People of the Revolution and the USSR

United States state institutions 1919–1996 ○ Heart attack

The National Security Advisor who chose not to wake the president on the first night of the Cuban Missile Crisis

Ray Cline's voice on the phone: 'Those things we've been worrying about, it looks as though we've really got something.' Bundy asked, 'You're sure?'

National Security Advisor (1961–1966) under Kennedy and Johnson, and a key architect of the Vietnam War escalation. On the evening of October 15, 1962, the CIA informed him of Soviet missile bases in Cuba; he decided to wait until morning to tell the president, fearing that a hastily called nighttime meeting would blow secrecy. After leaving government in 1966, he served as president of the Ford Foundation and, in his later years, helped lead the campaign to renounce first use of nuclear weapons.

United States state institutions 1920–1986 ○ Natural causes

A career diplomat who worked the front lines of détente

On March 4, 1974, he presented his credentials as the U.S. ambassador to Moscow.

Walter Stoessel was a career American diplomat whose work centered on the Soviet Union and Europe during the Cold War. As ambassador in Moscow from 1974 to 1976, he represented Washington on the ground during détente and the negotiations surrounding the Helsinki process. He later served as ambassador to West Germany and Deputy Secretary of State.

United States state institutions 1920–2022 ○ Natural causes

An airman whose small act of kindness became an international symbol

When the children asked how they would recognize his plane, he promised to wiggle its wings.

Gail Halvorsen was a U.S. Air Force pilot who flew transport missions in the 1948–49 Berlin Airlift, helping sustain West Berlin during the blockade. After meeting children at the Tempelhof fence, he gave them gum and began dropping candy beneath handkerchief parachutes, an initiative that grew into Operation Little Vittles and gave the airlift a human face. The voluntary gesture stood at the boundary between military regulations and Cold War propaganda, yet it mobilized Berliners and American children and strengthened the West's political appeal. He later worked in air and space development and commanded Tempelhof Airport before retiring as a colonel in 1974.

1921–2019 ○ Natural causes

An American historian who interpreted the Spanish Republic and Civil War

In 1948 an FBI agent pressed Jackson to inform on his classmates; "I told them that I had not considered that to be any of my business," he recalled.

Gabriel Jackson was an American historian, Hispanist, and journalist who made modern Spanish history his central field. His 1965 book, The Spanish Republic and the Civil War, was an early English-language synthesis of the Second Republic and the war, including the conflicts within the Republican camp. Jackson viewed the Republic’s institutional reformers and the PCE’s wartime strategy relatively sympathetically, while treating the POUM and revolutionary left as politically impractical, a position that became one pole in later historiographical debate. McCarthyism delayed his academic career, but he later taught modern European history at UC San Diego and continued writing on Spain after retiring to Barcelona.

1924–2004 ○ Natural causes

A historian who forecast the Soviet collapse

Writing as “Z,” he predicted that Gorbachev could not overcome communism's contradictions, then later acknowledged the essay.

Martin Malia was an American historian of Russia and European intellectual history who taught and researched at Berkeley. In The Soviet Tragedy, he argued that socialism's comprehensive attempt to abolish capitalism also undermined economic and political freedom, making the Soviet system structurally resistant to self-correction. In 1990 he published the essay “To the Stalin Mausoleum” under the pseudonym Z, predicting that Gorbachev's reforms could not overcome communism's internal contradictions. His interpretation became a powerful pole in explanations of the Soviet collapse, while critics argued that it reduced socialism's historical possibilities to a defect in ideology itself.

1924–2012 ○ Natural causes

Pioneer of Mao studies, author of The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung and editor of the ten-volume Mao’s Road to Power

A Mao scholar who weighed Mao's merits against his faults, setting land reform against the executions of the Campaign against Counter-Revolutionaries, the starvation after the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. He cared less about judging Mao than about his thought's future influence.

A Minnesotan trained in physics who worked on the Manhattan Project before turning to political science, he taught in Paris and directed the Contemporary China Institute at SOAS in London. His 1963 The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung was the first systematic Western analysis of Mao’s thought grounded in the original texts, arguing that it was not a copy of Soviet Marxism but a distinct adaptation to Chinese conditions. In his later years at Harvard’s Fairbank Center he edited Mao’s Road to Power, the unexpurgated collection of Mao’s writings from 1912 to 1949.

United States state institutions 1924–2024 ○ Natural causes

The 39th U.S. president whose administration marked both the peak and the end of détente

After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Carter declared in his January 1980 State of the Union: 'An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America.'

A Georgia peanut farmer and Baptist, Carter rose from Navy nuclear submarine officer to become a 'New South' governor who pledged to end racial discrimination. Elected president in 1976 as a Washington outsider, he brokered the Camp David Accords, returned the Panama Canal, and normalized diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China. In June 1979 he brought détente to its peak by signing SALT II with Brezhnev in Vienna, only to withdraw the treaty from Senate consideration after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that December, proclaiming the Carter Doctrine and closing the era of détente. After leaving office he founded the Carter Center, dedicating his post-presidency to human rights, public health, and conflict mediation, and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.

United States state institutions 1925–2020 ○ Natural causes

A cautious strategist at the Cold War's end

He worried that the Malta Summit was premature, yet ultimately helped make it happen.

Brent Scowcroft was a former U.S. Air Force officer and national-security official whose realist approach emphasized disciplined policy coordination between presidents, diplomats, and military leaders. As national security adviser to Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush, he helped manage arms policy and European diplomacy during the final years of the Cold War. He initially regarded the 1989 Malta Summit as premature because it might raise expectations without producing results, but then helped the administration navigate the meeting and the rapid transformation of U.S.-Soviet relations. In later years he continued to favor alliances and international institutions, criticizing the Iraq invasion and unilateralism.

