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. 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. 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.
It was as early as the 1950s, while a young Army officer, that Volkogonov first discovered information that created cognitive dissonance within himself. While reading early journals of Party members from the 1920s, Volkogonov realised "how stifled and sterile political debate in the Soviet Union had become in comparison to the early days." 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."
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." 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. 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 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.
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 criticised Stalin's management of the war and his liquidation of Soviet officers.
One British historian, summarising 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'."Albert Axell, Russia's Heroes, 1941-45; 2001:248.
"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.
Advisor to Yeltsin and 1990s stances
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.
In the early 1990s, Volkogonov was "the chairman of the commission investigating the hitherto unknown fates of allied prisoners of war in Soviet camps, chairman of the parliamentary committee for KGB and Communist Party archives". 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 July 20, 1991 he served as Advisor to the President of the Russian Federation on Defense Issues.Распоряжение президента РСФСР от 20 июля 1991 года «О советниках Президента РСФСР»
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.Указ президента Российской Федерации от 31 декабря 1991 года № 338 «Об Архиве Президента Российской Федерации»
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.Распоряжение президента Российской Федерации от 29 января 1992 года № 37-рп
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.Распоряжение президента Российской Федерации от 22 февраля 1992 года № 76-рп
From April 3, 1992 he was a member of the Presidential Advisory Council.Распоряжение президента Российской Федерации от 3 апреля 1992 года № 157-рп «Вопросы Президентского консультативного совета»
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.Распоряжение президента Российской Федерации от 4 апреля 1992 года № 158-рп «О Государственной комиссии по созданию Министерства обороны, армии и флота Российской Федерации» From September 24, 1992 to January 24, 1994, he served as Advisor to the President of the Russian Federation on Defense and Security Issues.Указ президента Российской Федерации от 24 сентября 1992 года № 1124 «О советнике Президента Российской Федерации по вопросам обороны и безопасности» Указ президента Российской Федерации от 24 января 1994 года № 177 «О Волкогонове Д. А.»
On October 2, 1992, the presidential order appointing him Advisor to the President of Russia on Defense Issues was declared invalid.Указ президента Российской Федерации от 2 октября 1992 года № 1154 «О признании утратившими силу решений Президента Российской Федерации»
From June 3, 1993, he served as Representative of the President of the Russian Federation for participation in the Constitutional Assembly.Распоряжение президента Российской Федерации от 3 июня 1993 года № 408-рп
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: "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."
Later Volkogonov took issue with what amounted to exoneration of Hiss. In a New York Times article entitled "Russian General Retreats on Hiss," Volkogonov clarified: "I was not properly understood... The Ministry of Defense also has an intelligence service, which is totally different, and many documents have been destroyed. I only looked through what the K.G.B. had. All I said was that I saw no evidence."
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." Volkogonov fell out of favor with Yeltsin in 1994, after opposing the use of force to solve ethnic disputes within areas of the former Soviet Union. Specifically, Volkogonov felt that Yeltsin was taking "the advice of wrong-headed counselors" in deciding to invade Chechnya.Editor's Preface, Autopsy for an Empire, Shukman, 1997
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 eventually became thoroughly disillusioned with Leninism.