Abdurakhman Genazovich Avtorkhanov (, 23 October 1908 – 24 April 1997) was a Soviet historian and Kremlinologist of Chechen origin who during the Cold War authored popular books on the Soviet Union and its ruling system. He wrote under several Russian pseudonyms, but since the Dissolution of the Soviet Union some of his works have been republished under his real name. Initially a devoted Communist Party functionary who experienced imprisonment during the Great Terror, Avtorkhanov defected to Nazi-Germany during the Second World War (not long before the Soviets deported the Chechens). After the war, he stayed in West Germany and eventually aligned himself with the anti-Communist Western Bloc, working as a professor at the U.S. Army Russian Area School and becoming a co-founder of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

Biography and works

Avtorkhanov's date of birth is uncertain. According to his memoirs he was born between 1908 and 1910 in the small Chechen village of Lakha-Nevri, which was destroyed by Soviet troops during the deportation of the Chechen and Ingush population in 1944. He was given the last name of Avtorkhanov in 1923 when he was registered for an orphanage. The young Avtorkhanov enthusiastically joined the Communist Party in 1927 and served as a high-ranking party functionary. He graduated from the elite Moscow Institute of Red Professors with a major in Russian history in 1937, during which time he wrote six books on the history of the Caucasus. He was arrested and falsely accused in 1937 during the Great Purge, but released in 1942. The NKVD assigned him to infiltrate the anti-Soviet Chechen movement in which his school friend Khasan Israilov was a leader, but Avtorkhanov crossed the front line to Germans, was arrested by Gestapo, released and lived until the end of the war in Berlin. During the war, he published in many newspapers of Nazi Germany. After the war, Avtorkhanov became a co-founder of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in 1951. Autorkhanov authored numerous books and articles on the history and core issues of Communism. His book Staline au pouvoir (The Reign of Stalin), published in French in 1951, described Joseph Stalin's reign of terror. His book Stalin and the Soviet Communist Party is regarded as a primary source for the political background of Stalin's rise to power. He was one of the first authors to claim, in his 1976 book on Stalin's death, that Stalin had been murdered by the head of NKVD Lavrentiy Beria. Pyotr Grigorenko made and distributed copies of the book in the Soviet Union by photographing and typewriting. In his books, Avtorkhanov emphasized the leading role of Soviet security services in keeping the regime alive. In 1950, three years before Stalin's death, he wrote: "It is not true that power and authority in the Soviet Union are shared between the [Communist] Party and the military clique ... [or] that the Politburo of the Party's Central Committee is an omnipotent superpower ... The Politburo, although bright, is still only a shadow of the real superpower that stands behind the chair of every Politburo member. The Politburo members themselves know it for sure, the Party vaguely guesses it, and the people are apathetic to 'high politics'. People are taught not to think. One absolute power thinks, acts and dictates for everyone. The name of this force — the NKVD / MVD / MGB ... The Stalinist regime is held together not by the organization of Soviets, Party ideals, the Politburo, or Stalin’s personality, but by the organization and technical skill of the Soviet political police, in which Stalin himself plays the role of the first policeman ... To say the NKVD is the state secret police conveys very little ... To say that the NKVD is a 'state within a state' belittles the NKVD, for the mere formulation allows for the presence of two forces: the normal government and that of the supernormal NKVD; while there is only one actual force — universal Chekism. Chekism of the State, Chekism of the Party, Chekism of the collective, Chekism of the individual. Chekism in ideology, Chekism in practice. Chekism from top to bottom. Chekism from the all-powerful Stalin to an insignificant informant." One of his books named "Murder of Chechen-Ingush nation" (in Russian: "Убийство чечено-ингушского народа") is still very popular among Chechens and Ingush today. A few months before the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Avtorkhanov was granted honorary citizenship by the Chechen-Ingush ASSR. At the time of the First Chechen War he maintained a correspondence with the Chechen president Dzhokhar Dudayev. He also urged peace negotiations on Russian President Boris Yeltsin. He died in Munich, Germany, shortly after the end of the war, in 1997.