People of the Revolution and the USSR

1931–2006 ○ Natural causes

Historian who pioneered the history of Russian and American anarchism

Named a distinguished professor in 1982, his announcement quoted him: 'Every good person deep down is an anarchist.'

Born in Brooklyn to Jewish immigrant parents from Odessa, Avrich was a pioneering historian who spent his entire career teaching the history of Russian and American anarchism at Queens College. His Kronstadt, 1921 (1970) demolished the Bolshevik claim that the rebellion was a White-Guard conspiracy, and he later conceded that Getzler's muster-roll figures were more current than his own. He worked to recover anarchists as 'pioneers of social justice' rather than amoral and violent militants, and bequeathed a 20,000-item archive to the Library of Congress.

1931–2012 ○ Natural causes

Historian whose Mao’s China and After judged the Chinese revolution critically from within the Marxist tradition

He brought Mao-era China into US classrooms from 1968, then spent his later years recording how the reform era slid into what he called bureaucratic capitalism.

From Detroit, he taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His first book, Li Ta-chao and the Origins of Chinese Marxism (1967), showed how nationalism and faith in the peasantry combined as Marxism was received in China. Mao’s China and After, first published in 1977, became the standard textbook history of the People’s Republic, reading Maoism through the tension between socialist ideals and the modernisation of a backward country. He criticised the repression of the Mao years while judging that the marketisation of the reform era had abandoned socialism’s promise.

1932–

The historian who recast Vichy collaboration

“The Vichy regime had its own active project to remake France after the defeat of June 1940.”

Robert Paxton is an American historian of modern Europe whose work examines Vichy France and the social and political conditions of fascism. By reading German occupation records alongside French sources, he showed that Vichy was not merely a passive instrument of Germany but a collaborator pursuing its own project of national reorganization. Co-authored with Michael Marrus, Vichy France and the Jews argued that Vichy's early anti-Jewish statutes originated in French policy rather than direct German orders, reshaping French historiography and public memory. His work made collaboration and resistance legible through the interaction of state institutions, social forces, and wartime conditions, while leaving room for debate over particular interpretations.

1932–

A historian linking Soviet social and Jewish histories

He argued that the war's long-term domestic impact was far more far-reaching than its international implications.

Yaacov Ro'i is an Israeli historian of Soviet Jews, Islam, Middle Eastern policy, and Soviet society. Combining documentary research with social surveys, he traced how state policy shaped national communities and popular political consciousness. The Bleeding Wound analyzes the domestic costs and legacies of the Soviet-Afghan War, using differences between Central Asian and Russian respondents to add evidence to the debate over how far the war contributed to the Soviet collapse.

1933–

Russia's foremost alcohol epidemiologist, whose estimate that the anti-alcohol campaign saved over a million lives anchors the scholarship

"The anti-alcohol campaign saved the lives of more than 1 million individuals." Nemtsov's conclusion from a quarter-century of research.

A pioneer of alcohol epidemiology who graduated from the Moscow Medical Institute, trained as a psychiatrist, and spent his career at the Moscow Research Institute of Psychiatry. Spurred by the 1985 anti-alcohol campaign, he developed methodologies to estimate real alcohol consumption and the scale of alcohol-related mortality, arriving at the benchmark estimate that the campaign saved roughly one million lives. Tracking the waves of alcohol-driven excess mortality through the Gorbachev era and the post-Soviet collapse, his empirical work became a cornerstone of demographic debate on Russia's mortality crisis.

1933–2016 ○ Natural causes

The Soviet historian who laid the foundation of Leningrad Affair studies

His 1989 article 'The So-Called Leningrad Affair' in Voprosy istorii KPSS framed the purge as a factional struggle between the Zhdanov group and the Malenkov-Beria group. For over three decades, this framing remained the starting point of the debate.

