Dmitri Antonovich Volkogonov (; 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. 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. 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. Among his other work, in the spring of 1992, President Boris Yeltsin appointed Volkogonov to lead a commission on establishing the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation.

Early life

Volkogonov was born on 22 March 1928 in Chita, Eastern Siberia. Volkogonov was the son of a collective farm manager and a schoolteacher. 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 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."

Researching Stalin

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." 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 criticised Stalin's management of the war and his liquidation of Soviet officers.

"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. The second parliamentary committee released 78 million files to public access. As part of this process, Volkogonov was able to personally review "many documents of the Communist Party Central Committee and the Politburo". This declassification of state and Party papers allowed historians access which had never been allowed going back to the early formation of the Soviet Union seventy years before.

From December 31, 1991 he was a member of the Commission for Determining the List of Documents of the Archives of the President of the Russian Federation.

From January 29, 1992 he was a member of the State Delegation of the Russian Federation for the Preparation of Agreements between the Russian Federation and the States of the Former Union Republics on the Whole Range of Military-Political Issues.

From February 22, 1992 he was a member of the Government Commission for the Use of State Property Owned by the Former Institute of the Theory and History of Socialism of the Central Committee of the CPSU.

From April 3, 1992 he was a member of the Presidential Advisory Council.

From April 4, 1992 he served as chairman of the State Commission for the Creation of the Ministry of Defense, Army, and Navy of the Russian Federation. From September 24, 1992 to January 24, 1994, he served as Advisor to the President of the Russian Federation on Defense and Security Issues.

On October 2, 1992, the presidential order appointing him Advisor to the President of Russia on Defense Issues was declared invalid.

From June 3, 1993, he served as Representative of the President of the Russian Federation for participation in the Constitutional Assembly.

When notice of Volkogonov's research became known in the West, inquiries came to him from Alger Hiss and his lawyer in the United States. In 1948, Hiss had been accused of being a spy for the Soviet Union. When Hiss's lawyer contacted Volkogonov to check the KGB archives for record of Hiss as a spy, The New York Times reported: <blockquote>"Not a single document, and a great amount of materials has been studied, substantiates the allegation that Mr. A. Hiss collaborated with the intelligence services of the Soviet Union," the official, Gen. Dmitry A. Volkogonov, chairman of the Russian Government's military intelligence archives, declared. He called the espionage accusations against Mr. Hiss "completely groundless."</blockquote>

Later Volkogonov took issue with what amounted to exoneration of Hiss.</blockquote>

Responding to Volkogonov's last remarks, Hiss himself stated: "If he and his associates haven't examined all the files, I hope they will examine the others, and they will show the same thing."

Volkogonov co-chaired a U.S.-Russia Joint Commission on Prisoners of War, "and continued, always, to write."

Biography of Lenin and Critique of Leninism

Although Volkogonov began intensive research into Lenin in 1990, by the late 1980s he was actually already arriving at his own conclusion regarding Lenin's role. He said that the turning point was when he discovered one of Lenin's orders calling for the public hanging of Kulak peasants in 1918: |

"It never occurred to us", he wrote, "that the 'breakthrough' of October 1917 might be a counter-revolution, when compared to the events of February of that year."

Character

When Volkogonov's editor for the English editions of his books, Harold Shukman, first met him in Oxford, England in 1989, he found Volkogonov to be "utterly unlike [his] idea of a Soviet general". Shukman explained: "He did not strut or swagger, or drink or smoke, and in the many different situations in which I was to see him — in other countries, in Russia, with academics, etc., he was invariably easy-going and relaxed, and plainly popular."|20px|20px|Dmitri Volkogonov, Introduction, Autopsy For An Empire

By the end of his life, Volkogonov had "firmly committed himself to the view that Russia's only hope in 1917 lay in the liberal and social democratic coalition that emerged in the February Revolution."

In October 1993, he took an active part in the dispersal of the Congress of People's Deputies and the Supreme Soviet of Russia, serving as an aide to Deputy Defense Minister Konstantin Kobets. He was deputy head of the task force tasked with storming the Supreme Soviet. (According to Deputy Speaker of the Supreme Soviet , at the height of the shelling of the White House, he told him over the phone: "The situation has changed. The President, as Supreme Commander-in-Chief, signed a decree to the Minister of Defense to storm the House of Soviets and assumed full responsibility. We will suppress the putsch at any cost. Order in Moscow will be restored by the army".)

