People of the Revolution and the USSR

1954–2011 ○ Liver cancer

Nanjing University historian whose How the Red Sun Rose dissected the Yan’an rectification movement

His How the Red Sun Rose (2000) reconstructed the Yan'an Rectification Movement from party documents and memoirs, treating it as the process through which Mao consolidated personal authority and fixed the party's later methods.

Born in Nanjing, he grew up watching his father persecuted as a “rightist” during the Cultural Revolution and taught modern Chinese history at Nanjing University. How the Red Sun Rose: The Origins and Development of the Yan’an Rectification Movement, published in Hong Kong in 2000, reconstructed the movement of 1942–1945 from published sources alone, showing how Mao concentrated the party’s power in himself through thought reform, cadre screening and the “rescue campaign”, and set the template for later political campaigns. Banned on the mainland but widely read there, he died of liver cancer in 2011.

1954–

The archival historian of Stalin's state antisemitism who argued the 1953 deportation was a myth

Stalin's Jewish deportation became a kind of Loch Ness Monster: many claimed to have seen it, but no one has ever presented a single piece of incontrovertible evidence.

Russia's leading historian of the Stalin era, who set the scholarly standard through his archival excavation of Soviet state antisemitism. His books In the Clutches of the Red Pharaoh (1994) and Stalin's Secret Policy: Power and Antisemitism (2001) are the monumental reference works that documented the full scope of late-Stalinist persecution of Jews, including the Doctors' Plot and the anti-cosmopolitan campaign. In his 2003 article 'Deportation: A Mystification,' he provoked fierce debate by arguing the widely accepted claim that Stalin planned a mass deportation of Jews was like the Loch Ness Monster: a story many claimed to have seen but for which no archival evidence existed, a position that now stands as the central counterpoint to Brent and Naumov's Stalin's Last Crime.

1954–

A historian who reshaped the history of Vichy and wartime memory

In 2017 the historian of wartime memory was himself detained for ten hours at Houston's airport, nearly deported after U.S. border agents questioned the stipend for his lecture.

Henry Rousso is a French historian of France during the Second World War, the Vichy regime, and the changing memory of that past. Born in Cairo to a Jewish family that moved to France after the Suez Crisis, he made the relationship between historical experience and collective memory central to his work. His landmark book The Vichy Syndrome examined how post-Liberation France reconstructed, muted, and confronted collaboration and responsibility, while his term résistancialisme named the myth that exaggerated the Resistance’s size and national unity. His scholarship helped establish the study of contemporary memory as a field that distinguishes historical evidence from political uses of the past while tracing their interaction.

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.

1954–

A scholar who reread war after withdrawal

"The regime of President Najibullah, however, survived until April 1992, over three years after the Soviet withdrawal," he wrote, against predictions that it would fall within months of the Soviet departure.

Mark N. Katz is an American scholar of international politics whose research covers Russian politics and foreign policy, revolution, and the war on terror. At George Mason University, he taught and wrote on Soviet and Russian policy in the Third World and the international dimensions of revolutionary movements. In a 2011 analysis of the Afghanistan withdrawal, he argued that Soviet military and economic aid sustained Najibullah's regime for more than three years after the troops left, challenging the assumption that withdrawal necessarily meant imminent collapse.

1954–

Political scientist who argued the Soviet collapse was produced by the event-driven tide of nationalism, not structural inevitability

"Nationalism needs to be understood not only as a cause of action, but also as the product of action": Beissinger argued that events do not merely reflect structures but reconstitute them.

An American comparative political scientist who used event data to demonstrate the relationship between nationalist mobilization and state collapse in the USSR. In his 2002 book Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State, he argued that the Soviet dissolution was not structurally inevitable but resulted from the accumulating 'tidal' effect of nationalist protest diffusing across republics, where events in one context reshaped possibilities in another. Contrasting with Ronald Suny's structural account, Beissinger's position holds that the contagion of nationalist movements and the contingency of events can overwhelm institutional constraints, a framework he later extended to the study of color revolutions and urban rebellion.

1955–

A political scientist who analyzed Soviet dissolution through the paradoxes of federalism

In Dissolution, Walker contends that the USSR's full collapse was an outcome that surprisingly few desired, with confusion over the meaning of "sovereignty" during perestroika casting a "fog of war" that hurried disintegration.

