Dmitri Volkogonov

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Dmitri Antonovich Volkogonov (Дмитрий Антонович Волкогонов in Russian) (22 March 1928, Chita – 6 December 1995, Moscow) was a Russian historian, Doctor of Philosophy, Doctor of History, Colonel General (1986).

Volkogonov was the head of the Institute of Military History at the Ministry of Defense of the Soviet Union between 1988 and 1991. He was director of the arm of the Soviet military concerned with "psychological warfare", writing a manual on this subject for Soviet forces (The Psychological War). He also presided over a number of governmental and presidential committees.

Long known in Western military circles as one of the hardest of hard-liners, Volkogonov began, by the middle of Leonid Brezhnev's rule, to have serious doubts about the Soviet regime. At first these only concerned Joseph Stalin, whose purges led to the deaths of both of Volkogonov's parents. He spent nearly twenty years compiling a revisionist (by Soviet standards) biography. Though he forthrightly described Stalin's crimes, he remained an admirer of Vladimir Lenin and (following the Nikita Khrushchev line) believed that Stalinism was a perversion of true Leninism. That his book would be controversial was obvious to others, especially his superior, to whom he showed the book once it was completed. After reading "Joseph Stalin" he told Volkogonov that he was, in effect, attacking not just Stalin but Lenin. Volkogonov's wife also begged him not to publish the book and he did hold it back for a time, fearful of the consequences. Once the book was published, these consequences were not slow in coming. He was fired in 1991 from his job as director of the Institute of Military History at the Ministry of Defense of the USSR by Mikhail Gorbachev.

Once the Soviet Union's collapse was complete, Volkogonov combined his historical work with political activity in the newly established Russian state. Following the failed coup attempt of 1991, Volkogonov was appointed Defense Advisor to Russian leader Boris Yeltsin. By then he was already afflicted with the cancer that would kill him in 1995. Before he died, he contributed much to the so-called "liberal" strain of Russian thought that the Soviet period was itself an aberration in Russian history and thus "un-Russian." Volkogonov was one of the leaders of the movement to expose the crimes of the Soviet regime and exorcise its malignant influence from Russia. The independent streak that had come to the fore in the Eighties continued until the end of his life. He opposed the use of force in ethnic disputes and criticized Yeltsin for "having taken the advice of wrong-headed counselors" in the decision to invade Chechnya. (Editor's Preface, Autopsy for an Empire, Shukman, 1997)

Volkogonov is most famous for his trilogy Leaders (Вожди, or Vozhdi), which consists of the three books about Vladimir Lenin (Lenin: A New Biography), Leon Trotsky (Trotsky: The Eternal Revolutionary) and Joseph Stalin (Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy) and Autopsy for an Empire: the Seven Leaders Who Built the Soviet Regime (Russian title: Sem Vozhdei), 1998. Although his works have been attacked by critics in the West for various flaws of scholarship and writing, it should be noted that the English editions were essentially condensed versions of the much longer Russian originals (as acknowledged by their translator and editor Harold Shukman).