Dmitri Volkogonov
| Dmitri Volkogonov | |
|---|---|
| Personal details | |
| Born |
Dmitri Antonovich Volkogonov March 22, 1928 Chita, RSFSR, USSR |
| Died | December 6, 1995 (aged 67) Moscow, Russia |
| Nationality | Russian |
| Occupation | Historian |
| Military service | |
| Service/branch | Army |
| Years of service | 1945–1991 |
| Rank | Colonel-General |
Dmitri Antonovich Volkogonov (Russian: Дми́трий Анто́нович Волкого́нов) (22 March 1928 – 6 December 1995) was a Soviet/Russian historian and colonel general who was head of the Soviet military's psychological warfare department. After research in secret Soviet archives (both before and after the dissolution of the union), he published 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.
Dmitri Volkogonov was born March 22, 1928 in Chita, Eastern Siberia. Dmitri was the son of a collective farm manager and a schoolteacher. In 1937 when Dmitri was eight, his father was arrested and shot during Stalin's purges for being found in possession of a pamphlet by Bukharin. This was something Dmitri only found out years later while doing his own research in the restricted archives in Moscow. His mother was sent to a labor camp, where she died during World War II. The family was "exiled to Krasnoyarsk in Western Siberia: Volkogonov joked that as they were already in the Far East, and Stalin was not in the habit of sending his political prisoners to Hawaii, they had to be sent west."
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