Dmitri Volkogonov

Dmitri Antonovich Volkogonov (Russian: Дми́трий Анто́нович Волкого́нов) (22 March 1928 – 6 December 1995) was a Soviet/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 Soviet Uunion), he published biographies of Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Lenin, among others. Despite being a committed Stalinist and Marxist–Leninist for most of his career, Volkogonov eventually repudiated Communism and the Soviet system within the last decade of his life before his death from cancer in 1995.

Quotes

• However doomed a man may be, he still has the great luxury of freedom of thought that can carry him soaring over the past and the future, the single attribute that can never be taken away by tyrant or circumstance.
  • Dmitri Volkogonov (1996), Trotsky: The Eternal Revolutionary, Free Press, Simon and Schuster, ISBN 9780684822938 

• History has literally led me to a complete denial of all that I had been praying for my whole life [...] The only thing I can be proud of — the greatest merit of my life — is that I was able to fundamentally alter my views [...] I feel very happy that by the end of my life I've freed myself from this horrible nightmare, this primitivism.
  • As cited in an interview with Steven Erlanger "Writing History, Soviet General Finds Revelation", The New York Times (1 August 1995)

• Lenin was the antichrist [...] All Russia's great troubles stemmed from Lenin.
  • As cited in Alessandra Stanley (7 December 1995), "Dmitri Volkogonov, 67, Historian Who Debunked Heroes, Dies", The New York Times