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.'
Activities and affiliations
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
Related historical events
Reception and Historiographical Controversy
Volkogonov's biographies became the subject of fierce debate in Soviet and Russian historiography as soon as they appeared, and assessments split along two lines. Some scholars in Russia and the United States acknowledged the value of the new sources he drew from secret archives. The American specialist on Russian history Richard Pipes held that after gaining access to the presidential archive closed to most historians, Volkogonov changed his attitude toward communism and its leaders, and described him in his final years as acting like a man awakening from a long hypnotic sleep. Robert Service, the British biographer of Lenin, disagreed with Volkogonov's and Solzhenitsyn's view that Lenin and Leninism were wholly alien to Russian culture, while sharing his premise that the Soviet state had concealed the real Lenin.
Criticism of his source interpretation and method was equally sharp. Oleg Khlevnyuk, a professor at Moscow State University, judged that Volkogonov's Stalin biography 'has a rather journalistic character' and that its author 'is not a historian but a politician.' On the Trotsky biography, the historian Yuri Felshtinsky charged that Volkogonov commits an enormous number of factual errors and inaccuracies, with which literally every page of his two-volume work bristles. The philosopher Roman Kosolapov said of the Lenin book that there is not a paragraph that does not contain a rigged argument, a distortion, a falsity, or plain lies, and Zhores Trofimov, a historian and writer in Ulyanovsk, argued in a book of his own that it was not a political portrait at all but a compilation of articles, abounding in gossip, myths, conjectures and gross errors.
Critics such as the French historian Pierre Broue and the American writer Daniel Singer objected that equating Leninism, Stalinism and Trotskyism as one continuous ideology served to proclaim that Marxism is evil and revolution wrong. The debate shows that Volkogonov's work carried both the achievement of opening archival sources and the character of a political controversy.