Stalin history

(&#x;), Soviet and Russian military and political figure, historian, and philosopher.

Colonel General Volkogonov was born in Chita province, the son of a minor civil servant who was shot in Without knowledge of his father's true fate, Volkogonov entered military service in and rose rapidly in rank.

As a political officer after , he held various posts within the Soviet Ministry of Defense, eventually becoming deputy chief (&#x;) of the Main Political Administration.

Although known as an ideological hardliner, Volkogonov's foreign experiences gave rise to grave doubts about the Soviet system.

Volkogonov stalin biography wikipedia Search the history of over billion web pages on the Internet. Capture a web page as it appears now for use as a trusted citation in the future. Uploaded by station Hamburger icon An icon used to represent a menu that can be toggled by interacting with this icon. Web icon An illustration of a computer application window Wayback Machine Texts icon An illustration of an open book.

Travels in the Third World taught him that revolutionary leaders sought only cynical advantage from the Soviets. An academic visit to the West convinced him that capitalist societies had produced greater equalities than their supposedly egalitarian socialist counterparts. He was already reading suppressed writers when he learned the truth about his father's death&#x;that he had been executed as an enemy of the people.

Hence sprang the desire to expose the truth about Stalin and his times.

Estrangement from the military-political leadership precipitated Volkogonov's transfer to the USSR Institute of Military History.

Stalin biography book

Volkogonov stalin biography summary

Stalin history

There, while chief from to , his subordinates' revisionist draft history of the Great Patriotic War, coupled with his growing adherence to democratic ideals and an unorthodox evaluation of the Stalinist legacy, provoked clashes with the Ministry of Defense. Following the Soviet collapse, he served from to as security adviser to President Boris Yeltsin, while simultaneously championing democratic causes and chairing several parliamentary commissions as a Duma deputy associated with the Left-Centrist Bloc.

Before his turn against Soviet convention, Volkogonov's more significant works, including Marxist-Leninist Teachings about War and the Army () and The Psychology of War () reflected orthodox zeal. However, his subsequent conviction that the Soviet system had been flawed from the beginning permeated his historical works, including a revisionist biography of Stalin, Triumph and Tragedy (), and later volumes on Trotsky, Lenin, and other significant early Soviet leaders.

See also: stalin, josef vissarionovich

bibliography

Menning, Bruce W.

().

Best stalin biography 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 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 s and the post-Soviet era of the early s. Volkogonov was born on 22 March in Chita , [ 2 ] Eastern Siberia.

"Of Outcomes Happy and Unhappy." In Adventures in Russian Historical Research, eds. Catherine Freirson and Samuel Baron. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe.

Volkogonov, Dmitri. (). Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy, tr.

Volkogonov stalin biography Colonel General Volkogonov was born in Chita province, the son of a minor civil servant who was shot in Without knowledge of his father's true fate, Volkogonov entered military service in and rose rapidly in rank. As a political officer after , he held various posts within the Soviet Ministry of Defense, eventually becoming deputy chief — of the Main Political Administration. Although known as an ideological hardliner, Volkogonov's foreign experiences gave rise to grave doubts about the Soviet system. Travels in the Third World taught him that revolutionary leaders sought only cynical advantage from the Soviets.

and ed. Harold Shukman. New York: Grove Weidenfeld.

Volkogonov, Dmitri. (). Lenin: A New Biography, tr. and ed. Harold Shukman.

Volkogonov stalin biography pdf

Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy Dmitri Volkogonov. The most candid and fullest reappraisal of Stalin to date by a Soviet source, this chilling, remarkably intimate, gripping biography marks an historical as well as scholarly event. How was it possible for an inconspicuous Party functionary, with only a modest role in the October Revolution, to become messianic arbiter of the fate of millions via terror, mass murder, exile and deportation? Drawing on hitherto untapped major archives as well as on interviews, Soviet historian Volkogonov shows how Stalin built an omnipotent bureaucracy to serve his cruelest whims and abetted the slide toward one-man dictatorship. The author, a deputy in the Russian parliament, lost his father to Stalin's executioners.

New York: Free Press.

Volkogonov, Dmitri. (). Autopsy for an Empire: The Seven Leaders Who Built the Soviet Regime, tr. and ed. Harold Shukman. New York: Free Press.

Bruce W. Menning