Roy Medvedev
Encyclopedia
Roy Aleksandrovich Medvedev ' onMouseout='HidePop("45602")' href="/topics/Tbilisi">Tbilisi
, Georgia
) is a Russia
n historian
renowned as the author of the dissident
history of Stalinism
, Let History Judge , first published in English in 1972. Medvedev became a prominent Russian politician
and served as a consultant to Mikhail Gorbachev
.
. 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.
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
.
In 1969, Medvedev was expelled from the Communist Party after the publication of his book Let History Judge, which criticized Stalin and Stalinism at a time when official Soviet propagandists
were trying to partially rehabilitate the former dictator. Let History Judge reflected the dissident thinking that emerged in the 1960s among Soviet intellectuals who, like Medvedev, sought a reformed, democratic socialism
and a return to Leninism. 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
, but managed to publish numerous critical writings on Soviet history and politics abroad. Medvedev was oppressed for his active support of democracy
after he successfully published Let History Judge abroad in the late 1960s.
In a book co-authored with his identical twin brother, Zhores Medvedev
, A Question of Madness, Medvedev describes Zhores' Involuntary commitment
in the Kaluga Psychiatric Hospital. Zhores, a dissident
biologist
, was questioned at the Kaluga
psychiatric facilities about his involvement with samizdat
, and about the book he had written, The Rise and Fall of T.D. Lysenko; Zhores was exiled to Britain in the 1970s.
Medvedev returned to the ruling 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. After the collapse of the Soviet government, Medvedev joined with dozens of other former communist deputies of the Soviet and Russian parliaments to found the Socialist Party of Working People, becoming a co-chair of the party.
Medvedev supports the former President of Russia and current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin
.
Tbilisi
Tbilisi is the capital and the largest city of Georgia, lying on the banks of the Mt'k'vari River. The name is derived from an early Georgian form T'pilisi and it was officially known as Tiflis until 1936...
, Georgia
Georgia (country)
Georgia is a sovereign state in the Caucasus region of Eurasia. Located at the crossroads of Western Asia and Eastern Europe, it is bounded to the west by the Black Sea, to the north by Russia, to the southwest by Turkey, to the south by Armenia, and to the southeast by Azerbaijan. The capital of...
) is a Russia
Russia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
n historian
Historian
A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. If the individual is...
renowned as the author of the dissident
Dissident
A dissident, broadly defined, is a person who actively challenges an established doctrine, policy, or institution. When dissidents unite for a common cause they often effect a dissident movement....
history of Stalinism
Stalinism
Stalinism refers to the ideology that Joseph Stalin conceived and implemented in the Soviet Union, and is generally considered a branch of Marxist–Leninist ideology but considered by some historians to be a significant deviation from this philosophy...
, Let History Judge , first published in English in 1972. Medvedev became a prominent Russian politician
Politician
A politician, political leader, or political figure is an individual who is involved in influencing public policy and decision making...
and served as a consultant to Mikhail Gorbachev
Mikhail Gorbachev
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev is a former Soviet statesman, having served as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 until 1991, and as the last head of state of the USSR, having served from 1988 until its dissolution in 1991...
.
Early life and education
Roy Medvedev was the son of a Aleksander Romanovich Medvedev, professor of Military-Political Academy and has an identical twin brother, the biologist Zhores MedvedevZhores Medvedev
Zhores Aleksandrovich Medvedev is a Russian biologist, historian and dissident. His twin brother is the historian Roy Medvedev.-Biography:Zhores Medvedev and his twin brother Roy Medvedev were born on 14 November 1925 in Tbilisi, Georgia, USSR....
. Their father was arrested in 1938, during one of Joseph Stalin's purges
Great Purge
The Great Purge was a series of campaigns of political repression and persecution in the Soviet Union orchestrated by Joseph Stalin from 1936 to 1938...
, and died in a labor camp in 1941.
Medvedev graduated from the Leningrad University. After joining the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Communist Party of the Soviet Union
The Communist Party of the Soviet Union was the only legal, ruling political party in the Soviet Union and one of the largest communist organizations in the world...
