People

1966–

The Bangladeshi-American historian who founded the modern archival study of the Soviet space program

Even Russian space officials acknowledge Siddiqi as one of the few people worldwide conducting original archival research on the Soviet space program.

Born in Dhaka to an academic family, Siddiqi earned his Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon and became the first historian to systematically exploit post-Soviet Russian archives for the study of the Soviet space program, transforming it into a rigorous academic field. His 2000 NASA publication Challenge to Apollo remains the definitive archival history of the Soviet human spaceflight effort; The Wall Street Journal named it one of the five best books on space exploration, and it endures as the standard reference. In The Red Rockets' Glare (2010) he broadened his inquiry into the cultural history of Russian cosmic imagination from the 19th century through Sputnik, and he is now completing a study of the Gulag's intersection with Soviet science and technology as professor of history at Fordham University.

1966–

American historian who reassessed Soviet intervention in the Spanish Civil War using declassified archives

The basic error in the literature, he argues, has always been to approach Stalin's position in Spain as one based on strength rather than weakness.

Born in Burns, Oregon, he earned his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2001 under Stanley G. Payne. His 2004 book Stalin and the Spanish Civil War (Columbia University Press) drew on declassified Soviet documents to argue that Operation X, Stalin's military intervention in Spain, was enormously ambitious but an operational failure, becoming a landmark of post-Cold War revisionist historiography. He teaches European history and Holocaust studies at Queen's University Belfast and continues to research interwar Europe and the internationalization of the Spanish Civil War.

1967–

Nobel laureate who showed why the Kosygin reform was structurally doomed by extractive institutions

From Why Nations Fail: 'Soviet Russia generated rapid growth as it caught up rapidly with some of the advanced technologies in the world but was running out of steam by the 1970s because of a lack of creative destruction.'

Born to an Armenian family in Istanbul and later becoming an MIT economics professor, Daron Acemoglu is a leading institutional economist who won the 2024 Nobel Prize, alongside Simon Johnson and James Robinson, for explaining the institutional origins of prosperity gaps between nations. In Why Nations Fail (2012), written with Robinson, he analyzed the Soviet economy, arguing that prices under central planning were disconnected from real value and could not price innovation, while tying bonuses to the total wage fund killed any incentive for enterprises to automate, making the Kosygin reform structurally doomed from the start. His insight that sustained growth is impossible without inclusive institutions has had broad influence across development economics and political economy.

1967–

American historian who argued the USSR continued the imperial ethnographic practices of the tsarist state

Her continuity thesis, that tsarist-era ethnographers practically designed the Bolshevik state's territorial divisions and population categories, reshaped the landscape of post-Soviet nationality studies.

An American historian of Russia and the Soviet Union, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In her 2005 book Empire of Nations, she advanced a continuity thesis: former imperial ethnographers provided the Bolsheviks with knowledge that shaped the USSR's territorial borders and nationality policies, meaning the Soviet state did not break with imperial ethnographic practices but inherited them. The book won the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize and stands alongside Terry Martin's The Affirmative Action Empire, which stresses the novelty of Soviet nationality policy, as one of the two poles of post-1991 scholarship on Soviet nations.

1968–

A health economist who traced causal links in public policy

His study redirected the question of Russia’s mortality crisis from transition alone to the campaign’s end.

Jay Bhattacharya is an Indian-born American physician and health economist whose work connects medical evidence to questions of public policy and population well-being. His research examined how government programs, economic conditions, and biomedical innovation shape health outcomes. His 2013 study of the Gorbachev Anti-Alcohol Campaign argued that the campaign’s end, rather than the transition to capitalism alone, explained a large share of Russia’s early-1990s mortality crisis, shifting the terms of the post-Soviet debate. His later public interventions, especially during COVID-19, made him a contested figure in disputes over epidemiology, state restrictions, and scientific authority.

1970–

The American Soviet historian who mapped the three schools of Leningrad Affair historiography

In his 2004 article, Brandenberger argued that rumors of a 'Russian Communist Party' were a decisive factor behind the Leningrad Affair, adding an ideological dimension to interpretations that saw it as purely political factional struggle.

