People of the Revolution and the USSR

1866–1934 ○ Died

Historian who wrote Ukraine as a distinct historical subject, and chairman of the Central Rada

In March 1917 the Central Rada elected him chairman in absentia while he was still in exile in Moscow, and his return raised hope for uniting the democratic forces.

The historian whose History of Ukraine-Rus wrote Ukraine as a distinct historical subject, he chaired the Central Rada in 1917 and 1918. He returned to Soviet Ukraine in 1924 and died under surveillance in 1934.

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.

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–

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.

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.