People of the Revolution and the USSR

Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) Liberalism and republicanism 1869–1958 → Died

A publicist who moved between reformist socialism and anti-party politics

During the famine of 1921 she worked in Pomgol relief, and the following year she was expelled from Soviet Russia.

Yekaterina Kuskova was a political activist and writer who moved from revolutionary populism through Marxism and Economism toward liberal reformist socialism. Her 1899 Credo, which prioritised workers’ economic struggle and democratic reform, helped provoke a major dispute over the strategy of Russian Social Democracy. After 1905 she pursued democratic alliances through the Union of Liberation, the cooperative movement, women’s equality work, and journalism; in 1917 she supported the Provisional Government while also opposing the Kornilov movement. During the famine of 1921 she organised non-Bolshevik relief work in Pomgol with Sergei Prokopovich, but after the committee was dissolved she was arrested and expelled, continuing to write in exile.

United Kingdom state institutions Liberalism and republicanism 1883–1946 ○ Natural death

British economist who left the Treasury in protest at the peace treaty and warned of the damage reparations would do

Born in Cambridge, he studied mathematics at King’s College. Entering the Treasury in 1915, he designed the terms of credit between Britain and its continental allies. At the Paris Peace Conference he tried to keep Germany’s reparations within its capacity to pay but was largely excluded from the high-level talks, and the treaty’s outcome led to his resignation from the Treasury. The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), predicting the treaty’s damaging effects, made him internationally famous. In the Depression he argued that aggregate demand determined the level of economic activity and called for fiscal and monetary policy against slumps, publishing The General Theory in 1936. He led the British delegation at Bretton Woods in 1944, where the American plan largely prevailed. He died of heart attacks in 1946.

Liberalism and republicanism 1891–1962 ○ Heart attack

The liberal of the New Culture Movement who led the vernacular-language campaign and later served the Nationalists as a diplomat

A Columbia-trained pragmatist under John Dewey, he led the literary revolution that replaced classical Chinese with the written vernacular. A critic of both New Youth's Marxists and the Nationalist abandonment of constitutionalism, he died in Taipei in 1962.

A philosopher trained under John Dewey in the United States, he proposed literary reform in New Youth in 1917 and launched the vernacular-language movement. In the May Fourth years he urged “more study of problems, less talk of isms”, parting ways with Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu as they turned to Marxism. He was a professor and later president of Peking University and served as ambassador to the United States during the war with Japan. After 1949 he worked in the United States and Taiwan, while the mainland mounted a mass campaign against his thought in the 1950s. He died of a heart attack in Taipei.

Labour Party (United Kingdom) Liberalism and republicanism 1931–2017 ○ Natural causes

The historian who made the Spanish Civil War a global narrative

Thomas began The Spanish Civil War without knowing a word of Spanish, and the book was banned by the Franco regime and smuggled into Spain as a clandestine best-seller.

Hugh Thomas was an English historian whose 1961 The Spanish Civil War made a large, readable survey of the conflict available to an international audience. Drawing on printed diplomatic sources, participant accounts and interviews, he presented the Republican struggle and its internal violence without simply adopting either Communist or anti-Communist polemic. The book became a clandestine bestseller in Francoist Spain, was repeatedly revised, and remained a foundational point of reference despite factual and interpretive criticisms. His later work ranged across Cuba, the Spanish empire and world history, while his political career moved from Labour to the Conservatives and then the Liberal Democrats.

Liberalism and republicanism 1934–2023 ○ Natural causes

A liberal economist who helped design the transition from a planned to a market economy

In 1968, watching Soviet tanks crush the Prague Spring, Yasin later recalled: 'It all became clear to me in 1968.'

Yevgeny Yasin was an economist who developed reform proposals for moving the late Soviet planned economy toward a market economy. As a co-author in the Shatalin group’s 500 Days programme, he helped formulate a blueprint for rapid market transition, then worked in the reforming Russian state after the Soviet collapse. As Yeltsin’s economy minister, he represented the liberal reform line while confronting disputes over the transition’s social costs and the state’s capacity. He later shaped economic policy education and public debate through the Higher School of Economics and the Liberal Mission Foundation.

Liberalism and republicanism 1951–

Romanian-American political scientist and authority on the 1989 revolutions

In Bucharest in June 1990, he witnessed miners violently crushing anti-government protesters, an experience he said gave him insight into 'barbarity in its crassest, most revolting form.'

Born into a Romanian communist elite family and defecting in 1981, he is a political scientist who has analysed Stalinism and the collapse of East European communist systems from a comparative politics perspective. His 2003 Stalinism for All Seasons provided a definitive synthesis of Romanian communism, and in 2006 he chaired the Presidential Commission for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship, steering the country's landmark reckoning with its past. His 2009 article on the causes, meanings and consequences of 1989 became a benchmark for scholarship on the revolutions, arguing that ethnic conflict and authoritarian backsliding in the aftermath do not diminish their 'generous message' and colossal impact.

Liberalism and republicanism 1952–

The scholar who read 1989 as liberal democracy's endpoint

In 1989 he wrote: “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, but the end of history as such.”

Francis Fukuyama is an American political scientist and scholar of international politics who has compared the formation of states, institutions, and political orders. His 1989 essay “The End of History?” interpreted the end of the Cold War and the spread of liberal democracy as a point reached in humanity’s ideological evolution, making it one of the defining claims in debates over what 1989 meant. He expanded the argument in The End of History and the Last Man (1992), while later work stressed state capacity, the rule of law, and accountability, qualifying any simple early optimism.

Liberalism and republicanism 1955–

British historian who coined 'refolution' to define the peaceful revolutions of 1989

Meeting Václav Havel in a Prague basement pub on 23 November 1989, he offered this prediction: 'In Poland it took ten years, in Hungary ten months, in East Germany ten weeks: perhaps in Czechoslovakia it will take ten days!'

British historian, Oxford professor of European studies, and Guardian columnist who has chronicled the contemporary history of Central and Eastern Europe and the collapse of communist regimes. As an eyewitness to the revolutions of 1989 in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague, he recorded the unfolding of civil resistance in The Magic Lantern (1990) and coined the term 'refolution', a fusion of reform and revolution, to characterize the peaceful, negotiated nature of these systemic transitions. Called a 'historian of the present' by George Kennan, he has spent four decades writing on European freedom and democracy; his 2017 Charlemagne Prize and other international honours reflect work that has shaped both scholarly debate and policymaking.