Roy Medvedev

For other people of the same name, see Medvedev.
Roy Aleksandrovich Medvedev
Native name Рой Александрович Медведев
Born (1925-11-14) November 14, 1925
Tbilisi, Georgia, USSR
Citizenship
Nationality Russian
Fields Russian studies, investigative journalism
Alma mater Saint Petersburg State University
Known for human rights activism with participation in dissident movement in the Soviet Union

Roy Aleksandrovich Medvedev (Russian: Рой Алекса́ндрович Медве́дев; born 14 November 1925, Tbilisi, Georgia) is a Russian political writer renowned as the author of the dissident history of Stalinism, Let History Judge (Russian: К суду истории), first published in English in 1972. Medvedev became a prominent Russian public figure and served as a consultant to Mikhail Gorbachev.

Early life and education

Roy Medvedev was the son of Aleksander Romanovich Medvedev, a professor of Military-Political Academy and has an identical twin brother, the biologist Zhores Medvedev. Their father was arrested in 1938, during one of Joseph Stalin's purges, and died in a labor camp in 1941.

Medvedev graduated from the Leningrad University. After joining the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956 Medvedev pursued a teaching career before becoming a researcher in the Soviet Academy of Pedagogical Sciences.

Dissident historian

From a Marxist viewpoint, Medvedev criticized former Soviet General Secretary Joseph Stalin, and Stalinism in general, during the Soviet era. In the early 1960s, Medvedev was engaged in samizdat publications. He was critical of the unscientific nature of Lysenkoism.

Medvedev was expelled from the Communist Party in 1969 after his book Let History Judge was published abroad. The book criticized Stalin and Stalinism at a time when official Soviet propagandists were trying to rehabilitate the former General Secretary. Let History Judge reflected the dissident thinking that emerged in the 1960s among Soviet intellectuals who, like Medvedev, sought a reformist version of socialism. He announced his position, along with Andrei Sakharov and others, in an open letter to the Soviet leadership in 1970.

Medvedev was often subject to house arrest and KGB harassment under Leonid Brezhnev after 1969, but managed to publish many more critical writings on Soviet history and politics abroad.

In a book co-authored with his twin brother, Zhores, A Question of Madness, Medvedev describes Zhores' involuntary commitment in the Kaluga Psychiatric Hospital (see Political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union). Zhores, a dissident biologist, was questioned in the hospital about his involvement with samizdat, and his book The Rise and Fall of T.D. Lysenko. Zhores Medvedev was exiled to Britain in the 1970s.

Roy Medvedev rejoined the Communist Party in 1989, after Mikhail Gorbachev launched his perestroika and glasnost program of gradual political and economic reforms. He was elected to the Soviet Union's Congress of People's Deputies and was named as member of the Supreme Soviet, the permanent working body of the Congress. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 Medvedev and dozens of other former communist deputies of the Soviet and Russian parliaments founded the Socialist Party of Working People, and became a co-chair of the party.[1]

Medvedev supports the current President of Russia and former Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.[2]

Publications in English

Books
Articles

References

  1. ↑ Weir, Fred (February 1993). "An interview with Roy Medvedev". Monthly Review 44 (9): 1–10.
  2. ↑ Vishnevsky, Boris (25 January 2008). "Praising ode". Novaya Gazeta.

Further reading

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