Dmitri Volkogonov
Dmitri Antonovich Volkogonov was a Russian historian and colonelgeneral who was head of the Soviet militarys psychological warfare department. After researching the secret Soviet archives, he published biographies of Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Lenin, among others. Despite being a committed Stalinist and MarxistLeninist ideologue 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.
Dmitri Volkogonov was born March 22, 1928 in Chita, Eastern Siberia. Dmitri was the son of a collective farm manager and a schoolteacher. In 1937 when Dmitri was eight, his father was arrested and shot during Stalins purges for being found in possession of a pamphlet by Bukharin. This was something Dmitri only found out years later while doing his own research in the restricted archives in Moscow. His mother was sent to a labor camp, where she died during World War II. The family was exiled to Krasnoyarsk in Western Siberia Volkogonov joked that as they were already in the Far East, and Stalin was not in the habit of sending his political prisoners to Hawaii, they had to be sent west.
Source: Wikipedia