Yuri Felshtinsky

DR. YURI FELSHTINSKY, a prominent author, historian, and journalist, is an expert on Russia and the former Soviet Union. He has been featured in hundreds of print, TV and radio interviews worldwide.

Dr. Felshtinsky’s latest book about contemporary Ukraine, “World War III: The Battle for Ukraine,” was published in February 2015. Since 2002, Dr. Felshtinsky has also been in charge of the Kuchma Tapes project (decoding approximately 600 hours of conversations recorded in the office of Leonid Kuchma, the Ukrainian president from 1994 to 2005).

Dr. Felshtinsky co-authored the book “Blowing Up Russia” with Alexander Litvinenko, a former Lieutenant Colonel in the FSB who was poisoned with radioactive polonium in London in 2006. The book describes the gradual appropriation of power in Russia by the security apparatus, and details the FSB’s involvement in a series of terrorist attacks that took place in Russia between 1994 and 1999. “Blowing Up Russia” has been published in twenty countries. The book and subsequent documentary have been banned in the Russian Federation.

Dr. Felshtinsky’s recent publications include “The Corporation: Russia and the KGB in the Age of President Putin” (Encounter Books, New York, 2008, w/ V. Pribylovsky); “The KGB Plays Chess” (Russell Enterprises, Milford, CT, 2010, w/ V. Popov & B. Gulko); “Lenin and His Comrades” (Enigma Books, New York, 2010); “Lenin, Trotsky, Germany and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk: The Collapse of the World Revolution, November 1917-November 1918” (Russell Enterprises, Milford, CT, 2012). His latest Russian language publications include “Lev Trotsky,” a biography in four volumes (Moscow, 2012-13, w/ G. Chernyavsky), and a biography of George Orwell (Moscow, 2014). Dr. Felshtinsky has also compiled, edited, and annotated several dozen volumes of archival documents on Russian history.

Dr. Felshtinsky studied history at the Moscow Pedagogical Institute. In 1978, he immigrated to the United States and continued studying history, first at Brandeis University, then at Rutgers, where he received a Ph.D. in History. He was also a postdoctoral fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. In 1993, Dr. Felshtinsky defended a doctoral dissertation at the History Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, becoming the first U.S. citizen to receive a doctoral degree in Russia.