People of the Revolution and the USSR

United States state institutions Liberalism and republicanism 1900–1965 ○ Heart attack

Two-time presidential nominee who pressed the Soviet Union over its missiles in Cuba at the UN Security Council

At the emergency UN Security Council session of 25 October 1962 he told Soviet ambassador Valerian Zorin, "Don't wait for the translation: yes or no?" When Zorin refused to answer, he said he was "prepared to wait for my answer until hell freezes over," then had missile-site photographs shown.

Adlai Ewing Stevenson II (1900–1965) was an American politician and diplomat from a prominent Illinois political family; he was the Democratic nominee for president in 1952 and 1956, losing both times to Dwight Eisenhower. As governor of Illinois (1949–1953, counted as the 31st or 33rd governor under differing conventions) he removed political considerations from state police hiring, introduced a merit system, and vetoed a Red Scare bill requiring loyalty oaths of public employees. In 1949 he privately gave a sworn deposition as a character witness for Alger Hiss, which Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon used in the 1952 campaign to attack him as soft on communism. U.S. ambassador to the UN from 1961 until his death, he died of a heart attack in London on 14 July 1965.

France state institutions Liberalism and republicanism 1902–1989 ○ Natural causes

A Radical Socialist who defended the Republic

“Long live the Republic all the same!”

Vincent Badie was a French Radical Socialist lawyer and politician who worked in local government and parliament, defending veterans and republican institutions. In July 1940 he accepted that constitutional revision might be considered, but rejected transferring power to Pétain in a way that would abolish the Republic; he tried to present a motion signed by 27 parliamentarians and then voted against the grant of full powers. After Vichy suspended him as mayor, he joined the Resistance, was arrested, and deported to Dachau. After the war he returned to parliament and twice served as minister for veterans, while also defending French colonial rule and overseas presence.

France state institutions Liberalism and republicanism 1907–1982 ○ Natural causes

French prime minister who promised a ceasefire within four months after Điện Biên Phủ and concluded the 1954 Geneva Accords

As prime minister in 1954, Pierre Mendès France negotiated directly with the Viet Minh at Geneva, securing the July armistice that ended the fighting in Indochina, while also initiating talks on Tunisian autonomy.

A Radical Party lawyer and economist of Jewish descent, he joined the Free French during the war. An early critic of the Indochina War, he became prime minister on 17 June 1954, after the fall of Điện Biên Phủ, promising to resign if he failed to secure a ceasefire within four months, and kept the promise with the Geneva Accords of 21 July. In eight months in office he conceded autonomy to Tunisia, and the Algerian War broke out that November; he also laid the groundwork for military co-operation with Israel and the French nuclear programme.

United States state institutions Liberalism and republicanism 1912–1983 ○ Natural causes

A hawkish Democratic senator who tied Soviet trade status to Jewish emigration

"The American people, above all, are committed to a human détente… to the free movement of men and ideas," he said, "on which a stable and more lasting peace must be based."

The son of Norwegian immigrants, born in Washington state, he served in Congress for over four decades as a Cold War liberal. A champion of civil rights and environmental legislation yet skeptical of détente, he drove the Jackson-Vanik amendment tying Soviet trade status to Jewish emigration. When the informal 1974 bargain with Kissinger and Dobrynin collapsed under Soviet rejection, Jackson effectively sank the 1972 trade agreement. His hawkish aides later formed the core of neoconservatism.

United States state institutions Liberalism and republicanism 1925–1968 ✕ Assassinated

The president's brother and attorney general who engineered the secret settlement of the Cuban Missile Crisis

He later wrote: 'The strongest argument against an all-out surprise attack was that it would be a Pearl Harbor in reverse and would blacken the name of the United States in the eyes of the world.'

The younger brother and most trusted adviser of President John F. Kennedy, he was appointed attorney general at 35 and led a crusade against organized crime while championing civil rights. During the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, he initially favored invasion but was persuaded by George Ball's Pearl Harbor analogy to support a naval blockade instead; in the crisis's final hours, his secret meeting with Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin, delivering the promise that U.S. Jupiter missiles would be removed from Turkey, was the key to the settlement. After his brother's assassination, he served as a U.S. Senator, opposing the Vietnam War and fighting poverty, before being assassinated during his own presidential campaign in 1968.

Russian Federation state institutions Liberalism and republicanism 1931–2007 ○ Natural causes

The man who climbed onto the tank

In a New Year's address broadcast at 12:00 Moscow time on 31 December 1999: "I am resigning. I have done everything I could. … I want to ask you for forgiveness, because many of our hopes have not come true."

Born in Butka in the Urals in 1931 to a peasant family ruined as kulaks in collectivisation, he died in Moscow in 2007. A construction engineer who joined the party in 1961, he served as first secretary of the Sverdlovsk regional party (1976–85) and Moscow city party chief (1985–87), and was removed after criticising the leadership at the Central Committee plenum of 21 October 1987. He became an RSFSR people's deputy in 1990 and then chairman of the RSFSR Supreme Soviet (1990–91), winning the presidency in June 1991 and serving until 1999.

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.

Benin Liberalism and republicanism 1934–

Benin’s transitional government and pluralism

In the 1991 runoff he won 67.7% against Kérékou, becoming the first opposition candidate in post-colonial Francophone Africa to win an election.

A Beninese politician and former World Bank official. He became transitional prime minister after the 1990 National Conference and defeated Kérékou in the 1991 presidential election. He led the transition from the socialist regime, rather than founding it.

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 1938–2019 ○ Natural death

Founder of the MFM, the left party of the 1972 student-revolution generation

As the MFM was at last admitted to the front, Ratsiraka declared, 'There is no longer any reason to exclude the MFM.'

A sociology professor at Madagascar's agricultural college, Rakotonirina entered politics through Monja Jaona's MONIMA and helped organize the May 1972 protests that brought down the Tsiranana regime. In December 1972 he founded the Maoist left party MFM (Militants for Power to the Little People), which championed the poor, peasants and slave-descendants; after Ratsiraka dissolved the party and placed him under house arrest in 1976, he brought the MFM into the FNDR the following year and as head of the CSR's economic commission managed the nationalized enterprises. He later turned to liberalism, led the 1991 pro-democracy movement, and in 2009 was arrested as the prime minister named by the exiled president.

Czechia state institutions Liberalism and republicanism 1941–

The market reformer who rejected a third way

“We want a market economy without any adjectives.”

Václav Klaus was a Czech economist and politician who represented a radical route from state socialism to a market economy after 1989. He founded the Civic Democratic Party, helped lead the dissolution of Czechoslovakia, and later served as Czech prime minister and president. He sympathized with the Prague Spring's political liberalization but rejected its economic Third Way, a position that shaped the transition's call for an unqualified market economy and the subsequent Czech conservative line. As president, he challenged European integration and climate policy while emphasizing national sovereignty and markets.

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.