People of the Revolution and the USSR

1946–2010

Irish scholar of Middle East international politics and South Yemen

His 1985 LSE thesis on the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen and the 1990 book built on it are the standard study cited when assessing the South Yemeni socialist state's achievements and limits.

Simon Frederick Peter Halliday (1946–2010) was an Irish writer and scholar of international relations and the Middle East, born in Dublin. He read PPE at Queen's College, Oxford, took an MSc in Middle East politics at SOAS, and sat on the New Left Review editorial board from 1969 to 1983. His 1985 LSE doctorate on South Yemen's foreign relations became the standard study of the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen, and he taught international relations at the LSE, as professor from 1985 until 2008.

1947–

Historian of modern Ethiopia

Against the loose figure of 120 Derg members, he wrote that in actual fact their number was less than 110, that senior officers were deliberately excluded, and that no new members were ever admitted.

Historian and author of modern Ethiopian history, and emeritus professor at Addis Ababa University. He studied history at Haile Selassie I University and African history at the University of London, and served as Head of the History Department and Director of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies. He wrote the standard synthetic text on modern Ethiopia, 1855 to 1991, and was a founding member of the Forum for Social Studies.

1947–

An archival military historian of the Pacific War

Frank argued the atomic bombs moved the emperor and set the surrender in motion, while Soviet intervention is 'the factor that weighs heavily on enforcing compliance with the surrender' of Japan's armed forces.

Richard B. Frank is an American lawyer and military historian of the Pacific War in World War II. His work follows operations, policy, and the decisions of Japanese leaders from Guadalcanal to the end of the Japanese Empire. Downfall is especially important for its analysis of Japan’s surrender as a contested outcome shaped by military collapse, the atomic bombings, and the Soviet entry into the war.

1947–

A historian who connects war’s military outcomes to its psychological meaning

“Militarily, it was the moment when the balance significantly shifts, but symbolically it was when the Soviet people suddenly began to believe in themselves.”

Richard Overy is a British historian of the Second World War and Nazi Germany whose work examines the structures and consequences of modern war. He has treated military operations alongside economic mobilisation, social experience, and political psychology as forces shaping the course of conflict. On Stalingrad, he argues that the Soviet victory did not yet make Germany’s defeat certain in strategic terms, but marked a symbolic and psychological turning point: Soviet society began to believe in itself, while the message that Germany was vulnerable spread around the world. His approach links material conditions of war to changes in collective perception rather than treating them as competing explanations.

1947–

The Oxford economic historian who reassessed Soviet industrialization as one of the most successful development stories of the 20th century

"Soviet economic performance is usually dismissed as a failure. In contrast, I argue, the Soviet economy performed well. Japan was certainly the most successful developing economy of the twentieth century, but the USSR ranked just behind it."

Oxford economic historian Robert C. Allen argued in his 2003 book *Farm to Factory: A Reinterpretation of the Soviet Industrial Revolution* that Soviet industrialization was one of the most successful development stories of the 20th century. His recalculation found that consumption per head rose by roughly 30% between 1928 and 1937, directly reversing the classic studies by Abram Bergson and Janet Chapman that had concluded consumption declined. Using a simulation model, he also presented a counterfactual showing that a continuation of NEP without collectivization would have produced similar GDP growth rates, making his work a key reference in debates over the costs and achievements of Stalinist industrialisation.

1947–

A contentious biographer of Soviet history

He introduced his Trotsky biography with the words: 'If Mercader's ice axe didn't finish Trotsky off, I hope my book does.'

Robert Service is a British historian of the Soviet Union whose work ranges across the political history from the Revolution to Stalin's death. His biographies of Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky interpret individual choices alongside the structures of the revolutionary state. His account of Beria's elimination as a struggle shaped not only by Beria's crimes but also by his post-Stalin reform proposals has made him a significant, contested voice in the historiography.

1947–

Australian economic historian who reconstructed Soviet famine and repression statistics from the archives

"We do not absolve Stalin from responsibility for the famine… But the story which has emerged in this book is of a Soviet leadership which was struggling with a famine crisis which had been caused partly by their wrongheaded policies, but was unexpected and undesirable."

An Australian economic historian and researcher of Soviet social, economic, and demographic history. With Robert W. Davies he co-authored The Years of Hunger (2004), using post-Soviet archives to estimate famine deaths at about 4.5–6.5 million and to argue that the famine was not an intentional genocide but a tragedy produced by forced grain procurement, weather disasters, and reckless industrialisation. His 1990 article 'More Light on the Scale of Repression and Excess Mortality in the Soviet Union in the 1930s' began a career-long effort to correct inflated Western figures, later extending to comparative work on German and Soviet repression.

1948–

Former Maoist urban guerrilla turned Francoist revisionist historian who reignited Spain's Civil War debates

Asked in a 2008 interview whether he condemned Franco's regime, he refused, declaring that "Franco deserves the gratitude and recognition of the majority of Spaniards."