Professor of Russian and Soviet history at the University of Richmond. His research examines Stalin-era propaganda, ideology, and the formation of Russian national identity, beginning with National Bolshevism (2002), which argued that Stalin's russocentric mobilizational propaganda unintentionally forged a modern Russian national identity. His in-progress book, The Purge of Stalin's Would-Be Successors, draws on over twenty years of research into the Leningrad Affair (1949–1952), mapping three schools of historiography (factional struggle, Stalin's distrust of Leningrad, and self-provocation through patron-client networks) while arguing that the archives remain too closed for a definitive account.

1970–

An ethnographer of the social costs of the post-1989 transition

Traveling through Eastern Europe after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 became the turning point that led her to study both the hopes and costs of the transition.

Kristen Ghodsee is an American anthropologist and scholar of Eastern Europe whose ethnographic work examines how socialism and the transition from it shaped ordinary lives, especially women’s lives. Drawing on fieldwork in Bulgaria, she has studied socialist achievements alongside the losses of transition, recovering material experiences often obscured by triumphalist anti-communist narratives. Co-authored with Mitchell A. Orenstein, Taking Stock of the Shock compares economic and social indicators after the 1989 revolutions and argues that the gains of transition were distributed unevenly. Her work neither idealizes socialism nor accepts its replacement as an uncomplicated success, insisting that the consequences of capitalism must be assessed through evidence and people’s lived experience.

1975–

An economist who traces state policy through historical data

“To us, that was amazing … In the beginning, we could not believe it, but that is what the data show.”

Nancy Qian is an economist whose work spans development economics, political economy, and economic history, using large datasets and rigorous empirical methods to study how institutions and policy shape people’s lives. Her research on China and autocratic states connects questions of gender inequality, education, and the political economy of famine. With Andrei Markevich and Natalya Naumenko, she coauthored a 2021 study that compared regional mortality and grain procurement, presenting quantitative evidence on ethnic bias and centrally planned procurement during the Ukrainian famine. The study contributes data to debates that treat the Holodomor not only as a problem of production, but also as an outcome of state allocation and coercive procurement.

1979?–

Cold War historian who analyzed the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan as a 'long goodbye'

"A truly international history of the war... is at this point very far away," he conceded in the opening of A Long Goodbye.

A historian of Soviet and Russian foreign policy and Central Asia. His 2011 book A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan, drawing on archives and interviews, demonstrated that the Soviet decision to withdraw was a 'long goodbye' shaped as much by domestic politics as by the battlefield. After a BA at George Washington University and a PhD at the LSE, he taught for a decade at the University of Amsterdam and is now Professor at Temple University; his second book, Laboratory of Socialist Development (2018), won the Davis and Hewett prizes.

?–

A historian who anatomized the Soviet countryside state

Robbed in Moscow in 1992, he went to the police station to file a report, where the captain served him tea and cookies and casually told him he would have to pay bribes to move the case forward.

James Heinzen is an American historian of modern Russia and Soviet society, whose work spans political, social, and cultural history. His major study, Inventing a Soviet Countryside, traces how the state sought to transform rural Russia after the 1917 Revolution through the People's Commissariat of Agriculture, or Narkomzem. He analyzes the clash between overcoming rural backwardness and building socialism through the choices and conflicts of officials, Communist leaders, and peasants. His later research examined bribery and everyday corruption under Stalin, extending his study of tensions between state policy and social practice.

?–

A US historian who redefined the question of how the Space Race should be measured

“If we define the ‘space race’ as spaceflight capability, the Soviets won it hands down.”

Jennifer Frost is a historian of US women’s, political, and cultural history who teaches at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. Through work on the civil rights movement, the New Left, Hollywood politics, and history education, she has treated social movements and popular culture as central evidence for US history. In a 2019 reflection on the fiftieth anniversary of the Space Race, she distinguished the single benchmark of a lunar landing from overall spaceflight capability, arguing that Soviet firsts and the US Moon landing must be assessed together. This comparison frames the competition as a historical process shaped by military purposes, later cooperation, and social costs, not only as a national victory tally.

?–

A historian who decoded the Cold War archives

The secret speech, translated into Polish, was no longer secret.

Mark Kramer is an American historian of the Cold War, the Soviet Union, and political change in the socialist bloc and post-communist Eastern Europe. At Harvard University’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, he directs the Cold War Studies program and has worked extensively in newly opened archives across the former Warsaw Pact and Western countries. His research on how Khrushchev’s 1956 secret speech circulated through Poland traced how a text intended to remain confidential became a political force in de-Stalinization. Through research and editorial work, he treats Cold War history as an international process in which documents and information moved across borders, not only as a sequence of decisions by state leaders.