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Another prominent Soviet intellectual last week joined the growing debate on East-West détente. In a 7,000-word article circulated in Moscow and published in West Germany's weekly Die Zeit, Historian Roy Medvedev, 48, best known for his exhaustive exposé of the Stalinist purges (Let History Judge), took issue with several fellow dissidents who believe that Western pressures can lead to internal reforms. Arguing that change in the Soviet system can come only from above, Medvedev expressed fears that demands from the West are more likely to "make more difficult the process of democratization...
...Medvedev's argument is directly opposed to that of Physicist Andrei Sakharov (TIME, Sept. 24), who has called for congressional passage of Senator Henry M. Jackson's amendment making most-favored-nation status in Soviet trade contingent upon free emigration. Medvedev praised Sakharov's "unquestionable courage" and denounced the "gross and unjust" harassment that the scientist has suffered from Soviet authorities. But Medvedev also suggested that Sakharov and Novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn may unwittingly be aiding reactionaries within the Soviet leadership, who can seize on their declarations "to split and demoralize dissidents...
Lagging Behind. The crux of Medvedev's argument is that in the long run "the basic impulses for democratization of the U.S.S.R. must emerge from Soviet society itself." The right kind of Russian leader, he implies, could marshal enormous support "from below" because of widespread discontent over "the slow pace of economic, social and cultural progress, the bureaucratic system, mismanagement, lack of information and the lagging behind Western countries in many respects." Medvedev fears that pressures from the West could backfire and strengthen the hand of regressive elements. Indeed, he observes that there has already been an alarming "shift...
...Medvedev had long been an irritant to the Soviet authorities. His first sin, in 1969, was to write The Rise and Fall of T.D. Lysenko, a chronicle of Stalin's favorite scientist, a crackpot biologist who was the final, arbitrary word in Russian genetics for more than two decades. His second sin, in 1971, was to write The Medvedev Papers, a tale of Soviet censorship and suppression of intellectuals. Neither book was published in the U.S.S.R., but Soviet officials were so angered by their publication in the West that they finally confined Medvedev to a madhouse for what they...
...embarrassing was the protest, not only in the West but in Russia itself, that Medvedev was released from the asylum after 19 days. His latest round with the Soviet government may have been provoked by his plans to publish a "factual tribute" to Solzhenitsyn entitled Ten Years After One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (TIME, May 28). It is a chronicle of the novelist's rise to fame and his later harassment by Soviet authorities after he published his bestselling novel...