Yuri Felshtinsky

Yuri Felshtinsky (born 1956) is a Russian historian living in the United States. Felshtinsky has authored several books on modern Russian and early Soviet history, including Blowing up Russia (with Alexander Litvinenko) and The Age of Assassins (with Vladimir Pribylovsky).^[1]

Early life and education

Born in Moscow in 1956, Felshtinsky emigrated from the Soviet Union to the United States in 1978. He graduated from Brandeis University and got his PhD in history from Rutgers University. In 1993, he also defended his Doctor of Science thesis at the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow.

Publications by Yuri Felshtinsky

Felshtinsky has published a number of books on history of the Communist movement. In one of those books, Leaders the mobsters,^[2] he described the Bolshevik party as a mafia-like organization where "almost no one died by a natural cause", based on hundreds of primary and secondary sources. This includes the poisoning of Vladimir Lenin, Felix Dzerzhinsky, and Maksim Gorky by Genrikh Yagoda on the orders from Joseph Stalin, the murders of Mikhail Frunze, Vyacheslav Menzhinsky, and Leon Trotsky, the poisoning of Stalin by Lavrenty Beria, and other similar episodes.

Felshtinsky also wrote Blowing up Russia with Alexander Litvinenko.^[3][4][5] In this book, which was sponsored by former Russian oligarch and adversary of Vladimir Putin, Boris Berezovsky,^[5] Litvinenko and Felshtinsky describe the history of the Russian apartment bombings that had happened in September 1999. According to the authors, the bombings were committed by the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), as a false flag operation intended to justify the Second Chechen War. Felshtinsky is sometimes referred as an associate of Berezovsky.^[3][4] since Litvinenko and Felshtinsky were supported by Berezovsky in their research work.^[6]

In 2007 investigator Mikhail Trepashkin said that, according to his FSB sources, "everyone who was involved in the publication of the book Blowing up Russia will be killed", and that three FSB agents have made a trip to Boston to prepare the assassination of Felshtinsky.^[7]

List of selected publications

• The legal foundations of the immigration and emigration policy of the USSR, 1917 - 1927 (Glasgow, 1982)
• The Bolsheviks and the Left SRS (Paris, 1985)
• Trotsky's Notebooks, 1933-1935. Writings on Lenin, Dialectics, and Evolutionism. (New York, 1986)
• Towards a History of Our Isolation (London, 1988; Moscow, 1991)
• Conversations with Bukharin (Moscow, 1993)
• Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and the Left Opposition in the USSR, 1918 - 1928 (Paris, 1990)
• The Failure of World Revolution (London, 1991; Moscow, 1992)
• Big Bosses (Moscow, 1999)
• Felshtinsky, Yuri; Litvinenko, Alexander (2007). Blowing up Russia. translated from Russian by Geoffrey Andrews and Co. London: Gibson Square Books. ISBN 978-1-903933-95-4. 
• Felshtinsky, Yuri; Pribylovsky, Vladimir (2008). The Age of Assassins. The Rise and Rise of Vladimir Putin. London: Gibson Square Books. ISBN 1-906142-07-6. 
• Pribylovsky, Vladimir; Felshtinsky, Yuri. The Operation Successor. A political portrait of Vladimir Putin (Text online) (in Russian). 
• Leaders the mobsters (Text online) (in Russian). 
• with Vladimir Pribylovsky, The Corporation. Russia and the KGB in the Age of President Putin, ISBN 1-59403-246-7, Encounter Books; February 25, 2009, description.
• Boris Gulko, Yuri Felshtinsky, Vladimir Popov, Viktor Kortschnoi, The KGB Plays Chess: The Soviet Secret Police and the Fight for the World Chess Crown. Russell Enterprises, Inc. 2011, ISBN 1-888690-75-5.

Interviews

• "Interview with experts..." (in Russian). Radio Liberty. November 3, 2007. 
• Marr, Andrew (February 4, 2007). "The Litvinenko affair". BBC News. Retrieved 2009-12-31. 
• Lanskoy, Miriam (2004). "Interview with Yuri Felshtinsky" (). Demokratizatsiya 12 (4): 629–635. doi:10.3200/DEMO.12.4.629-635. ISSN 1074-6846. Archived from the original on 2004-10.  Check date values in: |archivedate= (help)

References

External links

• Felshtinsky's website