Yuri Felshtinsky

Yuri Georgievich Felshtinsky (Russian: Ю́рий Гео́ргиевич Фельшти́нский, born 7 September 1956 in Moscow) is a Russian American historian. Felshtinsky has authored a number of books on Russian history, including The Bolsheviks and the Left SRs (Paris, 1985), Towards a History of Our Isolation (London, 1988; Moscow, 1991), The Failure of the World Revolution (London, 1991; Moscow, 1992), Blowing up Russia (with Alexander Litvinenko), and The Age of Assassins (with Vladimir Pribylovsky).

Felshtinsky's parents died when he was 17 years of age. He began studying history in 1974 at Moscow State Pedagogical University. A couple of years later he decided to emigrate from the Soviet Union to Israel travelling first to Vienna. But instead of going from Vienna to Israel he went further to the United States where he arrived in April 1978 and there subsequently continued his studies. He graduated from Brandeis University and earned his PhD in history from Rutgers University. In 1993, he returned to Moscow and defended his Doctor of Science thesis at the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, becoming the first non-Russian citizen to earn a doctorate from a Russian university.

Felshtinsky has published a number of books on the 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," alleging the poisoning of Vladimir Lenin, Felix Dzerzhinsky, and Maksim Gorky by Genrikh Yagoda on orders from Joseph Stalin, the murders of Mikhail Frunze, Vyacheslav Menzhinsky, and Leon Trotsky, the poisoning of Stalin by Lavrentiy Beria, and other similar episodes.

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