Word: medvedevs
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...Methuselah syndrome that has flourished for years in the U.S.S.R. is about to be debunked, and by no less an authority than the eminent Russian-born biologist and student of aging, Zhores A. Medvedev. Exiled and working in London, Medvedev, 48, has written an article for an upcoming issue of the Gerontologist in which he systematically destroys the myth of the supercentenarians, not only in the Soviet Union but also in Kashmir and Ecuador. "The trouble is that many scientists have taken for granted that these old people are telling the truth, and then they try to find some reasons...
Moreover, says Medvedev, when about 40 medical, psychological and biochemical tests were run in 1972 on reputed centenarians in the U.S.S.R., a commission of gerontologists was surprised by the "paradoxical" finding that the function and metabolism of the oldsters were the same as those of people about 60 years old. Proven centenarians in the West exhibit a degeneration appropriate to their age, says Medvedev...
...scientists have been able to prove the claimed ages of the centenarians or satisfactorily explain longevity among such widely dispersed peoples, says Medvedev. He methodically ticks off each suggested cause. It is not mountain air, because many of the oldsters live at sea level. Nor is it temperature, because some live in torrid and others in frigid zones. Diet varies radically. Some of the people studied subsist on what heart specialists would consider healthful fare while others consume great quantities of fats and wine...
Merely possessing a copy of Gulag has become a dangerous offense for ordinary Soviet citizens, and dissidents who have defended Gulag may soon be punished. Western experts believe that Physicist Andrei Sakharov and Historian Roy Medvedev may be forced into exile for their praise of the book. One of Solzhenitsyn's more obscure defenders, Writer Vladimir Voinovich, a former railway worker, has been expelled from the Soviet Writers Union...
...Medvedev knows his way around the Soviet bureaucracy, and it is in that sort of expertise that his book is most interesting. He understands how campaigns of public opinion are mounted, as when Pravda presented an outpouring of orchestrated "mail" against awarding Solzhenitsyn the Lenin Prize. There is a cold fascination in learning that Glavlit-the machinery of hacks that controls censorship-could overrule even First Secretary Khrushchev about what should be published. More recently, Novelist Mikhail Sholokhov (Quiet Flows the Don) had to delete a chapter from a new novel called They Fought for the Motherland at the censors...