Edward W. Walker is an American political scientist who studies national politics, federalism, secession, and ethnic conflict in the Soviet and post-Soviet spaces. At Berkeley he led the program on Soviet and Eurasian studies while examining the links between communist systems and post-communist politics. His major book, Dissolution, argues that Soviet federalism both integrated the union republics and supplied institutions and legitimizing narratives of sovereignty that made secession conceivable when central control weakened.

1956–

A historian of the Holodomor’s mechanisms and memory

In 2009 he urged keeping, not toppling, monuments to the communist figures behind the Holodomor, setting a 'black board' beside each reading that its subject created the Holodomor and that his policy was criminal.

Vasyl Marochko is a Ukrainian historian whose work examines the countryside of the 1920s and 1930s and the Holodomor. He treats the famine not as an abstract disaster but as the outcome of state policies combining grain requisitioning with control over rural society. His calculation that blacklisting covered 252 of the Ukrainian SSR’s 405 districts shows the scale at which food deprivation and administrative isolation were imposed on peasants.

1957–

A historian who placed 1956 within Cold War international politics

In his interpretation, the 1956 Revolution was not a breakthrough that ended the Cold War, but an event in world politics that consolidated its stalemate.

Csaba Békés is a Hungarian historian of modern Hungary and Cold War international politics who analyzed the 1956 Revolution as a meeting point of domestic revolt and world politics. His work traces the international conditions and choices through which the revolution consolidated, rather than overturned, the Cold War stalemate. Through documentary editions and multi-archive research, he connected Hungary's experience to the history of the socialist bloc and the global Cold War.

1957–

Israeli-born political economist who established the causal-mechanism framework linking the Soviet-Afghan war to the USSR's collapse

Reuveny and Prakash contended that "the war in Afghanistan was a key factor, though not the only cause, in the breakdown of the Soviet Union," the claim that became the field's standard causal framework.

Rafael Reuveny is an Israeli-born scholar of international political economy and professor at Indiana University's School of Public and Environmental Affairs. His 1999 article 'The Afghanistan War and the Breakdown of the Soviet Union,' co-authored with Aseem Prakash, demonstrated that the Soviet-Afghan war accelerated the USSR's dissolution through four causal pathways: perception effects, military effects, legitimacy effects, and glasnost effects. It became the standard framework for the causal-mechanism debate on the war's role in the Soviet collapse. His broader research spans economic globalization, climate migration, the resource-conflict nexus, and modeling the collapse of historical civilizations.

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.

1958–

The Cold War historian who read the Soviet collapse as 'a perfect storm and a hapless captain': a man-made disaster

He summarised the Soviet collapse in one image: 'a perfect storm and a hapless captain.' The USSR did not have to fall; Gorbachev's missteps turned a crisis into a catastrophe.

A Moscow-born Cold War historian, Zubok studied at Moscow State University's history faculty and earned his PhD at the Soviet Academy of Sciences' Institute for the US and Canada in 1985. He moved to the United States in 1994, worked as a fellow at the National Security Archive at George Washington University, became a tenured professor at Temple University, and since 2013 has been professor of international history at the London School of Economics. His 2021 book Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union argues that the USSR's dissolution was not inevitable: Gorbachev's mishandled reforms turned a crisis into a catastrophe, a thesis crystallised in the phrase 'a perfect storm and a hapless captain.' The book was a finalist for the 2022 Cundill History Prize.

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–

An archival historian of Stalin's political power

In the conclusion of his Stalin biography, Khlevniuk warned that "a significant portion of Russian society seeks recipes for the present by looking to the Stalinist past."

Oleg Khlevniuk is a Russian historian and documentary editor whose work focuses on Soviet political history, the Gulag, and Stalin's rule. Drawing on state-archive materials and party and government records, he explains the Great Terror as a centrally directed system rather than a spontaneous eruption from below. His research stresses Stalin's directives and personal control over the terror's decisions and implementation, while distinguishing carefully between what the documents establish and what they leave uncertain. Through monographs and published source collections, he has also challenged the myths surrounding Stalin in Russian public discourse.

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.

1959–2015 ○ Natural causes

A historian who widened the blockade story from heroism to everyday ethics

Iarov’s research invited readers to see blockade survivors not through a hero-or-perpetrator binary, but through records of choice and survival.

