People of the Revolution and the USSR

1954–

The archival historian of Stalin's state antisemitism who argued the 1953 deportation was a myth

Stalin's Jewish deportation became a kind of Loch Ness Monster: many claimed to have seen it, but no one has ever presented a single piece of incontrovertible evidence.

Russia's leading historian of the Stalin era, who set the scholarly standard through his archival excavation of Soviet state antisemitism. His books In the Clutches of the Red Pharaoh (1994) and Stalin's Secret Policy: Power and Antisemitism (2001) are the monumental reference works that documented the full scope of late-Stalinist persecution of Jews, including the Doctors' Plot and the anti-cosmopolitan campaign. In his 2003 article 'Deportation: A Mystification,' he provoked fierce debate by arguing the widely accepted claim that Stalin planned a mass deportation of Jews was like the Loch Ness Monster: a story many claimed to have seen but for which no archival evidence existed, a position that now stands as the central counterpoint to Brent and Naumov's Stalin's Last Crime.

1954–1991 ✕ Killed by stray bullet

The 37-year-old economist killed by a stray bullet while coming to Komar's aid at the barricades

He ran to help Komar, who had jumped onto a BMP. The gunner fired warning shots, but Usov kept running, and a stray bullet struck him.

He was an agricultural economist by training who worked at the Moscow joint venture Ikom, an ordinary citizen until the August 1991 coup. In the early hours of 21 August, at the Tchaikovsky Tunnel, he ran to help Dmitry Komar, who had jumped onto a BMP armored vehicle to cover its observation slits, and was killed by a stray bullet; three days later, President Gorbachev awarded him and the two other victims the title of Hero of the Soviet Union, the last ever conferred.

1958–

The Cold War historian who read the Soviet collapse as 'a perfect storm and a hapless captain': a man-made disaster

He summarised the Soviet collapse in one image: 'a perfect storm and a hapless captain.' The USSR did not have to fall; Gorbachev's missteps turned a crisis into a catastrophe.

A Moscow-born Cold War historian, Zubok studied at Moscow State University's history faculty and earned his PhD at the Soviet Academy of Sciences' Institute for the US and Canada in 1985. He moved to the United States in 1994, worked as a fellow at the National Security Archive at George Washington University, became a tenured professor at Temple University, and since 2013 has been professor of international history at the London School of Economics. His 2021 book Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union argues that the USSR's dissolution was not inevitable: Gorbachev's mishandled reforms turned a crisis into a catastrophe, a thesis crystallised in the phrase 'a perfect storm and a hapless captain.' The book was a finalist for the 2022 Cundill History Prize.

1959–

The VPK's chronicler, the historian who dissected the Soviet military-industrial complex

He wrote: "The history of the Soviet VPK is a continuous cycle of war and preparation for war — and in that sense, the history of the entire Soviet economy."

A Russian historian who first systematically mapped the Soviet military-industrial complex. His 1996 monograph on the VPK in the 1920s–1950s remains foundational, and his collaboration with Cambridge scholars Barber and Harrison earned international recognition. Born to a peasant family in the Kirov region, he taught village school before studying at Moscow State University and joining the Institute of Marxism-Leninism in 1988. After the Soviet collapse he continued at the Russian Academy of Sciences, interspersed with advisory roles in the Presidential Administration and banking posts at Sberbank.

1959–

An archival historian of Stalin's political power

In the conclusion of his Stalin biography, Khlevniuk warned that "a significant portion of Russian society seeks recipes for the present by looking to the Stalinist past."

Oleg Khlevniuk is a Russian historian and documentary editor whose work focuses on Soviet political history, the Gulag, and Stalin's rule. Drawing on state-archive materials and party and government records, he explains the Great Terror as a centrally directed system rather than a spontaneous eruption from below. His research stresses Stalin's directives and personal control over the terror's decisions and implementation, while distinguishing carefully between what the documents establish and what they leave uncertain. Through monographs and published source collections, he has also challenged the myths surrounding Stalin in Russian public discourse.

1959–2015 ○ Natural causes

A historian who widened the blockade story from heroism to everyday ethics

Iarov’s research invited readers to see blockade survivors not through a hero-or-perpetrator binary, but through records of choice and survival.

Sergei Iarov was a historian of Russian twentieth-century social history and workers’ political consciousness who made the everyday life and moral choices of besieged Leningrad a central subject. Rather than explain blockade society through heroic resistance or administrative mobilization alone, he reconstructed from sources the interwoven experiences of solidarity, conformity, and strategies of survival under hunger. His books Blockade Ethics and Everyday Life in Besieged Leningrad placed the contradictions of human action in catastrophe at the centre of public memory.

1961–

The Moscow history teacher who read the Great Terror through its regional statistics

He holds that Stalin's single best deed was that in October 1941 he did not leave Moscow.

A historian who has studied the Stalin-era security organs while working as a history teacher and school head in Moscow. After a first study of the struggle inside the NKVD leadership (2006) he published The "Bloody Dwarf" against the Leader of the Peoples: The Yezhov Conspiracy (2009) and Stalin and the NKVD (2013), reconstructing how the Great Terror was carried out through its regional statistical variation and through the networks of Chekist clans such as Yevdokimov's 'North Caucasians'. He is the author of the two monographs in this reference library.