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 Russian dictatorDictator
A dictator is a ruler who assumes sole and absolute power but without hereditary ascension such as an absolute monarch. When other states call the head of state of a particular state a dictator, that state is called a dictatorship...
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
, and Stalinism
Stalinism
Stalinism refers to the ideology that Joseph Stalin conceived and implemented in the Soviet Union, and is generally considered a branch of Marxist–Leninist ideology but considered by some historians to be a significant deviation from this philosophy...
in general, during the Soviet era. In the early 1960s, Medvedev was engaged in samizdat
Samizdat
Samizdat was a key form of dissident activity across the Soviet bloc in which individuals reproduced censored publications by hand and passed the documents from reader to reader...
publications. He was critical of the unscientific nature of Lysenkoism
Lysenkoism
Lysenkoism, or Lysenko-Michurinism, also denotes the biological inheritance principle which Trofim Lysenko subscribed to and which derive from theories of the heritability of acquired characteristics, a body of biological inheritance theory which departs from Mendelism and that Lysenko named...
.
In 1969, Medvedev was expelled from the Communist Party after the publication of his book Let History Judge, which criticized Stalin and Stalinism at a time when official Soviet propagandists
Propaganda
Propaganda is a form of communication that is aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position so as to benefit oneself or one's group....
were trying to partially rehabilitate the former dictator. Let History Judge reflected the dissident thinking that emerged in the 1960s among Soviet intellectuals who, like Medvedev, sought a reformed, democratic socialism
Socialism
Socialism is an economic system characterized by social ownership of the means of production and cooperative management of the economy; or a political philosophy advocating such a system. "Social ownership" may refer to any one of, or a combination of, the following: cooperative enterprises,...
and a return to Leninism. He announced his position, along with Andrei Sakharov
Andrei Sakharov
Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov was a Soviet nuclear physicist, dissident and human rights activist. He earned renown as the designer of the Soviet Union's Third Idea, a codename for Soviet development of thermonuclear weapons. Sakharov was an advocate of civil liberties and civil reforms in the...
and others, in an open letter
Open letter
An open letter is a letter that is intended to be read by a wide audience, or a letter intended for an individual, but that is nonetheless widely distributed intentionally....
to the Soviet leadership in 1970.
Medvedev was often subject to house arrest and KGB
KGB
The KGB was the commonly used acronym for the . It was the national security agency of the Soviet Union from 1954 until 1991, and was the premier internal security, intelligence, and secret police organization during that time.The State Security Agency of the Republic of Belarus currently uses the...
harassment under Leonid Brezhnev
Leonid Brezhnev
Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev – 10 November 1982) was the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union , presiding over the country from 1964 until his death in 1982. His eighteen-year term as General Secretary was second only to that of Joseph Stalin in...
, but managed to publish numerous critical writings on Soviet history and politics abroad. Medvedev was oppressed for his active support of democracy
Democracy
Democracy is generally defined as a form of government in which all adult citizens have an equal say in the decisions that affect their lives. Ideally, this includes equal participation in the proposal, development and passage of legislation into law...
after he successfully published Let History Judge abroad in the late 1960s.
In a book co-authored with his identical twin brother, Zhores Medvedev
Zhores Medvedev
Zhores Aleksandrovich Medvedev is a Russian biologist, historian and dissident. His twin brother is the historian Roy Medvedev.-Biography:Zhores Medvedev and his twin brother Roy Medvedev were born on 14 November 1925 in Tbilisi, Georgia, USSR....
, A Question of Madness, Medvedev describes Zhores' Involuntary commitment
Involuntary commitment
Involuntary commitment or civil commitment is a legal process through which an individual with symptoms of severe mental illness is court-ordered into treatment in a hospital or in the community ....
in the Kaluga Psychiatric Hospital. Zhores, a dissident
Dissident
A dissident, broadly defined, is a person who actively challenges an established doctrine, policy, or institution. When dissidents unite for a common cause they often effect a dissident movement....
biologist
Biologist
A biologist is a scientist devoted to and producing results in biology through the study of life. Typically biologists study organisms and their relationship to their environment. Biologists involved in basic research attempt to discover underlying mechanisms that govern how organisms work...
