31 Stalinism era scholars and writers

Izrail Iossofovich Agol was a Soviet geneticist and philosopher. He was a member of the USSR Academy of Science, worked briefly in the United States of America and took an interest in radiation induced mutagenesis. As a Marxist philosopher, he also studied vitalist and mechanist views in biology and their relation to Marxism. He was killed in the aftermath of Trofim Lysenko's rise in the Stalin regime.

Daniil Leonidovich Andreyev was a Russian writer, poet, and Christian mystic.

Anton Vladimirovich Antonov-Ovseenko was a Russian historian and writer.

George Robert Acworth Conquest was a British historian and poet. He is best known for his Three Laws of Politics.

Milovan Djilas ; 12 June 1911 – 20 April 1995) was a Yugoslav communist politician, theorist and author. He was a key figure in the Partisan movement during World War II, as well as in the post-war government. A self-identified democratic socialist, Djilas became one of the best-known and most prominent dissidents in Yugoslavia and all of Eastern Europe.

Everyday Stalinism or Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s is a book by Australian academic Sheila Fitzpatrick first published in 1999 by Oxford University Press and in paperback in 2000. Sheila Fitzpatrick is the Bernadotte E. Schmitt Distinguished Service Professor (Emeritus), Department of History, University of Chicago.

Yuri Georgievich Felshtinsky is a Russian American historian. Felshtinsky has authored a number of books on Russian history, including The Bolsheviks and the Left SRs, Towards a History of Our Isolation, The Failure of the World Revolution, Blowing up Russia, and The Age of Assassins.

Petro Grigorenko or Petro Hryhorovych Hryhorenko was a high-ranking Soviet Army commander of Ukrainian descent, who in his fifties became a dissident and a writer, one of the founders of the human rights movement in the Soviet Union.

Adam Hochschild is an American author, journalist, historian and lecturer. His best-known works include King Leopold's Ghost (1998), To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914–1918 (2011), Bury the Chains (2005), The Mirror at Midnight (1990), The Unquiet Ghost (1994), and Spain in Our Hearts (2016).

David L. Hoffmann is a Distinguished Professor, an American historian, and an expert in Russian, Soviet, and East European history. His other interests include Environment, Health, Technology, and Science, as well as Power, Culture, and the State. Since 2017 he has been Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of History at the Ohio State University.

Stephen Mark Kotkin is an American historian, academic and author. He is currently the John P. Birkelund '52 Professor in History and International Affairs at Princeton University, where he is also co-director of the program in history and the practice of diplomacy and the director of the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. He is also a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He has won a number of awards and fellowships, including the Guggenheim Fellowship, the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship.

Moshe "Misha" Lewin, was a scholar of Russian and Soviet history. He was a major figure in the school of Soviet studies which emerged in the 1960s.

Roy Aleksandrovich Medvedev is a Russian political writer. He is the author of the dissident history of Stalinism, Let History Judge, first published in English in 1972.

Zhores Aleksandrovich Medvedev was a Russian agronomist, biologist, historian and dissident. His twin brother is the historian Roy Medvedev.

Simon Jonathan Sebag Montefiore is a British historian, television presenter and author of popular history books and novels.

Lev Nussimbaum, who wrote under the pen names Essad Bey and Kurban Said, was a writer and journalist, born in Kyiv to a Jewish family. He lived there and in Baku during his childhood before fleeing the Bolsheviks in 1920 at the age of 14. In 1922, while living in Germany, he obtained a certificate claiming that he had converted to Islam in the presence of the imam of the Turkish embassy in Berlin. He created a niche for himself in the competitive European literary world by writing about topics that Westerners, in general, knew little about - the Caucasus, the Russian Empire, the Bolshevik Revolution, newly discovered oil, and Islam. He wrote under the name of Essad Bey in German.

Nikita Vasilyevich Petrov is a Russian historian. He works at Memorial, a Russian organization dedicated to studying Soviet political repression. Petrov specializes in Soviet security services.

Richard Edgar Pipes was an American academic who specialized in Russian and Soviet history. He published several books critical of communist regimes throughout his career. In 1976, he headed Team B, a team of analysts organized by the Central Intelligence Agency who analyzed the strategic capacities and goals of the Soviet military and political leadership. Pipes was the father of American historian Daniel Pipes.

Edvard Stanislavovich Radzinsky is a Russian playwright, television personality, screenwriter, and the author of more than forty popular history books.

