Nicolas Werth

Nicolas Werth (born 1950) is a French historian.

Werth is a scholar of communist studies. He is the son of Alexander Werth, a Russian-born British journalist and writer who lived in the Soviet Union during World War II.

Nicolas Werth has taught abroad (Minsk, New York, Moscow, Shanghai). He served as Cultural Attaché at the French Embassy in Moscow during perestroika from 1985 to 1989. Werth joined the CNRS in 1989, where he devoted himself to History of the Soviet Union. His research has focused, among other things, on state violence and social resistance in the years 1920–1930.

He wrote the chapters dedicated to the USSR in The Black Book of Communism. He was the historic consultant for the French television documentary film, Staline: le tyran rouge, broadcast on M6 in 2007, and is co-author with Patrick Rotman and François Aymé of Gulag, The Story, broadcast on Arte in 2019.

He is President of Mémorial-France, the French branch of the Memorial society, since 2020.