People of the Revolution and the USSR

1963–

The historian who redefined the USSR as an 'affirmative action empire' rather than a 'prison of nations'

The 15 countries that emerged from the USSR largely didn't exist in 1917; they were a consequence of the Soviet organization of the country on national principles.

A Canadian-born historian who reshaped the study of Soviet nationality policy. His 2001 book The Affirmative Action Empire recast the early USSR not as a 'prison of nations' that suppressed its minorities, as the Pipes school had argued, but as the world's first state to systematically practice mass affirmative action for non-Russian peoples: a thesis that has become the most influential English-language framework on the subject. The George F. Baker III Professor of Russian Studies at Harvard, he also directs the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI).

1964–

A historian of Soviet and Eastern European memory

De-Stalinization after the Twentieth Congress took “two steps forward, then one step back.”

Anne Applebaum is an American historian and journalist whose work examines communism, authoritarianism, and civil society in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Gulag: A History reconstructed the camp system from the Revolution to its collapse through archival research and testimony, winning the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. In Iron Curtain and Red Famine, she explored the Sovietization of postwar Eastern Europe and the Ukrainian famine, arguing that the Twentieth Congress made de-Stalinization a movement of both release and renewed control.

1965–

A historian who reads the Soviet collapse as elite power struggle

In a 2021 interview he formulated the Soviet dissolution as the result not of an anti-nomenklatura revolution but of its incompleteness and inconsistency, treating the Moscow–Kyiv–Minsk core’s political struggle as decisive rather than peripheral national movements alone.

Aleksandr Vladlenovich Shubin (born 18 July 1965, Moscow) is a Russian historian and left-wing public figure. He graduated from the Moscow State Pedagogical Institute in 1989 after Air Force service in 1984–1985, worked at the Institute of World History of the Russian Academy of Sciences from 1992, took his doctorate in history in 2000, and has taught at the State Academic University for the Humanities since 2003 and the Russian State University for the Humanities since 2007. His research covers socialist thought, revolutionary and anarchist movements, Soviet history and twentieth-century international relations; he is the author of about 25 monographs and served as an adviser to Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov in 1997–1998.

1965–

Bulgarian political thinker who argued that the post-1989 imperative to imitate the West bred illiberal backlash in Eastern Europe

The rise of authoritarian chauvinism in Central and Eastern Europe has its roots not in political theory, but in political psychology: a deep-seated disgust at the post-1989 'imitation imperative.'

Bulgarian political scientist and chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia. He characterized post-1989 Eastern European politics as an 'Age of Imitation,' arguing that the post-Cold War imperative to Westernize bred nationalist resentment and an illiberal turn rather than liberal convergence. In The Light That Failed (2019), co-authored with Stephen Holmes, he developed this thesis through political psychology, tracing the roots of Eastern European populism not to ideology but to cultural humiliation at being forced to copy a morally superior foreign model. A founding board member of the European Council on Foreign Relations and a New York Times contributor, Krastev has shaped the debate on the thirty-year legacy of 1989 with an analytical framework that recasts illiberalism as a backlash against the 'imitation imperative.'

1965–

Environmental historian who traced Chernobyl's concealed death toll

"Ignorance about low-dose exposure is, I have argued, partly deliberate."

MIT historian of science and environment whose decade of archival work across Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus redefined the study of nuclear landscapes. Her Plutopia (2013) exposed the parallel plutonium disasters at Hanford and Mayak: the only book to win top scholarly prizes across Russian, U.S., and environmental history. And her National Book Critics Circle finalist Manual for Survival (2019) argued that the IAEA and Chernobyl Forum excluded internal exposure from contaminated food, suppressing evidence of tens of thousands of deaths. That critique has become the central historiographical challenge to the international consensus, opening a reckoning with how Cold War nuclear institutions shaped the science of low-dose radiation itself.

1965–

A historian of power's intimate worlds

He turned Beria's presence at Stalin's deathbed, and the evidence around the poisoning theory, into a historical question rather than a settled legend.

A British historian and writer, he is known for combining political history with vivid portraits of rulers and their private worlds. Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar reconstructed Stalin's rule and inner circle from newly available documents and testimony, including evidence concerning Beria at Stalin's death and the theory that Stalin was poisoned. He later broadened his scope with Young Stalin, Jerusalem: The Biography, and The Romanovs, bringing the long history of revolution, empire, and dynasty to a wide readership.

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 journalist who traced the structure of disaster

His Chernobyl narrative traces the structures of design and silence surrounding the explosion, not merely the moment of impact.

Adam Higginbotham is a British journalist and nonfiction writer, born in 1968 in Somerset, England. He began in London magazines and newspapers, became editor-in-chief of The Face and U.S. correspondent for The Sunday Telegraph Magazine, and has written for The New Yorker, Wired and The New York Times. Midnight in Chernobyl draws on hundreds of hours of interviews conducted over more than ten years, plus letters, unpublished memoirs and declassified archives, to trace how propaganda, secrecy and myth obscured the catastrophe. It won the 2020 William E. Colby Award and the 2020 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, and in 2024 Challenger won the Kirkus Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He studied history in college but calls himself a journalist and writer rather than a historian.

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.

1968–

British journalist and writer who tracked Angola's 1977 massacre through interviews

Her posting as BBC correspondent in Luanda from 1998, reporting on the civil war, was what set her on the later investigation of the events of 27 May 1977.

