Dmitri Volkogonov

Who was Dmitri Volkogonov?

Dmitri Antonovich Volkogonov was a Russian historian and Colonel-General who was the former head of the Soviet military's psychological warfare department. He published revealing biographies of Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Lenin, among others. Despite being a committed Stalinist and Marxist-Leninist ideologue for most of his career, Volkogonov came to repudiate communism and the Soviet system within the last decade of his life before his death from cancer in 1995.

Through his research in the restricted archives of the Soviet Central Committee, Volkogonov discovered facts that contradicted the official Soviet version of events, and the cult of personality that had been built up around Lenin and Stalin. Volkogonov published books that contributed to the strain of liberal Russian thought that emerged during Glasnost in the late 1980s and the post-Soviet era of the early 1990s.