People of the Revolution and the USSR

1965–

Environmental historian who traced Chernobyl's concealed death toll

"Ignorance about low-dose exposure is, I have argued, partly deliberate."

MIT historian of science and environment whose decade of archival work across Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus redefined the study of nuclear landscapes. Her Plutopia (2013) exposed the parallel plutonium disasters at Hanford and Mayak: the only book to win top scholarly prizes across Russian, U.S., and environmental history. And her National Book Critics Circle finalist Manual for Survival (2019) argued that the IAEA and Chernobyl Forum excluded internal exposure from contaminated food, suppressing evidence of tens of thousands of deaths. That critique has become the central historiographical challenge to the international consensus, opening a reckoning with how Cold War nuclear institutions shaped the science of low-dose radiation itself.

1966–

American historian who reassessed Soviet intervention in the Spanish Civil War using declassified archives

The basic error in the literature, he argues, has always been to approach Stalin's position in Spain as one based on strength rather than weakness.

Born in Burns, Oregon, he earned his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2001 under Stanley G. Payne. His 2004 book Stalin and the Spanish Civil War (Columbia University Press) drew on declassified Soviet documents to argue that Operation X, Stalin's military intervention in Spain, was enormously ambitious but an operational failure, becoming a landmark of post-Cold War revisionist historiography. He teaches European history and Holocaust studies at Queen's University Belfast and continues to research interwar Europe and the internationalization of the Spanish Civil War.

1967–

American historian who argued the USSR continued the imperial ethnographic practices of the tsarist state

Her continuity thesis, that tsarist-era ethnographers practically designed the Bolshevik state's territorial divisions and population categories, reshaped the landscape of post-Soviet nationality studies.

An American historian of Russia and the Soviet Union, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In her 2005 book Empire of Nations, she advanced a continuity thesis: former imperial ethnographers provided the Bolsheviks with knowledge that shaped the USSR's territorial borders and nationality policies, meaning the Soviet state did not break with imperial ethnographic practices but inherited them. The book won the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize and stands alongside Terry Martin's The Affirmative Action Empire, which stresses the novelty of Soviet nationality policy, as one of the two poles of post-1991 scholarship on Soviet nations.

1970–

The American Soviet historian who mapped the three schools of Leningrad Affair historiography

In his 2004 article, Brandenberger argued that rumors of a 'Russian Communist Party' were a decisive factor behind the Leningrad Affair, adding an ideological dimension to interpretations that saw it as purely political factional struggle.

Professor of Russian and Soviet history at the University of Richmond. His research examines Stalin-era propaganda, ideology, and the formation of Russian national identity, beginning with National Bolshevism (2002), which argued that Stalin's russocentric mobilizational propaganda unintentionally forged a modern Russian national identity. His in-progress book, The Purge of Stalin's Would-Be Successors, draws on over twenty years of research into the Leningrad Affair (1949–1952), mapping three schools of historiography (factional struggle, Stalin's distrust of Leningrad, and self-provocation through patron-client networks) while arguing that the archives remain too closed for a definitive account.

1970–

An ethnographer of the social costs of the post-1989 transition

Traveling through Eastern Europe after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 became the turning point that led her to study both the hopes and costs of the transition.

Kristen Ghodsee is an American anthropologist and scholar of Eastern Europe whose ethnographic work examines how socialism and the transition from it shaped ordinary lives, especially women’s lives. Drawing on fieldwork in Bulgaria, she has studied socialist achievements alongside the losses of transition, recovering material experiences often obscured by triumphalist anti-communist narratives. Co-authored with Mitchell A. Orenstein, Taking Stock of the Shock compares economic and social indicators after the 1989 revolutions and argues that the gains of transition were distributed unevenly. Her work neither idealizes socialism nor accepts its replacement as an uncomplicated success, insisting that the consequences of capitalism must be assessed through evidence and people’s lived experience.

?–

A historian who anatomized the Soviet countryside state

Robbed in Moscow in 1992, he went to the police station to file a report, where the captain served him tea and cookies and casually told him he would have to pay bribes to move the case forward.

James Heinzen is an American historian of modern Russia and Soviet society, whose work spans political, social, and cultural history. His major study, Inventing a Soviet Countryside, traces how the state sought to transform rural Russia after the 1917 Revolution through the People's Commissariat of Agriculture, or Narkomzem. He analyzes the clash between overcoming rural backwardness and building socialism through the choices and conflicts of officials, Communist leaders, and peasants. His later research examined bribery and everyday corruption under Stalin, extending his study of tensions between state policy and social practice.

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A US historian who redefined the question of how the Space Race should be measured

“If we define the ‘space race’ as spaceflight capability, the Soviets won it hands down.”

Jennifer Frost is a historian of US women’s, political, and cultural history who teaches at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. Through work on the civil rights movement, the New Left, Hollywood politics, and history education, she has treated social movements and popular culture as central evidence for US history. In a 2019 reflection on the fiftieth anniversary of the Space Race, she distinguished the single benchmark of a lunar landing from overall spaceflight capability, arguing that Soviet firsts and the US Moon landing must be assessed together. This comparison frames the competition as a historical process shaped by military purposes, later cooperation, and social costs, not only as a national victory tally.

?–

A historian who decoded the Cold War archives

The secret speech, translated into Polish, was no longer secret.

Mark Kramer is an American historian of the Cold War, the Soviet Union, and political change in the socialist bloc and post-communist Eastern Europe. At Harvard University’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, he directs the Cold War Studies program and has worked extensively in newly opened archives across the former Warsaw Pact and Western countries. His research on how Khrushchev’s 1956 secret speech circulated through Poland traced how a text intended to remain confidential became a political force in de-Stalinization. Through research and editorial work, he treats Cold War history as an international process in which documents and information moved across borders, not only as a sequence of decisions by state leaders.