A controversial Spanish writer who evolved from a founding member of the Maoist urban guerrilla group GRAPO into Francoism's most prominent revisionist historian. He argues that the left, not the right, bore primary responsibility for the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, contending that the Socialist-led insurrection of October 1934 was the conflict's true beginning. His 2003 bestseller Myths of the Civil War sold 150,000 copies and ignited the post-2000 revisionism debates, drawing praise from Stanley G. Payne and fierce rejection from mainstream historians including Paul Preston and Alberto Reig Tapia.

1949–

American historian and publisher who documented Stalin's last conspiracy

'There should be a major film, and it should be called Gulag. This is the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century.'

American publisher and historian who founded the Annals of Communism series at Yale University Press in 1991, bringing newly opened Soviet archives to Western readers for the first time. His 2003 book Stalin's Last Crime, co-authored with Vladimir Naumov, drew on previously closed KGB and presidential archives to reconstruct the Doctors' Plot and argue that Stalin was planning a mass deportation of Soviet Jews and a new wave of terror on the eve of his death. Since 2009 he has served as executive director of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, leading efforts to preserve Eastern European Jewish heritage.

1949–

Cuban-born US sociologist and historian of the Cuban Revolution

In December 1977 she helped lead the Antonio Maceo Brigade with Lourdes Casal on a visit to Cuba by 55 exiles, a trip that preceded the 1978 dialogues between Cuban exiles and the Cuban government.

Marifeli Pérez-Stable is a Cuban-born sociologist and historian of Cuba, born in 1949; her family left the island when she was 11. She took her PhD in sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1985 and a master's in political science at the University of Florida. She is the author of The Cuban Revolution: Origins, Course, and Legacy (Oxford University Press, first edition 1993), whose periodization the dictionary's historiography draws on. She was professor of sociology at Florida International University, now professor emeritus, and served as vice president for democratic governance at the Inter-American Dialogue from 2004 to 2009. Her designation as Cuban is an attributed label; no formal US citizenship status is documented.

1949–

the British economic historian whose three-position taxonomy of NEP's failure shaped the historiographical debate

Why did NEP fail? I should like to distinguish three ways in which this question has been answered: rational abandonment, irrational or political decision, and constrained choice.

Mark Harrison is a British economic historian who studied economics at Cambridge and modern history at Oxford, and taught at the University of Warwick from 1975, researching the Soviet economy for over four decades. His 1980 paper 'Why Did NEP Fail?' identified three positions in the historiographical debate (rational abandonment, irrational or political decision, and constrained choice), a taxonomy that has structured assessments of NEP ever since. His work expanded into the economics of warfare, state secrecy, and coercion, earning the Alec Nove Prize for Accounting for War (1996) and producing Secret Leviathan (2023), a landmark study of information control under Soviet communism.

1950–2025 ○ Natural causes

A revisionist historian of Soviet political history

He likened the archives to laboratories where he could try to explain the unimaginable.

J. Arch Getty was an American historian of Soviet political history and Stalinism who taught and conducted research at UCLA. In Origins of the Great Purges (1985), he challenged the picture of Stalinism as the product of seamless central control, emphasizing weak party organization, local autonomy, and conflict within the leadership. That approach became a major strand of the Western revisionist debate surrounding Khrushchev’s revelations and the interpretation of Stalinism, although it did not absolve Stalin or the party leadership of responsibility for terror. After Soviet archives opened, he and other scholars used new records to reassess the scale of repression and the workings of state violence.

1950–

The historian who interpreted the Prague Spring between the tanks and the memory wars

The experience of the occupation, the incredible solidarity in August 1968: that belongs to those very rare historical moments that not everyone gets to live through, and one can count oneself lucky to have experienced it.

Jan Pauer is a Czech-born historian who witnessed the Prague Spring of 1968 and emigrated to West Germany the following year. In 1995 he published Prag 1968, the definitive account of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, and spent his career at the University of Bremen's Research Centre for Eastern Europe studying modern Czechoslovak history. In his 2011 ENRS article, he argued that the invasion marked 'the start of a civil society opposition and the historical end of reform communism,' contending that the Prague Spring was buried twice: first by Soviet tanks and then by the memory politics of post-1989 Czechia.

1950–

An archival journalist who reconstructed the Cold War's most dangerous crises

He recast the Cuban Missile Crisis not as a summit-room myth, but as an hour-by-hour crisis compounded by accidents.

Michael Dobbs is a British-born journalist and nonfiction author who reported from the front lines of the Cold War's end and other international conflicts. As a Washington Post correspondent and bureau chief in Eastern Europe, Paris, and Moscow, he chronicled the collapse of the socialist bloc and its international consequences. One Minute to Midnight cross-checked American, Soviet, and Cuban sources to reconstruct the Cuban Missile Crisis hour by hour, showing that the danger of nuclear war was far greater than familiar summit-room myths suggested. His method shifts attention from great-power leaders alone to commanders, civilians, and accidents that could magnify a crisis.

