Dmitri Volkogonov - Last Years

Last Years

"Despite his undergoing extensive surgery for colon and liver cancer" in 1991, the pace of both his political activity and the publication of his writings increased sharply.

During the August 1991 coup attempt in which a hardliners attempted to wrest control from Gorbachev in an attempt to reassert the Communist Party's power in the Soviet Union, Volkogonov was in a hospital in London. When Volkogonov saw the news of the coup on television, he said to his editor, “So, they’ve done it.” Defense Minister Dmitry Yazov who had fired Volkogonov from the Institute three months earlier had told him, “something will happen to get rid of the likes of you.” From his hospital bed Volkogonov broadcasted an appeal on BBC to the Soviet army to not obey the orders of the coup leaders.

Dmitri Volkogonov died from his cancer in December 1995 at the age of 67.

Volkogonov is most famous for his trilogy Leaders (Вожди, or Vozhdi), which consists of the three books about: Vladimir Lenin (Lenin: A New Biography, 1994); Leon Trotsky (Trotsky: The Eternal Revolutionary, 1992); and Joseph Stalin (Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy).

He also finished just before his death Autopsy for an Empire: the Seven Leaders Who Built the Soviet Regime (Russian title: Sem Vozhdei) in 1998. The book presents chapters on "the seven leaders of the Soviet Union: Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko and Gorbachev." Volkogonov was in the Soviet Army during the reign of six of the seven leaders; and he had "direct working contact" with four of those leaders in his role as a colonel-general. The English editions were essentially condensed versions of the much longer Russian originals (as acknowledged by their translator and editor Harold Shukman).