A Soviet historian. After graduating with honors from Leningrad State University's History Faculty and working as a teacher and party functionary in Torzhok, he spent 25 years at the Leningrad Institute of Party History from 1966, researching the siege, postwar reconstruction, and the political biographies of party leaders. His 1989 article in Voprosy istorii KPSS, 'The So-Called Leningrad Affair,' was the first to frame the case as a factional struggle between the Zhdanov group and the Malenkov-Beria group with Stalin's sanction, launching the entire post-Soviet historiography. The book of the same name he co-compiled with Viktor Demidov in 1990 sold 200,000 copies and remains the most influential documentary study. He taught as professor at St. Petersburg University from 1991 until his death, training a generation of historians.

1933–2023

U.S. political scientist and Ethiopia specialist

Under the Mengistu government he worked on asylum and amnesty cases for emigres, helping dozens avoid torture and death; in 2018 he received the Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Star of Honour.

American political scientist and Ethiopia specialist who was professor and then professor emeritus at Oklahoma State University. Sources disagree on when he joined the Peace Corps in Addis Ababa: the obituary and the Ethiopian Crown Council say 1963, publisher and library biographies say 1964. He later directed the Educational Resources Center in New Delhi, was dean of continuing education at Austin College and a senior visiting fellow at the University of Tulsa, and taught at OSU from 1988 to 2008. Under the Mengistu government he worked on asylum and amnesty cases for Ethiopian emigres, helping dozens avoid torture and death, and in 2018 he received the Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Star of Honour. His books include Ethiopia: A Post-Cold War African State (1999) and The Lion of Judah in the New World (2011).

1934–2026 ○ Natural causes

The revisionist historian who overturned the Cold War coup thesis with archival evidence

Rather, I would emphasize the party's internally relatively democratic, tolerant and decentralised structure and method of operation, as well as its responsiveness to the prevailing mass mood.

A leading American historian of the revisionist school on the Russian Revolution. One of the first Western researchers granted access to Soviet archives from the 1960s, his 1976 work The Bolsheviks Come to Power demonstrated empirically that the October Revolution was not a minority coup but was carried out with broad popular support for peace, land, and bread, directly challenging the Cold War coup thesis identified with Richard Pipes. His finding that the Bolshevik Party of 1917 was 'a relatively open, democratic, and decentralized organization' reshaped the paradigm of revolution studies, and he was respected for accepting conclusions contrary to his own political convictions on the strength of the archival record.

1934–

A British historian of modern Soviet history

For Stalin, the 'creation of the idea of the perpetual enemy' was indispensable.

Martin McCauley is an Irish-born historian of Soviet and East European politics. A former senior lecturer at UCL's School of Slavonic and East European Studies, he wrote widely on Stalinism, the Khrushchev era, the Cold War, and the rise and fall of the Soviet Union. He interpreted the 20th Party Congress speech both as an effort to restore a functioning Party, freeing officials from fear of repression, and as a move in Khrushchev's struggle to weaken rivals.

1934–

America's most prominent historian arguing the Second Republic's radicalization brought on the Spanish Civil War

The very expression 'historical memory' is an oxymoron, a fundamental contradiction in terms. Memory is intrinsically individual, subjective, and very frequently fallacious.

America's leading historian of modern Spain, Payne taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison for 37 years and shaped the conservative interpretation of the Spanish Civil War through over twenty books on the Second Republic, Franco, and European fascism. His central thesis holds that the collapse of the Second Republic stemmed not from right-wing conspiracy but from the revolutionary radicalization of the Socialist-led left, reading the Civil War as a clash of revolution and counterrevolution. Since the 2000s, critics including Ángel Viñas, Helen Graham, and Paul Preston have charged his later work with excessive benevolence toward Francoism, yet Payne's revisionist framework remains an indispensable pole in Civil War historiography.

1935–2010 ○ Died

The British economic historian whose archival work recast postwar European recovery and integration

He read the 1947 crisis as a dollar payments crisis rooted in the strength of Europe's investment and production boom. As noted in the body, this is a paraphrase, and it drew sharp dissent from scholars who held that the Marshall Plan was economically necessary.