1961–

A historian who recalculated the Winter War casualty record

Where the Winter War's official loss figures had drifted broadly for fifty years, he recounted the dead one by one from a name-level database, arriving at some 138,000 Red Army dead and a loss ratio more than five times that of the Finns.

Yuri Kilin is a Petrozavodsk historian whose research examines Karelia and the Soviet Union’s foreign and military policy. He led a 2006–2009 project that critically reconciled official records of Red Army losses in the Winter War and reopened the question of how the dead should be counted. His 2012 figure of 138,533 Soviet dead became the latest major revision in the debate over the war’s human cost.

1963–1991 ✕ Shot dead

The architect and poet shot dead rushing a BMP as the troops pulled back, the last of the coup's three martyrs

In a video recording, Ilya stands before a tank and shouts at the soldiers: 'What are you doing? People are dying!'

A Moscow Architectural Institute graduate who worked as an architect and wrote poetry posthumously collected in Yevtushenko's Strophes of the Century. During the August 1991 coup, in the early hours of 21 August, he rushed at a BMP in the Tchaikovsky Tunnel after another armored vehicle had been set ablaze and the troops were pulling back; he was shot in the head and died at the scene. Posthumously made a Hero of the Soviet Union, Krichevsky was one of the coup's only three fatalities, and his Jewish funeral, with a rabbi and an Orthodox priest officiating together, became a public symbol of the new Russia's multi-ethnic identity.

1963–

A historian tracing what the Leningrad Affair left unresolved

Noting that the purge lists overlapped with the cadres Kuznetsov had promoted during the siege, he concludes: 'This is not the "Leningrad" Affair but the "Kuznetsov" Affair.'

Kirill Boldovsky is a Russian historian of late Soviet and contemporary Russian political history. His work examines the Leningrad party apparatus before and after the Leningrad Affair alongside the history of the siege, distinguishing what surviving records establish from what remains unknown. By connecting institutional history with the politics of memory, he presents the affair not simply as a purge but as a conflict over party power, regional rule, and historical knowledge.

1965–

A historian who reads the Soviet collapse as elite power struggle

In a 2021 interview he formulated the Soviet dissolution as the result not of an anti-nomenklatura revolution but of its incompleteness and inconsistency, treating the Moscow–Kyiv–Minsk core’s political struggle as decisive rather than peripheral national movements alone.

Aleksandr Vladlenovich Shubin (born 18 July 1965, Moscow) is a Russian historian and left-wing public figure. He graduated from the Moscow State Pedagogical Institute in 1989 after Air Force service in 1984–1985, worked at the Institute of World History of the Russian Academy of Sciences from 1992, took his doctorate in history in 2000, and has taught at the State Academic University for the Humanities since 2003 and the Russian State University for the Humanities since 2007. His research covers socialist thought, revolutionary and anarchist movements, Soviet history and twentieth-century international relations; he is the author of about 25 monographs and served as an adviser to Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov in 1997–1998.

1968–1991 ✕ Crushed to death

Afghan war veteran, the youngest and last Hero of the Soviet Union, killed confronting an armored vehicle during the August coup

He jumped onto a BMP armored vehicle to throw canvas over its observation slits. The gunner spun the turret and threw him off, but he got up, ran after it, and climbed on again.

A Guards sergeant who served in Afghanistan and worked as a forklift driver in Moscow after demobilization. In the early hours of 21 August 1991, he answered Rutskoy's call for 'Afghan brothers' and joined the defense of the Russian White House; in the Tchaikovsky Tunnel he tried to blind a BMP armored vehicle by covering its observation slits with canvas and was crushed to death, becoming one of the coup's only three fatalities. Posthumously awarded Hero of the Soviet Union and the Medal 'Defender of a Free Russia' No. 1.

1975–

Historian who advanced an alternative theory that corruption among Leningrad leaders provoked the late-Stalinist purge

Sushkov argued the 'Leningrad Affair' was driven not by factional rivalry but by Leningrad's leaders showing how the secret-ballot system could be voided.

Andrei Sushkov is a Russian historian of the Soviet party-state power system and the administrative practices of regional nomenklatura. Drawing on primary sources from archives in the Urals, St. Petersburg, Karelia, and other regions, he advanced an alternative interpretation of the 'Leningrad Affair': the purge was provoked not only by elite power struggles but by widespread corruption and the private appropriation of state resources among Leningrad's leaders. His 2018 monograph 'The Leningrad Affair': A General Purge of the 'Cradle of the Revolution' is regarded as the most systematic treatment of the subject, reshaping a key debate in postwar Stalinist political history.

1977–

A quantitative reinterpreter of Russian economic history

His 2021 study showed that regional differences in famine mortality were more closely associated with ethnic bias than with food productivity.

Andrei Markevich is an economic historian who reconstructs Russian economic history through quantitative evidence and institutional analysis. His work examines the state, markets, industrialization, and planning in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union over long time spans, and he has taught and conducted research at the New Economic School in Moscow. A 2021 study with Natalya Naumenko and Nancy Qian found that the high mortality of Ukrainians during the 1932–33 famine cannot be explained by food production alone, linking it to ethnically biased procurement policy and migration restrictions. The study uses large regional datasets to connect the famine’s economic mechanisms with the responsibility of state policy.

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.