Yuri Felshtinsky

Yuri Felshtinsky (b. 1956, Moscow) 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).

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", 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 a book, Blowing up Russia, together with Alexander Litvinenko.. In this book, which was sponsored by Berezovsky, 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 oligarch Boris Berezovsky. since Litvinenko and Felshtinsky were supported by Berezovsky in their research work [1].

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

List of selected publications

• The legal foundations of the immigration and emigration policy of the USSR, 1917 - 1927 (Glasgow, 1982) [2]
• The Bolsheviks and the Left SRS (Paris, 1985)
• Trotsky's Notebooks, 1933-1935. Writings on Lenin, Dialectics, and Evolutionism. (New York, 1986) [3]
• 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) [4]
• (with Alexander Litvinenko) Blowing up Russia(translated by Geoffrey Andrews), Gibson Square Books, London, 2007, ISBN 978-1903933954
• (with Vladimir Pribylovsky) The Age of Assassins. The Rise and Rise of Vladimir Putin, Gibson Square Books, London, 2008, ISBN 190-614207-6;
• (with Vladimir Pribylovsky)The Operation Successor. A political portrait of Vladimir Putin Text online (Russian)
• Leaders the mobsters Text online (Russian)

Interviews

• His interview at RFE/RL, November 3, 2007
• The Litvinenko affair, 04 February 2007, Andrew Marr interviewed Yuri Felshtinsky, on BBC News
• Interview with Yuri Felshtinsky, Demokratizatsiya, 2004

External links

• Felshtinsky's website