1926–2010 ○ Natural causes

A historian who traced revolutionary pluralism and the making of Stalinism

Against models of communism as an immutable system, Daniels argued that the movement was an evolutionary product of circumstances.

Robert Vincent Daniels was an American historian and educator who traced competing possibilities within the Russian Revolution and Soviet politics. His landmark book The Conscience of the Revolution examined early Communist pluralism, resisting the idea that Stalin’s collectivization and concentration of power were inevitable outcomes of the revolution. Daniels distinguished the Opposition’s industrialization program from Stalin’s violent implementation, while cautioning against exaggerating foreign-policy differences between the factions. His later scholarship and textbooks brought debates in Soviet history to generations of students.

United States state institutions 1927–2008 ○ Stroke

The U-2 pilot whose six-minute, 928-photo run over Cuba on 14 October 1962 revealed Soviet missiles and ignited the Cuban Missile Crisis

"I kind of felt like I was going to be looked at as the one who started the whole thing. I wasn't anxious to have that reputation.", Associated Press interview, 2005

A native of Apalachicola, Florida, he enlisted in the Army Air Forces at 17 and flew combat missions in both the Korean War and two deployments to Vietnam. On the morning of 14 October 1962, his six-minute U-2 flight over western Cuba produced 928 photographs; analysts identified Soviet SS-4 medium-range ballistic missiles by noon, and the images landed on President Kennedy's desk, triggering the thirteen-day nuclear standoff.

United States state institutions 1928–2010 ○ Stroke

Kennedy's speechwriter whose pen chose 'quarantine' over airstrikes at the nuclear brink

Asked if he wrote 'ask not what your country can do for you,' his lifelong reply was: 'Ask not.'

John F. Kennedy's chief speechwriter and closest adviser, whom Kennedy called his 'intellectual blood bank.' During the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, he opposed the Joint Chiefs' call for airstrikes and backed the naval blockade, drafting Kennedy's October 22 televised address and choosing the word 'quarantine' over 'blockade' to avoid the legal implication of a declaration of war. He later called it 'the Kennedy speech with the greatest impact on the planet,' and also drafted the president's secret correspondence with Khrushchev. After the assassination he wrote Johnson's 'Let Us Continue' address, resigned in 1964, and spent decades as an international lawyer and author, endorsing Barack Obama in 2008.

United States state institutions 1929–

Reagan's NSC Soviet expert who assembled the 'Soviet 101' briefing papers and the last US ambassador to the USSR

Matlock recalled, "I've never had a better student than Ronald Reagan. He knew that he didn't know a lot of things, and he wasn't ashamed of it."

Jack Matlock was an American Soviet specialist who fell in love with Russia reading Dostoevsky and spent a 35-year Foreign Service career immersed in US-Soviet relations, beginning with translating Kennedy-Khrushchev messages during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis from the Moscow embassy. As Reagan's NSC senior director for European and Soviet affairs, he assembled the 'Soviet 101' curriculum: 24 briefing papers by CIA and State Department analysts, and role-played Gorbachev in mock summits to prepare Reagan for Geneva. Appointed ambassador to the USSR in 1987, he witnessed the country's final four years and later judged Gorbachev's failure to secure a written SDI-sharing commitment from Reagan at Geneva a 'strategic error.'

1929–2018 Died

A scholar who quantified the Soviet economy's hidden flows

Even when official sales fell, samogon continued to be consumed outside the statistics.

Vladimir Treml was an American economist who used indirect indicators to estimate income and consumption missing from official Soviet statistics. He analyzed actual alcohol consumption, including samogon, and vodka's share of state budget revenue, showing why retail-sales figures understated drinking in Soviet society. His 1982 book Alcohol in the USSR: A Statistical Study brought this work together and was kept in restricted library collections in the Soviet Union.

United States state institutions 1930–

The pragmatic diplomat who engineered the Cold War's final transition

In his November 29, 1989 Malta briefing memo, Baker wrote that Bush should project a "new pace and purpose" while leading as much as Gorbachev.

James Baker was a lawyer and Republican political operator who became central to American conservative politics through his long alliance with George H. W. Bush. After serving as treasury secretary on currency and international finance, he became secretary of state and helped manage the diplomacy of the Cold War's final years, German reunification, and the Gulf crisis. He did not treat Gorbachev's reforms as a matter of faith, weighing them against American interests and allied stability, yet he persuaded Bush to reach toward perestroika and translated that choice into the agenda and working arrangements of the 1989 Malta summit. His cautious realism slowed the inertia of confrontation while turning rapid change into negotiations that Washington could help manage.

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.

United States state institutions 1933–2017 ○ Natural causes

An intelligence officer whose restraint mattered at the nuclear brink

Seeing unusual Soviet nuclear readiness, he advised against raising NATO's alert level.

Leonard H. Perroots was a U.S. Air Force general and military intelligence specialist whose career intersected with the management of nuclear danger late in the Cold War. As assistant chief of staff for intelligence, U.S. Air Forces in Europe, during Able Archer 83 in 1983, he observed unusual Soviet nuclear readiness but advised against raising NATO alert levels, avoiding a potentially dangerous escalation. He later directed the Defense Intelligence Agency and left a significant retrospective account of the war scare, illustrating how intelligence judgment can shape decisions at the nuclear brink.

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–

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.