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...YEARS AFTER IVAN DENISOVICH by ZHORES MEDVEDEV 202 pages. Knopf...
Last August while Russian Geneticist Zhores Medvedev was working in Britain - with his government's permis sion - Soviet authorities canceled his passport and revoked his citizenship, making him an involuntary émigré. Medvedev, who now lives in London, cannot have been surprised. The Soviets had tried to subdue him before, once locking him in an insane asylum for 19 days until worldwide protests embarrassed the government into releasing him. Medvedev's indignant dissidence (expressed in The Rise and Fall of T.D. Lysenko and A Question of Madness) had marked him as a troublesome enemy of partiinost, that...
...Khrushchev, the new Soviet leaders took up repression again in a serious way - isolating the rebellious, taking away their jobs, jailing them, sending them to asylums. Lesser-known dissidents were easily silenced. The better known, like Solzhenitsyn, have tried to save themselves with publicity. Yet in May 1972, says Medvedev, it seemed that the stage had been set to charge Russia's greatest living writer with defaming the Soviet state. Richard Nixon was then on his way to Moscow, however. As Medvedev dryly relates: "An agreement was expected, amongst many others, on cultural and scientific affairs, and reprisals against...
...Medvedev's pragmatic view does not come as all that much of a surprise. While Sakharov apparently no longer even considers himself a socialist, Medvedev remains a committed Marxist-Leninist. Even though he was expelled from the Party in 1969 for his writings about Stalin, he is respected both by dissidents and many orthodox Communists. Shortly after Medvedev's expulsion, Soviet authorities tried to have his twin brother, Zhores, a brilliant biologist, declared insane for writing a critical book about Stalin's crackpot geneticist, T.D. Lysenko...
Last August the Soviet embassy in London lifted Zhores' passport while he was doing research in Britain. That action may well have influenced Roy Medvedev's poignant comment on freedom of emigration, which he calls "an important civil liberty. But it is more important for conditions to be created here under which the Soviet people would not want to leave their country...