Dmitri Volkogonov - Biography of Lenin

Biography of Lenin

Although Volkogonov began intensive research into Lenin beginning in 1990, by the late 1980s he was actually already arriving at his own conclusion regarding Lenin's role.

Lenin’s archives were housed in the former Central Committee building on Moscow’s Staraya Square. Deep in the basement of the huge grey building were shelves held metal boxes that contained all the written records associated with Lenin. Volkogonov explained, "As I saw more and more closed Soviet archives, as well as the large Western collections at Harvard University and the Hoover Institution in California, Lenin’s profile altered in my estimation".

Volkogonov always used to say "that in his own mind, Lenin was the last bastion to fall." He said that the turning point was when he discovered one of Lenin's orders calling for the public hanging of Kulak peasants in 1918:

Hang (hang without fail, so the people see) no fewer than one hundred known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers...Do it in such a way that for hundreds of versts around, the people will see, tremble, know, shout: they are strangling and will strangle to death the bloodsucking kulaks.