Roy Aleksandrovich Medvedev (Russian: Рой Алекса́ндрович Медве́дев; born 14 November 1925, Tbilisi, Georgia) is a Russian political writer, author of the dissident history of Stalinism, Let History Judge (Russian: К суду истории), first published in English in 1972. Medvedev became a prominent Russian public figure and served as a consultant to Mikhail Gorbachev.
Early life and education
Roy Medvedev was the son of Aleksander Romanovich Medvedev, a professor of Military-Political Academy and has an identical twin brother, the biologist Zhores Medvedev. Their father was arrested in 1938, during one of Joseph Stalin's purges, and died in a labor camp in 1941.
Medvedev graduated from the Leningrad University. After joining the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956 Medvedev pursued a teaching career before becoming a researcher in the Soviet Academy of Pedagogical Sciences.
From a Marxist viewpoint, Medvedev criticized former Soviet General Secretary Joseph Stalin, and Stalinism in general, during the Soviet era. In the early 1960s, Medvedev was engaged in samizdat publications. He was critical of the unscientific nature of Lysenkoism.
Medvedev was expelled from the Communist Party in 1969 after his book Let History Judge was published abroad. The book criticized Stalin and Stalinism at a time when official Soviet propagandists were trying to rehabilitate the former General Secretary. Let History Judge reflected the dissident thinking that emerged in the 1960s among Soviet intellectuals who, like Medvedev, sought a reformist version of socialism. He announced his position, along with Andrei Sakharov and others, in an open letter to the Soviet leadership in 1970.
Medvedev was often subject to house arrest and KGB harassment under Leonid Brezhnev after 1969, but managed to publish many more critical writings on Soviet history and politics abroad.
In a book co-authored with his twin brother, Zhores, A Question of Madness, Medvedev describes Zhores' involuntary commitment in the Kaluga Psychiatric Hospital (see Political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union). Zhores, a dissident biologist, was questioned in the hospital about his involvement with samizdat, and his book The Rise and Fall of T.D. Lysenko. Zhores Medvedev was exiled to Britain in the 1970s.
Roy Medvedev rejoined the Communist Party in 1989, after Mikhail Gorbachev launched his perestroika and glasnost program of gradual political and economic reforms. He was elected to the Soviet Union's Congress of People's Deputies and was named as member of the Supreme Soviet, the permanent working body of the Congress. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 Medvedev and dozens of other former communist deputies of the Soviet and Russian parliaments founded the Socialist Party of Working People, and became a co-chair of the party.
Medvedev supports the current President of Russia and former Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
Books
Let History Judge: The Origin and Consequences of Stalinism, Alfred A.Knopf, New York, 1972 ISBN 0-394-44645-3
On Socialist Democracy, Alfred A.Knopf, New York, 1975, ISBN 0-394-48960-8
Problems in the Literary Biography of Mikhail Sholokhov, Cambridge University Press, 1977
Khrushchev, Blackwell, Oxford, Doubleday,New York, 1983, ISBN 0-385-18387-9
The October Revolution, Columbia University Press, New York, 1979, ISBN 0094629005
All Stalin's Men, Blackwell, Oxford, 1984, ISBN 0-385-18388-7
A Question Of Madness (with Zhores Medvedev). Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York. 1971. ISBN 0-394-47900-9 ISBN 0-14-003783-7
Khrushchev: The Years in Power (with Zhores Medvedev). 198 pages. Columbia University Press. 1976. ISBN 0-231-03939-5
On Soviet Dissent Columbia University Press. 1979. ISBN 0-231-04812-2
Philip Mironov and the Russian Civil War (with Sergei Starikov) Alfred Knopf. 1978. ISBN 0-394-40681-8
Nikolai Bukharin: The Last Years. 176 pages. W W Norton & Co Inc. 1983. ISBN 0-393-30110-9
Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism (Revised and expanded edition). Columbia University Press. 1989. ISBN 0-231-06350-4
Post-Soviet Russia: A Journey Through the Yeltsin Era (with George Shriver). 394 pages. Columbia University Press. 2002. ISBN 0-231-10607-6
The Unknown Stalin (with Zhores Medvedev). The Overlook Press. 336 pages. 2004. ISBN 1-58567-502-4
China and the Superpowers. Basil Blackwell. Oxford. 1986. ISBN 0-631-13843-9
Articles
Sakharov, Andrei; Turchin, Valentin; Medvedev, Roy (6 June 1970). "The need for democratization". The Saturday Review: 26–27.