1950–2023 ○ Died

The institutional economist who crystallized the 50-year debate over the Kosygin reform in a single book title

In 1977, when he defended his candidate's dissertation on the 'Asiatic mode of production,' the Academy of Social Sciences under the CPSU Central Committee, the official reviewer, submitted an evaluation whose essence was: 'This is not Marxism.'

An institutional economist of Tatar origin born in Moscow, he graduated with honours from the MSU economics faculty and taught political economy there, attracting attention with a controversial dissertation on the 'Asiatic mode of production' that the Academy of Social Sciences under the CPSU Central Committee denounced as 'not Marxism.' In 1993 he helped Kuzminov found the Higher School of Economics (HSE), serving as its first department chair, first vice-rector, and first full professor, becoming a central architect of the Russian institutional-economics school. As editor of the 2017 collective monograph 'Missed Chance or Last Valve? On the 50th Anniversary of the Kosygin Reforms of 1965,' he crystallized the polarized historiographical debate: reform as a lost opportunity for the planned economy versus its last safety valve, in a single title.

1950–

A historian who reread Sino-Soviet relations through Cold War archives

In 1995 he spent over a million yuan of his own money to buy declassified Russian archives, which he then opened to fellow scholars free of charge.

Shen Zhihua is a historian of the Cold War, the Soviet Union, and Sino-Soviet relations who led the Center for Cold War International History Studies at East China Normal University. He expanded the documentary basis of Chinese Cold War scholarship by personally collecting declassified Russian materials and editing large archival compilations. His work explains the Sino-Soviet split through the interaction of state interests and competition within the international communist movement, questioning accounts that reduce China’s choices to ideological solidarity alone. His studies of the Korean War and the Sino-Soviet alliance trace the calculations of China, the Soviet Union, and Korea, bringing a major Chinese interpretation of the Cold War to an international readership.

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.

1952–

An economist who reads international monetary order through history

He read the Marshall Plan not simply as an aid project, but as a structural adjustment program that changed postwar Europe’s economic order.

Barry Eichengreen is an American economist and economic historian who connects the history of international monetary and financial systems to contemporary policy problems. His work on the gold standard showed how the structure and management of an international monetary regime helped transmit the Great Depression. In his study of the Marshall Plan, he emphasized that the conditions attached to aid, not simply its volume, pushed Western Europe’s postwar mixed economies toward more markets and less control. That argument made him an important reference point in debates over whether reconstruction succeeds through cash, institutional conditions, or their combination.

1952–

Balkan historian whose Albania at War brought Albania's wartime experience into European historiography

Albania at War recast the occupation as fragmentation and internal division, a power struggle ending in the communists' rise and Enver Hoxha's regime; the war, he concluded, pulled Albania out of one isolation only to push it into another.

Historian of the Balkans and Albania, born 27 January 1952. He took his Ph.D. at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1982, was professor of history and chair of the Department of History at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne, and is now professor emeritus there. He is a foreign member of the Albanian Academy of Sciences. Neither his citizenship nor his national origin is documented. His books include King Zog and the Struggle for Stability in Albania (1984), Albania at War, 1939–1945 (1999) and Balkan Strongmen (2006); he co-edited Albanian Identities (2002) with Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers and co-wrote A Concise History of Albania (2022) with Oliver Jens Schmitt.

1952–2014

Portuguese historian of the colonial war and of Angola's 1977 purge

Died in Lisbon on 30 October 2014; her husband and co-author Álvaro Mateus had died about a year earlier, in August 2013.

Portuguese historian. Born in Viana do Castelo in 1952; she died in Lisbon on 30 October 2014. Her research covered Portuguese colonialism, the colonial war and the political police; her doctoral work became A PIDE/DGS na guerra colonial 1961-1974 (2004), a reference study showing the PIDE was more brutal than assumed, worked closely with the Army in the colonies, and persisted in Africa after being dissolved in Portugal itself, siding with those who obstructed decolonisation. With her husband and co-author Álvaro Mateus (a former PCP militant, d. 2013) she published on Angola and Mozambique, including Purga em Angola (2007) on 27 May 1977, in which she held President Agostinho Neto responsible for the killing of Nito Alves's supporters. She interviewed former political prisoners; recordings and transcripts are held at the Torre do Tombo.

1952–

A historian connecting Chernobyl to modern Eastern European history

Forty years on he wrote, "In a way, Chernobyl created glasnost."

David Marples is a Canadian historian at the University of Alberta who studies the modern history and politics of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine. He was an early analyst of Chernobyl’s social and political consequences, beginning with Chernobyl and Nuclear Power in the USSR, published in the year of the accident, and later work on nuclear policy, safety, and the responses of states and affected communities. His research expanded to national history, famine, and the Soviet collapse, while treating Chernobyl as an important influence on the USSR’s crisis without reducing that collapse to a single cause.