Word: medvedevs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Among dissident Soviet intellectuals, the man who best embodies the spirit of loyal opposition to the Kremlin is Roy Medvedev, 46, an educator-turned-historian and a dedicated Marxist-Leninist. Last month a London publisher brought out a Russian-language edition of Who Is Mad? (to be published in the U.S. on Dec. 1 by Alfred A. Knopf under the title A Question of Madness), co-authored by Roy and his twin brother Zhores. a prominent biologist. It describes Zhores' 19-day confinement in a madhouse for his political behavior, and Roy's ultimately successful efforts...
Last week reports were circulating in Russia that Roy Medvedev had left his job at the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences in Moscow after the KGB (the Soviet secret police) had searched his apartment, confiscated his private papers, and issued a summons for him to appear for questioning-which he refused to obey. The police raid had the unintended effect of focusing public attention in the West on a major new work by Medvedev. Among the papers that were seized by the KGB agents was a 1,500-page typescript of the first comprehensive study of the Stalin era ever...
...Medvedev irritated Soviet authorities when two of his works reached the West. In 1969 the Columbia University Press printed The Rise and Fall of T.D. Lysenko, a devastating history of how the crackpot genetic theories of Stalin's pet scientist were established as unassailable dogma until the fall of Khrushchev...
After that book was published, Medvedev was fired from his job as head of the Obninsk radiological institute, 35 miles southwest of Moscow. Unable to find another job, he set about writing a calm, straightforward survey of the restrictions, censorship, and surveillance that oppress many Soviet intellectuals. This work too found its way to the West via samizdat (literally "self-publishing"), the literary underground. It was his authorship of that book, published in the U.S. this week by St. Martin's Press as The Medvedev Papers, which led directly to Medvedev's forced hospitalization last year...
...Medvedev was released only after his twin brother, Roy, an eminent historian, mobilized a protest by a group of internationally renowned writers and scientists, including Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Physicists Andrei Sakharov and Pyotr Kapitsa, and Mstislav Keldysh, president of the Academy of Sciences. Last summer, in an attempt to hush up the embarrassing affair, the KGB (Soviet secret police) promised the Medvedevs that they would "close the case" and asked for assurances that the brothers would not write about what had happened. Roy Medvedev agreed, on the condition that there be no more "psychiatric blackmail...