Dmitri volkogonov

Dmitri Volkogonov is the type of Russian historian the West needs more of. His writings reflect a culmination of events closely tied to the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the nation his life was spent in the service to; he contributed significantly to the delegitimization of the Soviet regime in the eyes of ordinary Russians by debunking myths around its national heroes and exposing the naked terror which underpinned the USSR. What’s more, his own life reveals as much about the Soviet Union as those of the communist leaders he wrote about.

For most of his life, Volkogonov was the furthest thing from a dissident historian. In fact, only in his last few years of life, after having spent most of his career as a Soviet general, did he come to disavow his life-long held beliefs.

He was born in 1928 to a schoolteacher/farmer and his wife in Siberia. At the age of eight he was orphaned when his father was arrested for possessing a pamphlet written by the recently purged Nikolai Bukharin, a first-generation Bolshevik revolutionary and close Stalin ally who, nevertheless, had recently been executed in the Great Purge of 1937. His father was similarly shot and his mother was sent to labor camp where she too perished. The young Volkogon

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