1952–
Former interior-ministry officer and Russian historian of Soviet mass repression who works from security-service archives
Born in Barnaul, he graduated from the Soviet interior ministry’s military-political school in 1974 and from the KGB–MVD faculty of the Lenin Military-Political Academy in 1982. He served in interior-ministry troops and agencies from 1974 to 2008, headed the history department of the St Petersburg MVD law institute from 1991 to 2008 and was a professor in the history faculty of St Petersburg University from 1999 to 2016. His Mission of the Order (1997) examined the mechanism of mass repression in north-western Russia, and in 2013 he used FSB regional archive case files to reconstruct the OGPU’s 1933 arrests of homosexual men in Leningrad, in an article that condemns homosexuality in religious and moral terms.
Activities and affiliations
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1974–1991
Soviet Union state institutionsInterior ministry officer
Security, intelligence and policing - 1991–