Imagine for a moment that it is 1986 and, as a result of some monstrous cataclysm, the entire territory of the Soviet Union has been completely depopulated. Suppose further that some extraterrestrials came and wandered through the dead cities and abandoned villages. They would have found nearly 100,000 monuments in the shape of a stocky, bald man with a protruding forehead, almost always beckoning forward with one hand.


The aliens might be tempted to think that these marble and bronze idols had somehow managed to conquer this great country. And, in fact, they would not be far from the truth: The man depicted so many thousands of times really did seize control of this land. In 1917, he promised the people peace and land. In reality, he took away their liberty. Obviously, I am talking about Vladimir Lenin, who was transformed by Bolshevik propaganda into a god on earth. In reality, though, he was the anti-Christ.


Nonetheless, for most of my life, I was a Leninist. Even the fact that Lenin's regime executed my father as an "enemy of the people" and that my mother died in exile always seemed to me like some kind of monstrous mistake. I somehow never thought to blame it on the Lenin's followers. An atmosphere of total propaganda, in which there is no truth or other points of view, is capable of transforming people into one-dimensional creatures.


I was a Leninist, a follower of Lenin. More than that, thanks to a lot of hard work and zeal, I made a career within the Leninist system. I became a three-star general, defended two dissertations, became a professor and more. In short, I was one of the "chosen few" before I became a heretic.


My first doubts stirred after the Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev exposed Stalin at the 20th Communist Party Congress in 1956. My intellectual confusion grew proportionally as the stagnation of society deepened. I began to realize that the state's monopoly over power and thought was ruinous for the country. In 1984, on the eve of Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika, I finished a two-volume biography of Stalin, although I could not publish it until 1988. Even though society was slowly thawing out from decades of Bolshevik domination, it was still not ready to face the truth.


I was never a dissident. I never signed any dramatic statements of protest. I never tried to emigrate. Once, at a meeting of high-ranking military leaders in 1987, I spoke out. I said that it was time to liquidate the politorgany, the tools that the government used to control the army. I was immediately removed from my post and demoted to head of the Institute of Military History.


There, I directed the writing of a 10-volume history of World War II. Together with my colleagues, we painstakingly prepared the first four volumes, which we presented to the country's highest ranking military officers and to the secretariat of the Central Committee. After a "discussion" of the work, they declared that it was "anti-Soviet." And they decided that "Volkogonov is fulfilling the social orders of the West." That very day, I was again removed from my post and stripped of my commission.


Nonetheless, still in uniform, I attempted to express my views at the next congress of the Communist Party. With great difficulty, I was able to get permission to speak, and I said that the party had only one chance to save itself, "only if it could follow the line of social-democracy." They didn't even let me finish speaking; I was hounded from the podium. However, it was at this time that I began to work closely with Boris Yeltsin. I was, I believe, the first general to openly support him.


In addition to working in the Supreme Soviet, I continued to write my books. The next to appear was a two-volume study of Leon Trotsky. While I was writing that book, though, it became clear to me that I would have to come to grips with Vladimir Ilych Lenin, the leader of the October 1917 coup. It was not easy to make this decision. Just last fall, a survey revealed that 62 percent of Russians positively -- even loyally -- regard "the founder of the Soviet state." Among them are many who remain fanatically devoted to his ideas. This is a reality that we cannot escape. For seven decades, people's minds were so thoroughly muddled that it will take a long time to undo the damage.


I did not write my book on Lenin just because I -- in my capacity as the chairman of the parliamentary commission on opening the archives of the Communist Party -- suddenly had access to thousands of Lenin's documents that were previously unknown and had never before been published. The main reason I wrote the book was the historic collapse of the work that he had begun.


In the course of three years of work, I think that I was able to penetrate into the spiritual world of Lenin. In my mind, I was able to plunge into the political currents of that distant time. In that world, even now, mystical shadows continue to act out roles they played long ago. Before my very eyes stood Lenin, the man who became the nastiest scar on the face of the twentieth century. He was a revolutionary with a powerful, but uncompromising and cynical intellect. Lenin never tried to combine morality with politics, and he never loved Russia.


It was easy for him, when his power was threatened, to betray his allies in the war against Germany. He gave the enemy more than a million square kilometers of Russian territory and almost 250 tons of gold. Lenin traded the defeat of his motherland in World War I for personal power. Without flinching, he turned the imperialist war into a civil war and 13 million Russians perished. A further two million were driven out of the country. Lenin may not have been as personally cruel as Stalin was, but he espoused a fantastically cruel philosophy. He was the anti-Christ.


And so my biography of Lenin was published, not only in Russia but around the world. Since then, I have made a number of new friends. But I have also acquired millions of enemies. More than half the letters I get are nothing but curses and threats. People say the most insulting things behind my back.


But I long ago understood that, in a country that had absolutely no freedom for decades and that only now is slowly, torturously walking the path from totalitarianism to civilized society, one has to pay a high price for every achievement. I have lost the majority of the friends I made during my life. Practically the only magazines and newspapers that reviewed my book were communist ones, and the word "traitor" was far from the most insulting term they used.


But I expected that. I did not expect that the democratic publications would be unwilling to risk discussing my book. Nonetheless, I am proud that I was the one who once and for all spoke the truth: All of Russia's misfortunes during the 20th century sprang from one source -- from the party and ideology of Lenin, from Vladimir Ilych Lenin himself.





Dmitri Volkogonov is a retired general, historian and Boris Yeltsin's Special Advisor on Defense. He contributed this article to The Moscow Times.