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...QUESTION OF MADNESS by Zhores and Roy Medvedev. 223 pages. Knopf...
...Medvedev offers some new and intriguing evidence about Stalin's career, citing unpublished and previously unknown memoirs and monographs written by victims of the purges. Performing a delicate balancing act, he manages to deliver a scathing indictment of the Soviet regime during the quarter of a century that Stalin ruled, while at the same time endorsing the goals of the Bolshevik revolution and acquitting Lenin of responsibility for the crimes committed by his successor. In answer to the question of why Lenin permitted Stalin to contend for power in the early '20s, Medvedev writes: "Lenin's natural...
Aberration. If he has an occasional bone to pick with Lenin, however, Medvedev has nothing but condemnation for Stalin. He sees Stalin as typical of the "unstable and dishonorable people who join a revolutionary movement and later degenerate into tyrants." Medvedev writes: "His political views were formed under the influence of Marx and Lenin, but they did not grow into convictions, into a system of Communist moral principles . . . He was only a fellow traveler of revolution." Medvedev's thesis is that Stalinism was an aberration of Communism and that the Marxist-Leninist system is still the best hope...
...Medvedev conceived Let History Judge at the time of Nikita Khrushchev's destalinization speech in 1956. He began researching and writing the book in 1962 and reportedly submitted it for publication to the Party Central Committee's Academy of Social Sciences in 1965. The book was rejected. He then revised and greatly expanded it, completing the work in 1968. Forty folders full of research material on the Stalin period were among the papers taken from his apartment...
Last week Medvedev left his home and moved in with friends. He is said to be under constant police surveillance. At week's end, in an open letter circulating in Moscow, Medvedev strongly protested against the "absolutely arbitrary nature and illegality" of the police raid. Some fear that this new round of harassment may be a prelude to arrest, but there is hope that Medvedev's international stature may be sufficiently enhanced by Let History Judge to persuade the authorities to think twice before further persecuting him and thus touching off a worldwide protest...