British journalist and writer born in London. She studied African politics and history at SOAS, University of London, then worked for the BBC World Service from 1996 to 2007, based in and travelling across Angola, Ivory Coast, Mali and Ghana. Reporting on Angola's civil war as BBC correspondent in Luanda from 1998 prompted her later investigation of the events of 27 May 1977. Her book In the Name of the People: Angola's Forgotten Massacre (2014) relied on interviews in London, Lisbon and Angola because almost no archival or official documents on the massacre survive; it is not an academic history but an account of her research process that makes her own political opinions and self-questioning part of the narrative. She later published the fragmentary memoir This Is the Place to Be (2016) and the novel Spent Light (2024), and has taught creative writing at Royal Holloway.

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.

1970–

A historian of de-Stalinization, memory, and cultural change

A historian of de-Stalinization's memory politics, she served as historical consultant to Armando Iannucci's satire of the post-Stalin power struggle, The Death of Stalin (2017).

Polly Jones is a British historian of Russian and Soviet culture whose work examines memory politics in authoritarian societies. Her research shows that after the 1956 Secret Speech, de-Stalinization was not only a reform directed from above but also a negotiated process in which writers and citizens navigated censorship and official memory. Her monograph and edited work analyse cultural and social change in the Khrushchev era, the myths and memories of the Stalinist past, and the tension between the Thaw's ideals and its lived responses.

1971–

A historian of state and society in Soviet Ukraine

Using records from his native Markivka, where 329 of 401 resettled Russian families returned within a year, he rebutted as baseless myth the claim that the resettlement sowed today's Donbas separatism.

Hennadii Yefimenko is a Ukrainian historian of the political and social history of Soviet Ukraine in the first half of the twentieth century. He analyzed post-Holodomor rural resettlement as two waves, linking the state’s economic need to restore grain production with the large-scale return of settlers. His work treats population movement not as a simple story of ethnic change, but as a question in which rural labour and state rule were intertwined.

1971–

The Swiss historian whose archival research overturned the received Yugoslav narrative of the Tito-Stalin split

Perović showed from newly opened East-bloc archives that Tito's Balkan territorial ambitions, particularly over Albania, triggered the 1948 split, and that the 'Yugoslav path to socialism' was a post hoc myth.

A Swiss historian and political scientist, he is Professor of Eastern European History at the University of Zurich and director of the Center for Eastern European Studies (CEES). His 2007 Journal of Cold War Studies article, 'The Tito-Stalin Split: A Reassessment in Light of New Evidence,' overturned the official Yugoslav narrative by using newly opened East-bloc archives to argue that Tito's Balkan territorial ambitions, particularly the push to absorb Albania, rather than a distinct Yugoslav path to socialism, drove the 1948 split with Moscow. He has also produced significant work on the North Caucasus under Russian rule and on Soviet energy diplomacy, and founded and edits several online scholarly digests including the Caucasus Analytical Digest, extending East European studies to a broader public.

1975–

Historian who advanced an alternative theory that corruption among Leningrad leaders provoked the late-Stalinist purge

Sushkov argued the 'Leningrad Affair' was driven not by factional rivalry but by Leningrad's leaders showing how the secret-ballot system could be voided.

Andrei Sushkov is a Russian historian of the Soviet party-state power system and the administrative practices of regional nomenklatura. Drawing on primary sources from archives in the Urals, St. Petersburg, Karelia, and other regions, he advanced an alternative interpretation of the 'Leningrad Affair': the purge was provoked not only by elite power struggles but by widespread corruption and the private appropriation of state resources among Leningrad's leaders. His 2018 monograph 'The Leningrad Affair': A General Purge of the 'Cradle of the Revolution' is regarded as the most systematic treatment of the subject, reshaping a key debate in postwar Stalinist political history.

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.

1977–

A quantitative reinterpreter of Russian economic history

His 2021 study showed that regional differences in famine mortality were more closely associated with ethnic bias than with food productivity.

Andrei Markevich is an economic historian who reconstructs Russian economic history through quantitative evidence and institutional analysis. His work examines the state, markets, industrialization, and planning in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union over long time spans, and he has taught and conducted research at the New Economic School in Moscow. A 2021 study with Natalya Naumenko and Nancy Qian found that the high mortality of Ukrainians during the 1932–33 famine cannot be explained by food production alone, linking it to ethnically biased procurement policy and migration restrictions. The study uses large regional datasets to connect the famine’s economic mechanisms with the responsibility of state policy.

1977–

An archival historian of Cold War military affairs

Citing the archives, Ritter argued that Hungary's Southern Defence System was built not to invade Tito's Yugoslavia but to repel a Western attack expected through its territory.

László Ritter is a Hungarian modern historian whose research centers on intelligence, state security, the armed forces, and Hungarian-Yugoslav relations. In his study of the Tito-Stalin split, he reexamined Béla Király's memoir-based claim that the Soviet bloc prepared to invade Yugoslavia, using declassified Hungarian and international archival materials. By distinguishing Hungary's southern defenses and general-war preparations from an offensive plan, Ritter kept the question of Stalin's military intentions open while challenging an influential narrative.

1980–

Cold War historian who traced the Sino-Soviet split to inequality within the alliance and clashing national interests

ideological disagreements only served as a cover for the power struggle… in which ideology was merely a means to an end.

Sergey Radchenko is a Soviet-born British historian of the Cold War, known for his work on Sino-Soviet relations. His first book, Two Suns in the Heavens (2009), argued that the split was driven less by ideology than by the structural inequality of the alliance and Chinese resentment, becoming the major counter-argument to Lorenz Lüthi's ideology-centered interpretation.