Vitaly Semenovich Lelchuk (; born 1929) is a Russian historian who is a specialist in the Soviet model of industrialisation, scientific and technological revolution, and the history of the USSR. He graduated from Moscow State University where he also taught before moving to the Institute of History of the USSR Academy of Sciences. He later joined the State Academic University for Humanities (GAUGN) in Moscow where he was deputy dean of the Faculty of History.
Lelchuk was born in 1929 to a Jewish family in Saint Petersburg. He received his advanced education at Moscow State University (MSU), from which he graduated in 1952.
From 1952 to 1959, Lelchuk taught history at MSU and from 1959 at the Institute of History of the USSR Academy of Sciences, later becoming deputy dean of the Faculty of History of the State Academic University for the Humanities (GAUGN) in Moscow. He was chairman of the editorial board of National History.
Lelchuk specialises in the Soviet model of industrialisation, scientific and technological revolution, and the history of the USSR generally.
He wrote a number of books on the early industrialisation effort of the Soviet Union, starting with a study of the Soviet chemical industry, Sozdanie khimicheskoàpromyshlennosti SSSR; iz istorii sot︠s︡ialisticheskoàindustrializat︠s︡ii, in 1964. With respect to Lenin's New Economic Policy, Lelchuk argued that its mixed results were a consequence of a failure to set clear objectives due to ideological differences and a power struggle within the Communist Party, rather than structural problems in the Soviet economy.
His 1984 survey of Soviet industrialisation in the 1920s and 30s, Industrializat︠s︡ii︠a︡ SSSR--istorii︠a︡, opyt, problemy, was praised by Hiroaki Kuromiya in The Russian Review for its innovative approach in covering not only the economic problems faced by the Soviet Union but the social ones too, making the work valuable to social historians.
He wrote a short history of Soviet society with Yury Polyakov and Anatoly Protopopov that was published by Progress Publishers in 1971 and translated into French (1972) and English (1977). He took an interest in historiography and in 1988, during the period of the collapse of the USSR when the whole corpus of Soviet history was being re-evaluated under what has been called an "historical glasnost", participated in a roundtable discussion by dissident, establishment and revisionist historians of pressing historiographical problems such as access to archives, the treatment of Stalinism, and political rehabilitations. The same year, he edited Istoriki sporjat: Trinadcat' besed (Historians argue: Thirteen conversations). He also published three edited works on the Soviet Union during the Cold War (1995, 1998, 2000), part of new scholarship assisted by the opening of Soviet archives.