Yuri Felshtinsky was born in Moscow in 1956. In 1974, he began studying 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. In 1993, he defended a doctoral dissertation at the History Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, becoming the first foreign citizen to receive a doctoral degree in Russia. Felshtinsky has compiled, edited, and annotated several dozen volumes of archival documents in Russian history. His first books, published in Russian, include 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).
In 1998, he traveled to Moscow in order to study the political problems of contemporary Russia. At that time, he became acquainted with Alexander Litnvinenko, a Lieutenant Colonel of the FSB who had cut his ties with the establishment for which he had worked for over twenty years. In 2000, Felshtinsky and Litvinenko began working on Blowing Up Russia, a book that describes the gradual appropriation of power in the Russia by the security apparatus and details the FSB’s involvement in a series of terrorist atrocities that took place between 1994-1999. In August 2001, several chapters from the Blowing Up Russia were published in a special edition of the Novaya Gazeta newspaper. In 2002, the book became the basis for a documentary film, Blowing up Russia (also known as Assassination of Russia). Both the book and the documentary were banned in Russia. Up to 2006, Felshtinsky continued working with Litvinenko on gathering additional materials documenting the FSB’s involvement in the apartment-house bombings of September 1999. In November of 2006 Alexander Litvinenko was killed in London.
In 2007, Alexander Litvinenko’s and Yuri Felshtinsky’s book Blowing Up Russia was published in twenty different countries.
Felshtinsky’s latest publications include The Corporation: Russia and the KGB in the Age of President Putin (Encounter Books, New York, 2008, with Vladimir Pribylovsky); The KGB Plays Chess (Russell Enterprises, Milford, CT, 2010, with Vladimir Popov & Boris Gulko); Lenin and His Comrades (Enigma Books, New York, 2010).