Sergei Iarov was a historian of Russian twentieth-century social history and workers’ political consciousness who made the everyday life and moral choices of besieged Leningrad a central subject. Rather than explain blockade society through heroic resistance or administrative mobilization alone, he reconstructed from sources the interwoven experiences of solidarity, conformity, and strategies of survival under hunger. His books Blockade Ethics and Everyday Life in Besieged Leningrad placed the contradictions of human action in catastrophe at the centre of public memory.

1959–

The structural analyst of the Soviet collapse who argued the system was not dying

Even though Soviet socialism had clearly lost the competition with the West, it was lethargically stable and could have continued muddling on for quite some time.

American historian who reshaped Soviet studies through a structural-institutional lens, analyzing Stalinism as a full 'civilization' in Magnetic Mountain (1995) and earning a Pulitzer finalist nod for his multi-volume Stalin biography. In Armageddon Averted (2001), he argued the Soviet Union remained 'lethargically stable' as late as 1985 and that Gorbachev's reforms, not inherent systemic failure, drove the collapse, reorienting the entire debate. He directed Russian and Eurasian studies at Princeton for 33 years and now serves as Kleinheinz Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, shaping American strategic thinking on Russia and China.

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.

1961–

Author of the “People’s Trilogy”, who used provincial party archives to put the Great Famine’s death toll at 45 million

A Dutch historian of modern China, author of The People's Trilogy, which won the Samuel Johnson Prize.

A Dutch historian who taught at SOAS in London before becoming a professor at the University of Hong Kong. Mao’s Great Famine (2010), drawing on provincial party archives opened in the 2000s, estimated that at least 45 million people died of hunger, violence and overwork during the Great Leap and argued that the famine was the result of state violence rather than natural disaster or planning error; it won the Samuel Johnson Prize. The Tragedy of Liberation (1949–1957) and The Cultural Revolution (1962–1976) completed the trilogy. His figures and interpretation are contested; other scholars put the famine’s toll between 15 and 36 million.

1961–

The Moscow history teacher who read the Great Terror through its regional statistics

He holds that Stalin's single best deed was that in October 1941 he did not leave Moscow.

A historian who has studied the Stalin-era security organs while working as a history teacher and school head in Moscow. After a first study of the struggle inside the NKVD leadership (2006) he published The "Bloody Dwarf" against the Leader of the Peoples: The Yezhov Conspiracy (2009) and Stalin and the NKVD (2013), reconstructing how the Great Terror was carried out through its regional statistical variation and through the networks of Chekist clans such as Yevdokimov's 'North Caucasians'. He is the author of the two monographs in this reference library.

1961–

A historian who recalculated the Winter War casualty record

Where the Winter War's official loss figures had drifted broadly for fifty years, he recounted the dead one by one from a name-level database, arriving at some 138,000 Red Army dead and a loss ratio more than five times that of the Finns.

Yuri Kilin is a Petrozavodsk historian whose research examines Karelia and the Soviet Union’s foreign and military policy. He led a 2006–2009 project that critically reconciled official records of Red Army losses in the Winter War and reopened the question of how the dead should be counted. His 2012 figure of 138,533 Soviet dead became the latest major revision in the debate over the war’s human cost.

1963–

A Cold War historian who recast the Berlin Wall's origins

Of East Germany pushing the reluctant Soviets into building the Berlin Wall, she compressed the dynamic into one line: "the tail wagged the dog."

Hope M. Harrison is an American historian of Germany, Russia, and Cold War international politics. Her major study, Driving the Soviets Up the Wall, reconstructs Soviet-East German relations through East German and Soviet archival sources. Challenging accounts that treated the 1961 border closure as Nikita Khrushchev's decision alone, she argues that Walter Ulbricht repeatedly pressured Moscow as the GDR faced political and economic crisis. Her interpretation highlights how a smaller socialist state and tensions within an alliance could shape Cold War high politics.

1963–

A historian tracing what the Leningrad Affair left unresolved

Noting that the purge lists overlapped with the cadres Kuznetsov had promoted during the siege, he concludes: 'This is not the "Leningrad" Affair but the "Kuznetsov" Affair.'

Kirill Boldovsky is a Russian historian of late Soviet and contemporary Russian political history. His work examines the Leningrad party apparatus before and after the Leningrad Affair alongside the history of the siege, distinguishing what surviving records establish from what remains unknown. By connecting institutional history with the politics of memory, he presents the affair not simply as a purge but as a conflict over party power, regional rule, and historical knowledge.