Dmitri Volkogonov - Early Life

Early Life

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 Stalin's purges for being found in possession of a pamphlet by Bukharin. (Something he 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 as not in the habit of sending his political prisoners to Hawaii, they had to be sent west."

Volkogonov entered the military at the age of seventeen in 1945, which was common for many orphans. He studied at the Lenin Military Academy in Moscow in 1961; transferring to the Soviet Army's propaganda department in 1970. There he wrote propaganda pamphlets and manuals on psychological warfare and gained a reputation as a hardliner.

It was as early as the 1950s, while a young Army officer, that Volkogonov first discovered information that created cognitive dissonance within himself. While reading early journals of Party members from the 1920s, Volkogonov realized “how stifled and sterile political debate in the Soviet Union had become in comparison to the early days.” Krushchev’s 1956 secret speech further solidified this thought within him, but he kept these thoughts to himself at that time.

During the decades that Volkogonov headed the Department of Special Propaganda, he visited Angola, Ethiopia, the Middle East and Afghanistan. He "enjoyed a rapid rise in the Soviet Army as a specialist in charge of psychological and ideological warfare. Only a fully committed Communist could qualify for these posts, and he earned his credentials by grinding out propagandistic and agitational screeds." "But even as he was indoctrinating troops in Communist orthodoxy, General Volkogonov was struggling with private doubts based on the horrors he discovered hidden in the archives". Volkogonov also had the opportunity to view the conditions of various client states during the Cold War. While these countries received military aid, Volkogonov later recalled, "...they all became poorer; their economies were collapsing everywhere. And I came to the conclusion that the Marxist model was a real historic blind alley, and that we, too, were caught in a historic trap."