Roy Medvedev, historian an active participant in the dissident movement in the USSR in the 1960s, died on February 13 at the age of 101. He is the author over 30 historical and journalistic books and biographies of contemporaries, among the most significant "In the judgment of history: Genesis and consequences of Stalinism", about the Great Terror in In the USSR, was published in the United States. It was subsequently published in 20 countries and translated into 14 languages. The author himself called it the main part of his life.
He was an active participant from the beginning of the 1960s dissident movement. Together with his brother, he was the editor of the magazine "Politički dnevnik", which dealt with socio-political issues. In 1969, he was expelled from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union "due to views incompatible with party membership." In 1970, together with physicists Andrei Sakharov and Valentin Turchin, he published an open letter to Soviet leaders about the need to democratize the Soviet system.
Life path
Roy Alexandrovich Medvedev was born on November 14, 1925 in Tiflis (now Tbilisi). It was named after Manabendra Roy (1887–1954), one of the founders of the Communist Party of India and a prominent figure in the Comintern. In 1938, Roy and Jores's father was accused of counter-revolutionary activity and repressed. He died in 1941 in the forced labor camp in Kolyma.
In 1943, Roy Medvedev graduated from high school as a part-time student and was drafted into the army. He served in the Transcaucasian Military District (1943–1946). After the war, he graduated in 1951 at the Faculty of Philosophy of the Leningrad State University, which in
From 1951 to 1954, he worked as a teacher in the Sverdlovsk region, and then as a school director in the Leningrad region. In 1958, he obtained a doctorate in pedagogical sciences, after which he worked at the State Publishing House for Pedagogical Literature and the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences of the USSR.
When the 20th Congress of the CPSU was held in Moscow in 1956, known for its condemnation of the personality cult and ideological legacy of Joseph Stalin, Roy Medvedev's father was rehabilitated, after which Roy Medvedev joined the CPSU.
In the same year, Roy's brother Zhores Medvedev, however forcibly placed in a psychiatric hospital in Kaluga. He suffered more severe persecution by the Soviet authorities than his brother. These events are described in the brothers' joint book "Who's Crazy?", published in London in 1971. Zhores Medvedev then moved to Great Britain and was stripped of his Soviet citizenship.
Disappearance from Moscow
When the book "In the Judgment of History: The Genesis and Consequences of Stalinism" was published in the United States in 1974, Roy Medvedev's apartment was searched, and he was served with a summons to appear before the prosecution. Instead of reporting to the prosecutor's office, Medvedev decided to "disappear from Moscow" before his books were published and fled to the Baltics, where he lived for several years.
"When I returned home, no one even invited me to the hearing. The books were published, the press was good, they forgot about me and left me alone until Brezhnev's death. Although there was another search in 1975, it had no consequences, Roy Medvedev recalled on a later occasion.
During Perestroika, he was a deputy and a member of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. In 1989, Medvedev was reinstated to the Communist Party at his own request. When during the time of Perestroika Mikhail Gorbachev, censorship in the USSR was reduced, the ban on his books was lifted and his books were also printed in the USSR. In 1991, Roy Medvedev harshly criticized the State Committee for Emergency Situations, which tried to carry out a coup, but also against the President of Russia, Boris Yeltsin.
Putin's biographer
He spoke against the banning of the Communist Party of the USSR, rejected Yeltsin's dissolution of the Congress of People's Deputies of the USSR, and in 1992. After the collapse of the USSR in 1991, he held the position of co-president of the Socialist Workers' Party of the Russian Federation (abolished in 2000).
During his life, Medvedev wrote over 50 books, many of which were dedicated to various Soviet and Russian political figures: Joseph Stalin, Yuri Andropov, Nikita Khrushchev, Dmitry Medvedev, Yuri Luzhkov. Between 2000 and 2014, he published nine books and articles about Putin, so he was called Putin's biographer.
Roy Medvedev is the author of over 30 historical and journalistic books and biographies of contemporaries. For the biography of the chairman of the KGB and general secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU Yuri Andropov in the series "Lives of extraordinary people", he was awarded the FSB of Russia Award in 2007.
Among his works: "Khrushchev: Years in Power" (1975), "They Surrounded Stalin" (1990), "Personality and Epoch". Political portrait of LI Brezhnev (1991), General Secretary from Lubyanka (1993), Chubais and the voucher (1997), Putin's riddle (2000), Vladimir Putin: No third term? (2007), Yuri Luzhkov and Moscow (2008), Boris Yeltsin: People and Power in Late 20th Century Russia (2011) and Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping: Personality and Leadership (2021).
