From Soviet military propagandist to the historian who opened the secret archives
Finding Lenin's 1918 telegram ordering the public hanging of a hundred kulaks — 'hang without fail, so the people see' — Volkogonov said: 'Lenin was the last bastion to fall in my own mind.'
A colonel-general who headed the Soviet military's psychological warfare directorate and served as deputy chief of the Main Political Administration, Volkogonov began writing a critical Stalin biography in 1978 using secret Central Committee archives. Completed in 1983 but banned until glasnost enabled publication in 1989, the book sent a shock through Soviet historiography. As director of the Institute of Military History he followed with critical biographies of Lenin and Trotsky; the Leaders trilogy won the Russian Federation State Prize posthumously. In his final years he served as Yeltsin's defence advisor and a Duma deputy, chaired commissions that declassified millions of KGB and Party documents, and described his lifelong Bolshevik faith as 'Utopian captivity.'
Career Timeline
- 1956Graduated Lenin Military-Political Academy
- 1963–1971Instructor, then deputy department head, Lenin Military-Political Academy
- 1971Assigned to Main Political Administration (GlavPU)
- 1979–1984Chief, Special Propaganda (psychological warfare) Directorate, GlavPU
- 1984–1988Deputy Chief, GlavPU (colonel-general, 1986)
- 1988–1991Director, Institute of Military History, USSR Ministry of Defence
- 1991–1995Advisor to the Russian President on defence and security; Duma deputy; chaired declassification and POW commissions