Born in Stoke-on-Trent on 19 January 1935, the only child of a Post Office employee, he read history at University College London and took a first-class degree in 1956, then a PhD at the LSE in 1960 under W. N. Medlicott on the German armaments industry in the Second World War. After posts at Edinburgh, the University of East Anglia and Stanford, he was Professor of European Studies at UMIST (1971–1983), Professor at the European University Institute (1983–1986) and Professor of Economic History at the LSE (1986–1996). Appointed official historian at the Cabinet Office in 1993, he wrote the first volume of the official history, and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1987. He taught again at the EUI from 1996 to 2002 and died on 28 September 2010, aged 75, after a three-year illness; he was buried in Highgate Cemetery.

1936–

A popular historian who reconstructed Russia’s tragedies through archives and drama

In 1989 Radzinsky became the first in the USSR to publish Yakov Yurovsky's note and the executioners' testimony, letting them recount the murder of the imperial family second by second.

Edvard Radzinsky is a Russian historian, playwright, and broadcaster who brought the country’s history and tragic figures to a wide audience. Trained at the Moscow Archive Institute, he began in theatre before writing biographies of Nicholas II, Rasputin, Stalin, and other figures. In his 1997 Stalin biography, he used newly accessible records and testimony to argue that Beria may have poisoned Stalin, a claim that remains an interpretation in an unresolved debate rather than established fact. His vivid, psychological histories became widely read, while professional historians criticized aspects of his sourcing and interpretation.

1936–

The historian whose archival discoveries rewrote the study of the Tito-Stalin split

When sources that had been 'absolutely inaccessible' before finally opened, he recalled that he, a historian, entered 'a completely new era', regretting only that it came only in his mid-fifties.

A Soviet and Russian historian specializing in modern Yugoslav history and Cold War international relations in Eastern Europe. From 1966 at the Institute of Slavic Studies, he was among the first to exploit newly opened Soviet archives in the late 1980s, unearthing records of Stalin's meetings with Yugoslav and Bulgarian communist leaders (1946–1948) that laid the documentary foundation for the post-Cold War reassessment of the Tito-Stalin split. His several hundred publications include the co-edited volume The Establishment of Communist Regimes in Eastern Europe, 1944–1949 (1997) with Norman Naimark and the annotated Cominform conference minutes, earning him international recognition.

1936–

A historian who opened the Cold War archives

In 1962, he left a Soviet cruise ship during a stop in Tunis and applied for a U.S. visa.

Vojtech Mastny was a Czech-American historian of the Cold War and Soviet foreign policy. Barred from the conventional educational path by his class background, he worked in factories and archives before emigrating to the United States in 1962, an experience that reinforced his attention to fragmentary evidence. He interpreted the Warsaw Pact not simply as a unified military alliance, but through the tension between a politically motivated bargaining instrument and a mechanism of Soviet discipline, testing both views against archival records. As coordinator of the Parallel History Project, he connected documents and testimony from the socialist military sphere to international scholarship.

1937–

The economist who exposed Soviet growth statistics as an 84-fold exaggeration and recalculated the real record

"The resulting economic mechanism combined all the worst features of both command and market economies": his verdict on the 1965 reform.

He was an economist who began recalculating Soviet official statistics using independent methods in the 1970s, arriving at the explosive finding that national income had grown not by the official 84.4 times but by only 6.6 times between 1928 and 1985. His 1987 article 'The Crooked Figure,' co-authored with Vasily Selyunin in Novy Mir, caused a sensation across Soviet society. He went on to write a multi-volume Economic History of Russia in the Modern Era, offering a dispassionate analysis of the achievements and failures of the Soviet planned economy; of the 1965 Kosygin reform he delivered the verdict that it 'combined all the worst features of both command and market economies.'

1938–

The British political scientist who argued Gorbachev's individual leadership was the decisive factor in transforming the Soviet system

Only rarely does an individual leader make a fundamental difference. Gorbachev was such a leader.

Emeritus Professor of Politics at Oxford and a leading scholar of Soviet and Russian politics. In The Gorbachev Factor (1996), he established the 'individual leader' thesis against structural determinism, arguing that Gorbachev's personal convictions and political choices were the decisive force behind the transformation of the Soviet system and the end of the Cold War. The thesis became one pole of the subsequent historical debate and remains among the most influential interpretations of perestroika.