Roy Medvedev

Origins and early life

Roy Aleksandrovich Medvedev was born in Tbilisi on 14 November 1925 to a Jewish mother, the cellist Yulia Isaakovna Reiman, and a Red Army political instructor, Aleksandr Medvedev; he and his twin brother, the biologist Zhores Medvedev, later told the Washington Post that as half-Jews they had felt the German threat directly during the war.

Work and career

His father was arrested in 1938 and died in a labour camp on the Kolyma in 1941, and that loss set the course of his life's work. He fought in the Red Army, studied philosophy at Leningrad University, taught, and worked in pedagogical research while writing history without any hope of publishing it at home. His book Let History Judge, a documented indictment of Stalin's terror built from the testimony of survivors and old Bolsheviks, circulated in samizdat and appeared abroad in 1971; he was expelled from the Communist Party in 1969 for writing it.

Unlike most dissidents he argued from within the Marxist tradition, calling for democratic reform of the Soviet system rather than its abolition, which put him at odds with Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov alike. He was never imprisoned, though his brother was confined to a psychiatric hospital in 1970 and later stripped of citizenship.

Later years

Rehabilitated under perestroika, readmitted to the party in 1989 and elected to the Congress of People's Deputies, he went on to write biographies of Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Putin, and he died in 2026.