Word: medvedevs
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...Medvedev twins have punched some embarrassing small holes in their country's bureaucracy. Zhores, a biochemist and sociologist of science, made influential enemies with his book The Rise and Fall of T.D. Lysenko (Columbia University Press, 1969). Drawing upon his personal experience as a devoted Marxist working within the Soviet scientific establishment, he fashioned a dispassionate piece of scholarship about Stalin's quack biologist and agronomist, whose theories hobbled Russia's economy for more than a generation...
...Medvedev, 46, a historian of the humanities, takes a more sweeping view of the Soviet past. He also takes as many risks as his brother. Earlier this fall (TIME, Nov. 1), KGB agents searched Roy's apartment and confiscated his bulky manuscript Let History Judge: The Origin and Consequences of Stalinism. But not before a copy had reached the West, where it will be published early next year...
...Zhores Medvedev's case, that directive was followed so literally that the precise nature of events-not to say Medvedev's "malady"-was a secret from everybody but the state. In May 1970, he was summoned to the Obninsk Psychiatric Clinic, not far from Moscow, under the pretext of attending a consultation about his son, a teenager with hippie tendencies. While waiting in a small room at a nurse's request, Medvedev looked out of a window and saw his son leaving the hospital grounds. When he turned to go, Medvedev found the door of the room...
...Stalinist days, Medvedev would have probably disappeared without a trace behind the walls of Lubianka prison. It is a measure of progress that Medvedev had only to endure obscene absurdities. Committees of psychiatrists tried to discredit his mind with such limp diagnoses as "poor adaptation to the social environment," and "obsessive reformist delusions." Such labels, as the Medvedevs note, could have also been pasted on Marx and Lenin...
False hopes, blackmail and red tape were used as well. Yet to read the Medvedevs' unruffled testimony is to believe -perhaps a bit too easily-that demolishing their inquisitors' tangled logic was child's play. It undoubtedly took a very clear mind and great emotional stability to stand up to such harassment. On the other hand, most of the psychiatrists appear to suffer from unresolved authority conflicts. Take the exasperated analysis of Medvedev bv one Dr. Lifshits, the book's most visible villain: "Another person with his intellect would be able in time to adjust...