People of the Revolution and the USSR

Dissident 1906–1999 ○ Natural causes

Gulag survivor, world authority on Old Russian literature, moral conscience of late Soviet society

Solovki, autumn 1929. Warned that an arrest squad was coming for him, he hid all night among the woodpiles, listening to execution volleys. At dawn he understood: "Someone else was taken instead of me — I must now live for two."

Philologist and cultural historian from St. Petersburg. Arrested in 1928 for counter-revolutionary activity, he spent four years at Solovki camp. After release, he joined the Pushkin House, becoming the world's foremost authority on Old Russian literature. He led studies of The Tale of Igor's Campaign and edited the 12-volume Monuments of Literature of Ancient Rus'. Elected Academician in 1970, he served as first chairman of the Soviet Cultural Foundation (1986–1993). He never joined the Communist Party, opposed Sakharov's Academy expulsion, and was called 'Russia's conscience' while a People's Deputy during perestroika. In 1998 he became the first recipient of the restored Order of St. Andrew.

Dissident 1907–1977 ○ Natural causes

A phenomenologist who turned care for truth into civic action

On 3 March 1977, he endured a lengthy State Security interrogation after being summoned under the pretext of speaking as a Charter 77 spokesperson.

Jan Patočka was a Czech philosopher who studied with Husserl and Heidegger, developed phenomenology and a philosophy of history, and examined Europe’s crisis through the idea of care for the soul. After refusing Communist Party membership, he was repeatedly excluded from university teaching and publication, yet continued his work through writing and apartment seminars. In 1977 he became, with Václav Havel and Jiří Hájek, one of the first spokespeople for Charter 77, which invoked the Helsinki Final Act and demanded civil rights. After repeated interrogations by the State Security service, his health deteriorated and he died on 13 March.

Dissident 1925–2018 ○ Natural causes

The dissident biologist who argued the archives contain no evidence Stalin planned a Jewish deportation

After his 1970 release from the psychiatric hospital: "No honest and principled scholar can be sure of his safety if such grounds can lead to repression in the form of indefinite confinement in a psychiatric hospital."

A Soviet biologist and dissident historian. Born in Tbilisi, he studied at the Timiryazev Agricultural Academy and researched the molecular mechanisms of aging. In 1962 he wrote a samizdat manuscript exposing Trofim Lysenko's pseudoscience, published in the US in 1969 as The Rise and Fall of T.D. Lysenko, which brought international attention to the corruption of Soviet biology. In 1970 he was forcibly confined in a psychiatric hospital and released after protests by Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn, and others; in 1973, while on a scientific visit to London, he was stripped of his Soviet citizenship and spent the rest of his life in exile. His late work Stalin and the Jewish Problem (2003) argued that no archival documents support the claim that the Doctors' Plot was meant to trigger a mass deportation of Soviet Jews.

Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks Dissident 1925–2026 ○ Natural causes

The Marxist historian who put Stalinism on trial

From Let History Judge: "I have never betrayed either my convictions or the ideals of my youth. In this I see my father's influence; he was able to instill in me his commitment to socialism, though my ideas about socialism have of course changed. I could not have written my books other than out of deep conviction."

Soviet Marxist historian and communist publicist. From the 1960s he participated actively in the dissident movement, editing the samizdat journal Political Diary. His magnum opus, Let History Judge (nearly two decades in the making), subjected Stalinism to a meticulous, source-based Marxist critique and led to his expulsion from the CPSU in 1969. He never abandoned his socialist convictions; reinstated in 1989, he served as a People's Deputy, Supreme Soviet member, and Central Committee member. He authored over 35 books, pioneering a tradition of self-critical Marxist historiography within the socialist movement.