Arseny Borisovich Roginsky was a Soviet dissident and Russian historian. He was one of the founders of the International Historical and Civil Rights Society Memorial, and its head since 1998.

Eli Schechtman was a Yiddish writer. He defined the purpose of his work as follows: "My mission in Jewish literature was and still is ... to show to those who negate the power of the Galut, how mighty – spiritually and physically – were the generations who grew up in that Galut, even in the most godforsaken places."

Robert John Service is a British historian, academic, and author who has written extensively on the history of the Soviet Union, particularly the era from the October Revolution to Stalin's death. He was until 2013 a professor of Russian history at the University of Oxford, a Fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford, and a senior Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He is best known for his biographies of Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky. He has been a fellow of the British Academy since 1998.

Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov, baptized as Varlaam, was a Russian writer, journalist, poet and Gulag survivor. He spent much of the period from 1937 to 1951 imprisoned in forced-labor camps in the arctic region of Kolyma, due in part to his having supported Leon Trotsky and praised the anti-Soviet writer Ivan Bunin. In 1946, near death, he became a medical assistant while still a prisoner. He remained in that role for the duration of his sentence, then for another two years after being released, until 1953. From 1954 to 1978, he wrote a set of short stories about his experiences in the labor camps, which were collected and published in six volumes, collectively known as Kolyma Tales. These books were initially published in the West, in English translation, starting in the 1960s; they were eventually published in the original Russian, but only became officially available in the Soviet Union in 1987, in the post-glasnost era. The Kolyma Tales are considered Shalamov's masterpiece, and "the definitive chronicle" of life in the labor camps.

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was a Russian novelist, philosopher, historian, short story writer, and political prisoner. One of the most famous Soviet dissidents, Solzhenitsyn was an outspoken critic of communism and helped to raise global awareness of political repression in the Soviet Union (USSR), in particular the Gulag system.

Boris Souvarine, also known as Varine, was a French Marxist, communist activist, essayist and journalist.

Karlo Štajner was an Austrian-Yugoslav communist activist and a prominent Gulag survivor. Štajner was born in Vienna, where he joined the Communist Youth of Austria, but emigrated to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in 1922 on the order of the Young Communist International to help the newly established Communist Party of Yugoslavia. After an illegal communist printing house in Zagreb where Štajner worked was searched by the police in 1931, he fled Yugoslavia, visiting Paris, Vienna, and Berlin before finally settling in the Soviet Union in 1932 where he worked in the Comintern publishing house in Moscow. During the Great Purge in 1936, Štajner was arrested and spent the next 17 years in prisons and gulags and three more years in exile in Siberia. He was released in 1956 after being rehabilitated, and returned to Yugoslavia. He spent the rest of his life in Zagreb with his wife Sonya whom he married in Moscow in the 1930s.

Stalin: Breaker of Nations is a biography of Joseph Stalin by author and historian Robert Conquest. It was published in 1991 by Weidenfeld and Nicolson and Penguin Books.

Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928 is the first volume of a three-volume biography of Joseph Stalin by American historian and Princeton Professor of History Stephen Kotkin. Originally published in November 2014 by Penguin Random House: Hardcover (ISBN 978-1594203794) and Kindle and as an audiobook in December 2014 by Recorded Books. The second volume, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941, was published in 2017 by Penguin Random House.

Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941 is the second volume in an extensive three-volume biography of Joseph Stalin by American historian and Princeton Professor of History Stephen Kotkin. Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941 was originally published in October 2017 by Penguin Random House, and as an audiobook in December 2017 by Recorded Books, and was reprinted as a paperback by Penguin in November 2018. The first volume, Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928, was published in 2014 by Penguin Random House and the third and final volume, Miscalculation and the Mao Eclipse is scheduled to be published after 2020.

Stalin's Peasants or Stalin's Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization is a book by the Soviet scholar and historian Sheila Fitzpatrick first published in 1994 by Oxford University Press. It was released in 1996 in a paperback edition and reissued in 2006 by Oxford University Press. Sheila Fitzpatrick is the Bernadotte E. Schmitt Distinguished Service Professor (Emeritus), Department of History, University of Chicago.

The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia is a history of private life in the Soviet Union during Stalinism, written by Orlando Figes. It was published in 2007 by Metropolitan Books and as an audiobook in 2018 by Audible Studios.