Boris Sokolov is a military historian, geographer and anthropologist and an expert in Russian literature. He has written studies of Gogol, Sergei Yesenin and Mikhail Bulgakov. For the last twenty years he has concentrated on Soviet twentieth-century history, writing about Lavrentiy Beria, Joseph Stalin, Vyacheslav Molotov and Leonid Brezhnev. He has also played a leading role in the struggle to reveal the reality behind the myths about the Soviet Union in the Second World War.