Discussion Papers Series
Professor Ilya Altman (Russia) was born in 1955 in the Soviet Union. He studied history at the Moscow State Historical-Archival Institute (today Russian State University for Humanities) before going on to receive his doctorate in 1983 from the Leningrad Department of the Institute for the History of the USSR in the Academy of Science of the USSR. He was the head of the Department of the State Archives of the Russian Federation from 1985 to 1990, and then worked as an assistant professor at the Russian State Universities for Humanities.
Professor Altman is the founder and co-chairman of the Russian Research and Educational Holocaust Center, which he started in 1992. In the same year, he started teaching about the Holocaust at the Jewish University of Moscow, part of the Maimonides Academy and the Centre for Jewish Civilization within the Moscow State University and Russian State University for Humanities.
Professor Altman has written extensively about the Holocaust and his work has been published in several countries including Belarus, Finland, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Lithuania, Russia, Sweden, Ukraine and USA. He has edited almost 40 books in the series The Russian Holocaust Library. He is the author of the monograph Victims of Hate: The Holocaust in the USSR (1941-1945) (Moscow, 2002) and the handbook for universities The Holocaust and Jewish Resistance on the Occupied Territory of the USSR (Moscow, 2002). Ilya Altman is a project manager and senior editor of the encyclopedia The Holocaust on the Territory of the USSR (Moscow, 2009) which was presented at the United Nations Headquarters in 2010.