Dmitri Volkogonov

While reading early journals of Party members from the 1920s, Volkogonov realized "how stifled and sterile political debate in the Soviet Union had become in comparison to the early days."

Dmitri Antonovich Volkogonov (Дми́трий Анто́нович Волкого́нов; 22 March 1928 – 6 December 1995) was a Soviet and 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 a biography of Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Lenin, among others such as Leon Trotsky.

Volkogonov was born on 22 March 1928 in Chita, Eastern Siberia.

Volkogonov was the son of a collective farm manager and a schoolteacher.

While there, Volkogonov compiled a two-volume collection of data on 45,000 Red Army officers who were arrested during the purges of the 1930s, in which 15,000 were shot.

In 1937, when he was eight, Volkogonov's father was arrested and shot during Stalin's purges for being found in possession of a pamphlet by Bukharin, who had fallen out of favor with Stalin and who was arrested that year.

This was something Volkogonov 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."

Volkogonov entered the military at the age of seventeen in 1945, which was common for many orphans.

It was as early as the 1950s, while a young Army officer, that Volkogonov first discovered information that created cognitive dissonance within himself.

Khrushchev's 1956 secret speech further solidified this thought within him, but he kept these thoughts to himself at that time.

During the decades that Volkogonov headed the Department of Special Propaganda, he visited Angola, Ethiopia, the Middle East and Afghanistan.

He "enjoyed a rapid rise in the Soviet Army as a specialist in charge of psychological and ideological warfare. Only a fully committed Communist could qualify for these posts, and he earned his credentials by grinding out propagandistic and agitational screeds."

"But even as he was indoctrinating troops in Communist orthodoxy, General Volkogonov was struggling with private doubts based on the horrors he discovered hidden in the archives".

Volkogonov also had the opportunity to view the conditions of various client states during the Cold War.

While these countries received military aid, Volkogonov later recalled, "...they all became poorer; their economies were collapsing everywhere. And I came to the conclusion that the Marxist model was a real historic blind alley, and that we, too, were caught in a historic trap."

He studied at the Lenin Military-Political Academy in Moscow in 1961, transferring to the Soviet Army's propaganda department in 1970.

There he wrote propaganda pamphlets and manuals on psychological warfare and gained a reputation as a hardliner.

Volkogonov was a fervent ideologue until the end of the 1970s, and devoted his energy to spreading Marxism–Leninism within the military.

Only with the most impeccable communist credentials did Volkogonov access the most secret Soviet archives.

While reading in the archives during the Brezhnev years, Volkogonov "found documents that astounded him — papers that revealed top Communists as cruel, dishonest and inept".

Thus, while Volkogonov was actively writing and editing Soviet propaganda materials for troops, "[he] was engaged in a lengthy, tortured but very private process of re-evaluating Soviet history."

Volkogonov began writing his biography of Stalin in 1978.

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.

He completed it by 1983, but it was banned by the Central Committee.

It was published under Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of Glasnost before the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

The publication of the book on Stalin within Russia made Volkogonov "a pariah among his fellow senior officers".

Although Volkogonov approached Lenin in the Stalin biography in a rather conventional way, he was passionate in his indictment of the Stalinist system.

As he later remarked, "It immediately made me many enemies."

"'Volkogonov admitted publicly that, like many senior Soviet officials, he had lived two mental lives, rising higher and higher in his career while burrowing deeper in the archives, as if symbolically undermining the system that had nurtured him.'"He had been director of the Institute of Military History since 1985, where he was heavily involved in research and writing.

While the Stalin biography caused friction, everything really came to a head in June 1991, when he was forced to resign.

Volkogonov had shown the other senior officers at the Institute a draft of the first volume of a 10-volume official Soviet history of World War II.

In it, Volkogonov criticized Stalin's management of the war and his liquidation of Soviet officers.

One British historian, summarizing Volkogonov's criticisms of Stalin's military role in World War II, then notes that "a number of officers at the Institute of Military History who had fought on the Eastern Front were critical of Volkogonov's writings on the war because he had never set foot on a battlefield. He was, they said, an 'armchair-general'."

"Accused of blackening the name of the army, as well as that of the Communist Party and the Soviet state, and personally attacked by Minister of Defense Yazov," and under pressure from Gorbachev, Volkogonov resigned.

After the failed 1991 Soviet coup d'état attempt by communist hardliners in August 1991, followed by the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991, Volkogonov became the special adviser for defence issues to the Russian President Boris Yeltsin.

Despite being a committed Stalinist and Marxist–Leninist 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.