In 1993, he was elected to the State Duma of the Federal Assembly of Russia of the first convocation, where he was a member of the and the Defense Committee.

Since March 1994, he has been a member of the initiative group of the Democratic Choice of Russia – United Democrats party. From October 21, 1993 to January 26, 1994, he was entrusted with the leadership, on a voluntary basis, of the commission under the president of the Russian Federation for the investigation of the disappearance without a trace of citizens of foreign states, as well as Russian citizens who disappeared under unclear circumstances outside the borders of the former Soviet Union.

Since February 17, 1994 he was a member of the Council on Personnel Policy under the president of the Russian Federation. Since August 18, 1994 he was a member of the Expert-Analytical Council under the president of the Russian Federation. Since September 22, 1994 he was a member of the Commission on Declassification of Documents. Since November 8, 1994 he served as chairman of the Commission under the President of the Russian Federation on Prisoners of War, Internees, and Missing Persons.

He worked until the last day of his life. He died of stomach cancer on December 6, 1995 in Moscow. He was buried at Kuntsevo Cemetery. His family donated his papers to the United States Library of Congress.

Volkogonov is most famous for his trilogy Leaders (Вожди, or Vozhdi), which consists of the three books about: Vladimir Lenin (Lenin: A New Biography, 1994); Leon Trotsky (Trotsky: The Eternal Revolutionary, 1992); and Joseph Stalin (Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy).

He also finished just before his death Autopsy for an Empire: the Seven Leaders Who Built the Soviet Regime (Russian title: Sem Vozhdei). The book presents chapters on "the seven leaders of the Soviet Union: Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko and Gorbachev." Volkogonov was in the Soviet Army during the reign of six of the seven leaders, and he had "direct working contact" with four of those leaders in his role as a colonel-general. Conversely, other writers such as Daniel Singer have claimed bias in his historical interpretation to “proclaim that Marxism is evil and revolution is wrong”, superficial assessment of the ideological formulations and compared his book unfavourably to the Deutscher trilogy. French historian Pierre Broué has also disputed the historical assessments by modern historians such as Volkogonov in which he argued had falsely equated Leninism, Stalinism and Trotskyism to present the notion of ideological continuity.

Awards

  • Order "For Merit to the Fatherland"
  • Order of the Red Banner of Labour
  • Order of the Red Star
  • Order "For Service to the Homeland in the Armed Forces of the USSR"
  • Order of the Badge of Honour
  • Jubilee Medal "In Commemoration of the 100th Anniversary of the Birth of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin"
  • Medal "For Distinction in Guarding the State Border of the USSR"
  • Jubilee Medal "Twenty Years of Victory in the Great Patriotic War 1941–1945"
  • Medal "Veteran of the Armed Forces of the USSR"
  • Medal "For Strengthening of Brotherhood in Arms"
  • Medal "For Construction of the Baikal-Amur Railway"
  • Jubilee Medal "40 Years of the Armed Forces of the USSR"
  • Jubilee Medal "50 Years of the Armed Forces of the USSR"
  • Jubilee Medal "60 Years of the Armed Forces of the USSR"
  • Jubilee Medal "70 Years of the Armed Forces of the USSR"
  • Medal "For Impeccable Service"
  • State Prize of the Russian Federation
  • Lenin Komsomol Prize
  • Medal "50 Years of the Mongolian People's Revolution"
  • Order of the National Flag
  • Order of 9 September 1944

Works

  • Mythical "Threat" and the Real Danger to Peace, Novosti Press Agency Publishing House, 1982
  • The Psychological War, Progress Publishers, 1986
  • The Army and Social Progress, Progress Publishers, 1987
  • Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy, Grove Weidenfeld, 1991
  • Credited as a Historical Consultant for Russia's War: Blood upon the Snow television documentary series.
  • Trotsky: The Eternal Revolutionary, Free Press, 1996
  • The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire: Political Leaders from Lenin to Gorbachev, HarperCollins Publishers, 1998
  • Autopsy for an Empire: The Seven Leaders Who Built the Soviet Regime, Free Press, 1999

See also

  • List of members of the State Duma of Russia who died in office

References

Further reading

  • McInnes, Neil. "Volkogonov's journey" National Interest 08849382, (Winter96/97), Issue 46 online