, was questioned at the Kaluga
Kaluga
Kaluga is a city and the administrative center of Kaluga Oblast, Russia, located on the Oka River southwest of Moscow. Population: It is served by Grabtsevo Airport.-History:...
psychiatric facilities about his involvement with samizdat
Samizdat
Samizdat was a key form of dissident activity across the Soviet bloc in which individuals reproduced censored publications by hand and passed the documents from reader to reader...
, and about the book he had written, The Rise and Fall of T.D. Lysenko; Zhores was exiled to Britain in the 1970s.
Medvedev returned to the ruling party in 1989, after Mikhail Gorbachev
Mikhail Gorbachev
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev is a former Soviet statesman, having served as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 until 1991, and as the last head of state of the USSR, having served from 1988 until its dissolution in 1991...
launched his perestroika
Perestroika
Perestroika was a political movement within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union during 1980s, widely associated with the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev...
and glasnost
Glasnost
Glasnost was the policy of maximal publicity, openness, and transparency in the activities of all government institutions in the Soviet Union, together with freedom of information, introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev in the second half of the 1980s...
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. After the collapse of the Soviet government, Medvedev joined with dozens of other former communist deputies of the Soviet and Russian parliaments to found the Socialist Party of Working People, becoming a co-chair of the party.
Medvedev supports the former President of Russia and current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin
Vladimir Putin
Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin served as the second President of the Russian Federation and is the current Prime Minister of Russia, as well as chairman of United Russia and Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Union of Russia and Belarus. He became acting President on 31 December 1999, when...
.
Publications in English
- Let History Judge: The Origin and Consequences of Stalinism, Alfred A.Knopf, New York, 1972 ISBN 0-394-44645-3
- On Socialist Democracy, Alfred A.Knopf, New York, 1975, ISBN 0-394-48960-8
- Problems in the Literary Biography of Mikhail Sholokhov, Cambridge University Press, 1977
- Khrushchev, Blackwell, Oxford, Doublday,New York, 1983, ISBN 0-385-18387-9
- The October Revolution, Columbia University Press, New York, 1979, ISBN 0 09 4621900 5
- All Stalin's Men, Blackwell, Oxford, 1984, ISBN 0-385-18388-7
- A Question Of Madness (with Zhores Medvedev). Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York. 1971. ISBN 0-394-47900-9 ISBN 0-14-003783-7
- Khrushchev: The Years in Power (with Zhores Medvedev). 198 pages. Columbia University Press. 1976. ISBN 0-231-03939-5
- On Soviet Dissent Columbia University Press. 1979. ISBN 0-231-04812-2
- Nikolai Bukharin: The Last Years. 176 pages. W W Norton & Co Inc. 1983. ISBN 0-393-30110-9
- Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism (Revised and expanded edition). Columbia University Press. 1989. ISBN 0-231-06350-4
- Post-Soviet Russia: A Journey Through the Yeltsin Era (with George Shriver). 394 pages. Columbia University Press. 2002. ISBN 0-231-10607-6
- The Unknown Stalin (with Zhores Medvedev). The Overlook Press. 336 pages. 2004. ISBN 1-58567-502-4
External links
- FindArticles.com - 'An interview with Roy Medvedev', Fred Weir, Monthly Review (Feb, 1993)
- Time.com - 'The Brothers Medvedev', R.Z. Sheppard, TimeTime (magazine)Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
(13 December 1971) - Roy Medvedev commentaries on Project SyndicateProject SyndicateProject Syndicate is an international not-for-profit newspaper syndicate and association of newspapers. It distributes commentaries and analysis by experts, activists, Nobel laureates, statesmen, economists, political thinkers, business leaders and academics to its member publications, and...
: