Yuri Nikolayevich Zhukov is a Russian historian and researcher at the Institute of Russian History at the Russian Academy of Sciences. Zhukov published several books that cover Joseph Stalin, such as Renaissance of Stalin and Handbook of Stalinist.
Zhukov argued that Stalin was not personally responsible for the Great Purge and shifted the blame onto subordinates of Stalin. According to Zhukov, Stalin had conducted liberal reforms in the Soviet Union and launched the purges against real threats to Soviet security. Zhukov has also argued that by assuming sole power, Stalin had "saved the country and the world" from Lev Kamenev, Leon Trotsky, and Grigory Zinoviev, for in Zhukov's view their revolutionary politics brought the Soviet Union into conflict with the world.
In a 2011 article for World Affairs, Marek Jan Chodakiewicz and Tomasz Sommer listed Zhukov, among others, as an example of historians which have been embraced by Stalin apologists. In a 2012 Literaturnaya Gazeta interview, historian Gennady Kostyrchenko stated that virtually all of Zhukov's most recent historical works have had the moral and political rehabilitation of Stalin as their overriding theme.