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“... Dmitri Volkogonov, General of the Soviet Army, head of the Institute of Military History and admirer of Gorbachev, has produced the most authoritative biography of Stalin we have read so far. There is no doubt that he had many advantages over Western biographers of Stalin, of whose work he seems to have made little use ...”

“... that biographies of Lenin need no longer be loaded with value judgments about the Soviet Union. Dmitri Volkogonov enjoyed unique access to hitherto unpublished Lenin documents in the former Central Party Archives (3724 in all, he tells us) and to other classified material of major significance, including records of Party Conferences and Congresses. His ...”

“... in the late 1980s, but the collapse of the Soviet Union ensured that it was short-lived. In 1992 Dmitri Volkogonov, a former general in the Soviet army who had made a splash a few years earlier with a revisionist biography of Stalin, came out with a sensational Trotsky biography (published in English in 1996), drawing on new sources, including the NKVD ...”

“... Henri Barbusse admired his subject, Trotsky and Isaac Deutscher wanted to cut him down to size. Dmitri Volkogonov wrote in late Soviet disillusionment, and the German historian Jörg Baberowski in contemptuous disgust. When I was writing my study of Stalin and his closest associates, On Stalin’s Team, I toyed with the conceit that, by taking my point ...”

“... Soviet period, including the most recent. Even the biography of Stalin by the military historian Dmitri Volkogonov is as much a reflection of the priorities of the age of Gorbachev – that is, to effect a complete break between Lenin and Stalin, keeping the halo more or less burnished above the head of the first while hauling the second deeper into the ...”

“... to look in their files and clear his name which, under the stewardship of the late General Dmitri Volkogonov, they briefly did. This impressed a good number of people: why would Hiss take the risk of asking for a search in the first place? However, subsequent disclosures from the Hungarian archives, chiefly concerning the bewildering quadruple ...”

“... would-be assassin was identified – possibly wrongly, according to Lenin’s Soviet biographer, Dmitri Volkogonov – as Dora Kaplan, a Social Revolutionary and former Tsarist political prisoner, who testified that she shot him because he was a traitor to the socialist cause: by no stretch of the imagination could she be said to be a White agent. The ...”

“... In his 1988 biography, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy, the first to be based on archival research, Dmitri Volkogonov presented both a real person, capable of emotional reactions and contradictions, and, more surprisingly, a real intellectual who remained a serious, wide-ranging reader all his life. Later biographies followed this up; the theme of high ...”