https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmitri_Volkogonov
https://archive.org/details/thepsychologicalwar/mode/2up
https://archive.org/details/stalintriumphtra00volk_0
https://www.scribd.com/book/224712263/Autopsy-For-An-Empire-The-Seven-Leaders-Who-Built-the-Soviet-Regime
Despite being a committed Stalinist and Marxist–Leninist 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.
Through his research in the restricted archives of the Soviet Central Committee, Volkogonov discovered facts that contradicted the official Soviet version of events, and the cult of personality that had been built up around Lenin and Stalin. Volkogonov published books that contributed to the strain of liberal Russian thought that emerged during Glasnost in the late 1980s and the post-Soviet era of the early 1990s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalinism
He lamented that, while Stalin had long since fallen in the estimation of many Soviet minds (the many who agreed with de-Stalinization), "Lenin was the last bastion" in Volkogonov's mind to fall and the fall was the most painful, given the secular apotheosis of Lenin that all Soviet children grew up with.[citation needed]
