People of the Revolution and the USSR

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.

1987–

A historian of the Soviet economy's reform possibilities and limits

"The Soviet economy can and should be considered as a single object," Safronov insists, reading its history as "cycles of centralisation and decentralisation."

Alexei Safronov is a Russian economist and historian who studies the Soviet economy across its full historical span. He rejects a simple opposition between liberalization and computerization in the Kosygin reform, instead presenting it as an attempt to combine economic and mathematical methods with material incentives inside a planned economy. His account stresses that the 1965 reform was more conservative in design than later memory often suggests, while its incomplete implementation produced both measurable gains and persistent limits.

Somali scholar who critiqued the Barre regime's rhetoric against its reality

His 1988 Socialist Somalia: Rhetoric and Reality diagnoses the widening gap between the Barre regime's rhetoric and realities and is cited as the standard scholarly critique of that era; it is the source of the 'internal militarism and external supplication' framing.

A Somali scholar and writer, he is the James Wallace Professor of International Studies at Macalester College and was founding dean of its Institute for Global Citizenship. He is founding editor-in-chief of Bildhaan: An International Journal of Somali Studies and the brother of scholar Abdi Ismail Samatar. Educated at the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse (B.A., 1978) and the University of Denver (M.A. 1981, PhD 1984), he taught about ten years at St. Lawrence University before moving to Macalester in 1994. His 1988 book Socialist Somalia: Rhetoric and Reality criticized the gap between the Barre military regime's claims and its actual record, and remains cited as the standard scholarly critique of that regime. The book's own formulation of a 'deeper slippage into internal militarism and external supplication' in mid-1980s Somalia is attributed to it rather than asserted as neutral fact.

?–

Lithuanian political scientist of Baltic politics and international relations

In his 2007 article "Bloody Sunday", he re-examined Gorbachev's claims of innocence about the January 1991 events in Vilnius and Riga. He concluded that Gorbachev most likely did not order the deaths of innocent people, but embraced the solution that led to that outcome.

Ainius Lasas is a Lithuanian political scientist who studies Baltic politics and international relations. He graduated from LCC International University in 1999, earned a master's diploma in journalism from Vilnius University, and took a PhD in international relations at the University of Washington. After working as a journalist with a national radio and television broadcaster, he was a senior research fellow at the University of Oxford and taught at the University of Bath before returning to Lithuania as dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities at Kaunas University of Technology. His research spans political psychology, including threat perception, historical memory and conspiracy theories, and political culture, including informal business-state relations.

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.

Historian of socialist-era Albanian historiography and its party control

An Albanian scholar of modern history, she was a lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Tirana and now serves as that university's Vice Rector for Scientific Affairs. In a 2017 article she showed that the Second World War became the central theme of socialist historiography because it legitimised the communist seizure of power in 1944, and that historical writing was a highly centralised process overseen by party bodies policing Marxist-Leninist principles and the party line. After the 1990s, as national history was revised, war history was revised too and historical writing became a more open process involving outside historians, though wartime accounts remained dominated by political and military history and national grand narrative.

?–

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.

?–1938 ✕ Executed

The economist who blueprinted Stalin's accelerated industrialization, standard-bearer of the 'socialist city' Urbanists

At the March 1929 Gosplan Congress: 'The socialist way of life must be more economical, cheaper than the capitalist one — and therefore it must win.'

Soviet economist and Urbanist theorist. His The USSR in 15 Years (1929) provided the blueprint for Stalin's accelerated industrialization, and he proposed replacing all cities and villages with collective socialist cities. Censured by name in a 1930 Central Committee resolution, he perished in the purges.

?–

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.

?–

A historian of the institutional limits of Soviet industrial reform

In his 2025 study, Pivovarov showed that restoring the ministries centralized management in name while leaving them without effective power over enterprises.

Nikita Pivovarov is a Russian historian who studies Soviet economic history and changes in industrial-management institutions. As a senior researcher at RANEPA's Research Center for Applied History, he examines late-Soviet reforms through documents and institutional design. In a 2025 study, he traced the restoration of sectoral ministries during the Kosygin reform and argued that, amid the Brezhnev-Kosygin conflict, centralization was compromised from the outset and the ministries lacked effective authority over enterprises.

Oxford research fellow and historian of Britain's Special Operations Executive

In the historiography of wartime Albania, The Wildest Province (2008) was described as by far the most comprehensive work on the subject, telling the story of SOE's Albanian missions from deployment in 1943 to withdrawal in early 1945 from interviews and declassified files.

Roderick Bailey is a British historian at the University of Oxford, where he is a Wellcome Trust-funded research fellow specialising in the history of medicine, modern conflict, and the study of resistance, intelligence and clandestine warfare. He took an MA (1997) and PhD (2004) at the University of Edinburgh and an MPhil (1998) at the University of Cambridge, and has held posts at Oxford's Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine (2013-2016), the Faculty of History (2016-2018) and the Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities (from 2017). In April 2012 he was appointed by the Prime Minister as official historian of SOE's secret war against Mussolini's Italy; his books include The Wildest Province (2008) and Target: Italy (2014).

?–

Finnish social anthropologist of southern Yemen and Aden

In 'The Snake with a Thousand Heads' (Middle East Report 256, 2010) she documented al-Harak, the southern movement that arose in summer 2007 against northern marginalization, tracing it to the 1994 civil war.

Finnish social anthropologist working on southern Yemen and Aden. She studied social anthropology at the University of Edinburgh, the London School of Economics and the University of Helsinki, first travelled to Aden in 1982, and has done ethnographic fieldwork in southern Yemen since the 1980s. Her doctoral dissertation on social dynamics and competing moral frameworks in Aden was published in 2010 by Syracuse University Press. Her research covers the history of shari'a, fiqh and court practice in Aden, gender and family law, and state building and the everyday state in Yemen.