, and Paul Preston have charged his later work with excessive benevolence toward Francoism, yet Payne's revisionist framework remains an indispensable pole in Civil War historiography.

1936–

A historian who opened the Cold War archives

In 1962, he left a Soviet cruise ship during a stop in Tunis and applied for a U.S. visa.

Vojtech Mastny was a Czech-American historian of the Cold War and Soviet foreign policy. Barred from the conventional educational path by his class background, he worked in factories and archives before emigrating to the United States in 1962, an experience that reinforced his attention to fragmentary evidence. He interpreted the Warsaw Pact not simply as a unified military alliance, but through the tension between a politically motivated bargaining instrument and a mechanism of Soviet discipline, testing both views against archival records. As coordinator of the Parallel History Project, he connected documents and testimony from the socialist military sphere to international scholarship.

1938–2020 ○ Lung cancer

American Russia scholar who argued through Bukharin's biography that the Soviet Union had reformable alternatives and collapse was avoidable

"At each of the most fateful moments, the rise of Stalin, the fall of Khrushchev, the end of the Soviet Union, there was an alternative."

Stephen F. Cohen was the American Sovietologist who built the most sustained scholarly case against the inevitability of the Soviet collapse. His landmark 1973 biography Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution recast Nikolai Bukharin's program (gradual collectivization, continuation of the NEP, intra-party pluralism) as a viable alternative to Stalinism, challenging the totalitarian school's insistence that Leninism led inexorably to Stalin. Cohen championed Gorbachev's perestroika as proof that the system was reformable, helped rehabilitate Bukharin's memory in the USSR, and after 1991 condemned America's 'failed crusade' (the triumphalist treatment of post-Soviet Russia as a defeated power). In his final decade, vilified as pro-Putin, he argued that U.S. media coverage of Russia had become more ideological than during the Cold War, and remained the field's most stubborn contrarian.

1940–

Political scientist whose analysis of the Cuban Missile Crisis reshaped the study of foreign-policy decision-making

We now know things that Kennedy didn't know. The Soviet Union had deployed 100 tactical nuclear weapons to Cuba, and the local Soviet commander could have launched them without additional codes or commands from Moscow.

American political scientist whose 1971 book Essence of Decision revolutionized the study of foreign-policy decision-making by introducing three analytical models: rational actor, organizational process, and bureaucratic politics. As founding dean of the Harvard Kennedy School (1977–1989), he built it into a world-class public-policy institution, and as Assistant Secretary of Defense under President Clinton, he led nuclear disarmament negotiations with former Soviet states, earning the Defense Department's highest civilian honor. His assessment that Kennedy believed the odds of nuclear war during the crisis were 'between 1 in 3 and even' became the empirical starting point for all subsequent scholarship on how close the world came to catastrophe.

1940–

The historian who argued the USSR built nations, not destroyed them, the 'revenge of the past' thesis

In sixth grade I gave a report on how the Soviet Union had defeated fascism and built cities the size of San Francisco since the war. My teacher blanched. From that day until I graduated, I was known as Comrade Suny.

An Armenian-American historian who transformed the paradigm of Soviet nationalities studies. In his 1993 book The Revenge of the Past, he overturned the Cold War consensus that the Soviet system repressed and Russified nationalities, arguing instead that Soviet nationality policy, through territorial demarcation, language codification, and ethnic bureaucracies, institutionalized and built national identities, ultimately creating the very nations that would destroy the Union. This 'revenge of the past' thesis became the dominant paradigm in post-Soviet nationalities research. He is also noted for major studies of each South Caucasus nation and won the Deutscher Memorial Prize for his 2020 biography of Stalin.

1941–

The post-revisionist historian who, after the Soviet archives opened, argued Stalin bore primary responsibility for the Cold War

It took Stalin, responding predictably to his own authoritarian, paranoid, and narcissistic predisposition, to lock the chain of causation into place.

An American Cold War historian whose 1972 first book, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, founded the post-revisionist school by arguing that neither superpower bore sole responsibility. After the Soviet archives opened in the 1990s, his 1997 We Now Know reversed course: using newly available documents, Gaddis contended that Stalin's personality and decisions were the decisive cause of the Cold War, a shift widely seen as a return to the orthodox interpretation. He won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for his authorized biography of George F. Kennan, and as Yale's Robert A. Lovett Professor was hailed by The New York Times as 'the dean of Cold War historians.' His intellectual arc from post-revisionism back toward orthodoxy is itself a map of how Cold War history has been rewritten as evidence has emerged.

1941–

An economic historian who traced the bureaucracy of Soviet planning

In the final 1938 Politburo transcript Gregory unearthed, Stalin explained the purge: 'I explain it by the fact that we were engaged in great deeds.'

Paul R. Gregory is an American economic historian whose work examines the Russian and Soviet economies. Combining statistical analysis with interviews, he studied how Soviet bureaucracies and planners actually operated and helped preserve officials’ testimony through the Soviet Interview Project. His 2000 retrospective on the Soviet planned economy, co-authored with Yuri Olsevich, interpreted the Kosygin reform as an attempt to combine directive planning with profit incentives without resolving their institutional tension.

1941–

A historian who recast the international history of Japan's surrender

Japan's surrender in August 1945 cannot be explained by the atomic bomb alone.

Tsuyoshi Hasegawa is a Japanese-American historian of modern Russian and Soviet history, the Cold War, and Russo-Japanese relations. His work ranges across the Russian Revolution, Soviet-Japanese relations, and the international history of the Pacific War's end, linking diplomacy to social and political change. His major book, Racing the Enemy, reopened debate over Japan's surrender by arguing that the Soviet declaration of war and invasion in August 1945, not the atomic bombings alone, decisively altered Japan's strategic options.

1941–

A biographer who reshaped the study of Soviet leadership

In the biography's preface Taubman called Khrushchev "a complex man whose story combines triumph and tragedy for his country as well as himself."

William Taubman is an American political scientist and historian of Soviet politics and the Cold War. After years of research, he published Khrushchev: The Man and His Era in 2003, a biography that won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. The book presents Khrushchev as both an heir to and a critic of Stalinism, placing the secret speech at the Twentieth Party Congress within the leader’s character and institutional setting. Taubman also wrote studies of Gorbachev and Stalin’s American policy, tracing the relationship between Soviet leadership and international politics.

1943–

The revisionist historian who recast the Korean War as fundamentally a civil war

"Civil wars do not start: they come" (The Origins of the Korean War)

An American historian of East Asia whose two-volume The Origins of the Korean War (1981, 1990) recast the conflict not as an international Cold War clash but as a civil war rooted in Japanese colonial rule and post-liberation social conflict. As Gustavus F. and Ann M. Swift Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, he fundamentally reshaped how American scholarship understands the Korean War, earning the John K. Fairbank Prize and the Kim Dae-jung Academic Award. His work directly challenged the traditionalist Cold War narrative, igniting fierce historiographical debate and shifting the paradigm of modern Korean history.

1945–

The preeminent chronicler of Soviet memory politics who traced the Lenin cult and the Great Patriotic War myth

"People need to value what they have, and what Russians have always had is loss."

Born in 1945 to Russian Jewish immigrants, Nina Tumarkin is an American historian of Russia who has taught Soviet history and memory politics at Wellesley College since 1975. Her first book, Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia (1983), won the Wilson Prize, and her definitive study The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia (1994) demonstrated how Stalin suppressed war memory, Brezhnev elevated it into a cult, and the cult was contested after 1985. One of six Soviet experts who briefed President Reagan before the 1985 Geneva Summit, she later learned that President Clinton read her book before his 1995 Moscow Victory Day visit and called it 'a great book.'