Sakharov, Andrei; Turchin, Valentin; Medvedev, Roy (Summer 1970). "An open letter". Survey: 160–170.
Medvedev, Roy (1974). "The Gulag Archipelago". Australian Left Review. 1 (45): 25–33.
Medvedev, Roy (July 1974). "On Solzhenitsyn's book The Gulag Archipelago". Soviet Studies in Literature. 10 (3): 44–62. doi:10.2753/RSL1061-1975100344.
Medvedev, Roy (January–February 1974). "Problems of democratization and détente". New Left Review. 1 (83): 25–33.
Medvedev, Roy (1 September 1974). "What lies ahead for us?". New Left Review (87): 61.
Medvedev, Roy (March 1979). "The future of Soviet dissent". Index on Censorship. 8 (2): 25–31. doi:10.1080/03064227908532898.
Medvedev, Roy (1 January 1984). "Andropov and the dissidents: the internal atmosphere under the new Soviet leadership". Dissent. 31 (1): 97–102.
Medvedev, Roy; Vladimov, Georgi (May 1979). "Controversy: dissent among dissidents". Index on Censorship. 8 (3): 33–37. doi:10.1080/03064227908532924.
Medvedev, Roy (1 May 1980). "The Afghan crisis". New Left Review. 1 (121): 91.
Medvedev, Roy; Medvedev, Zhores (1976). "Krushchev's secret speech". Australian Left Review. 1 (52): 34–37.
Medvedev, Roy; Medvedev, Zhores (November–December 1981). "The USSR and the arms race". New Left Review. 1 (130).
Medvedev, Roy; Medvedev, Zhores (1982). "A nuclear samizdat on Americas arms-race". The Nation. 234 (2): 38.
Medvedev, Roy (1 September 1991). "Politics after the coup". New Left Review. 1 (189): 91.
Medvedev, Roy (Fall 1992). "After the communist collapse: new political tendencies in Russia". Dissent. 39: 489–497.
Medvedev, Roy (March 1995). "Russia today". Russian Politics & Law. 33 (2): 40–46. doi:10.2753/RUP1061-1940330240.
Medvedev, Roy (March 1996). "Russians and Germans fifty years after World War II". Russian Politics & Law. 33 (2): 82–96. doi:10.2753/RUP1061-1940340282.
Medvedev, Roy (May 1998). "Russia again at the сrossroads". Sociological Research. 37 (3): 22–42. doi:10.2753/SOR1061-0154370322.
Medvedev, Roy (May 1998). "A new class in Russian society". Russian Politics & Law. 36 (3): 45–66. doi:10.2753/RUP1061-1940360345.
Medvedev, Roy (July 1999). "A long-term construction project for Russia". Russian Politics & Law. 37 (4): 5–48. doi:10.2753/RUP1061-194037045.
Medvedev, Roy (July 2000). "Boris Yeltsin resigns". Russian Politics & Law. 38 (4): 82–88. doi:10.2753/RUP1061-1940380482.
Medvedev, Roy (12 July 2006). "History and myths". Russia in Global Affairs.
Medvedev, Roy (June 2007). "The Russian language throughout the Commonwealth of Independent States: toward a statement of the problem". Russian Politics & Law. 45 (3): 5–30. doi:10.2753/RUP1061-1940450301.
Medvedev, Roy (July–September 2007). "A splinted Ukraine" (PDF). Russia in Global Affairs. 5 (3): 194–213. Archived (PDF) from the original on 19 January 2016.
