Dmitri Volkogonov
Russian military officer (colonel-general) and historian (1928-1995)
Dmitri Antonovich Volkogonov (Russian: Дми́трий Анто́нович Волкого́нов; 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.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Dmitri Volkogonov” is russian military officer (colonel-general) and historian (1928-1995). The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Dmitri, Volkogonov and Russian, not as a finished interpretation.
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The phrase “russian military officer (colonel-general) and historian (1928-1995)” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1232452. VIAF identifies the subject as 120635153. The Library of Congress control number is n78065823. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1928, 1995, 1992 and 1937.
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This entry incorporates text from “Dmitri Volkogonov” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.