13 февраля – На 101-м году жизни скончался легендарный историк и писатель, автор многочисленных трудов по политической истории Советского Союза и России конца XX – первой четверти XXI в., в советское время – диссидент и правозащитник, а затем, в 1989–1991 гг., – депутат Верховного Совета, в 1990–1991 гг. – член ЦК КПСС, в этом качестве принимавший активное практическое участие в реформировании СССР, Рой Александрович Медведев. Его без преувеличения можно назвать одним из ведущих исследователей сложного прошлого нашей страны в XX в. и борцов за восстановление исторической правды еще задолго до перестройки, когда ликвидация «белых пятен» минувшего и исправление его официозных трактовок стали обыденным делом, за которое взялись многие историки. Мы горды тем, что опубликовали две книги, написанные Роем Александровичем в соавторстве, – «Владимир Путин и Си Цзиньпин: личность и лидерство» (2021 г.) и «Владимир Путин и СВО» (2025 г.).
Выражаем искреннее соболезнование родным и близким Роя Александровича, его соавторам и коллегам по совместной работе.
New York Times, February 16, 2026
Roy Medvedev, Soviet Era Historian and Dissident, Is Dead at 100
His score of books and hundreds of essays documented Stalinist executions,
Communist repressions and censorship, and the transition to post-Soviet Russia
By Robert D. McFadden
Roy Medvedev, the Soviet historian whose books on Stalin’s crimes and
Communism’s excesses made him a political outcast for decades, and
then a rehabilitated voice of conscience as an invalid Soviet Union
stumbled toward collapse, died on Friday. He was 100.
His daughter-in-law Svetlana Medvedeva confirmed the death to the
Russian state news agency Tass and said the apparent cause was heart
failure.
In the palindromic world of Soviet-speak, where things proclaimed
false were often real and things proclaimed real were often false, Mr.
Medvedev was an internationally known nonperson — a Marxist writer of
power and insight who did not change his socialist democratic message,
but came full circle, from villain to hero, as history turned around
him.
Taken together, his score of books and hundreds of essays became the
story of the Soviet era from 1917 to 1991, documenting Stalinist
executions that mounted into the millions; Communist dictatorships
that imposed sweeping repressions, censorship and state controls over
ordinary lives; and the transition under Mikhail S. Gorbachev and
Boris N. Yeltsin to post-Soviet Russia.
In the West, he was known as the most independent historian of the
era. His major works, including his best-known book, “Let History
Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism” (1971), were
published abroad, but circulated underground at home under the radar
of censorship.
Unlike other Soviet dissident writers, including his twin brother,
Zhores A. Medvedev, who died in London in 2018, and the Nobel
Prize-winning author Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, who died near Moscow
in 2008, Roy Medvedev managed to avoid imprisonment and forced exile.
But for 20 years after his calls for democratic reforms first appeared
in samizdat (clandestine) journals in the mid-1960s, he was persona
non grata. The authorities subjected him to house arrest, ransacked
his apartment, seized his research, accused him of slandering the
nation and expelled him from the Communist Party. Still, he remained
loyal to the party and the nation and insisted that changes must come
from within.
He was right, eventually. Mr. Gorbachev became the Soviet leader in
1985 and instituted glasnost (openness), perestroika (restructuring)
and reforms that included a modest relaxation of censorship,
restraints on the police, multicandidate elections and a new
legislature of people’s representatives. Some writers who had been
denounced as traitors were praised, and many exiles, including Mr.
Solzhenitsyn, who had spent almost two decades in the United States,
were allowed to return home.
In 1989, Mr. Medvedev was reinstated by the Communist Party, elected
to the Congress of People’s Deputies and elevated to prominence as a
social and political critic. A year later, he became a member of the
party’s Central Committee, the ruling elite that had scorned him. “I
didn’t change my views,” he said at the time. “A turnabout occurred in
the party, the Central Committee. They stopped discriminating against
me.”
By then, there had even been calls for unbanning his books. The
Communist youth weekly Sobesednik in 1988 portrayed him as an old
hero. “We hope that soon the Soviet reader can also become acquainted
with the works of our unyielding countryman, Roy Medvedev — sharp,
polemical, controversial, appealing to the voice of conscience in each
of us, surprisingly true and sincere,” it said. “The times demand
these books.”
In his rumpled jacket with collar undone and necktie askew, Mr.
Medvedev looked like a gentle professor. He was calm and soft-spoken,
with lidded blue eyes and a shock of white hair scraped back from a
high forehead. The face was a bit red, as if he’d just had a bottle of
wine, and he seemed perpetually on the verge of a wicked thought or a
great idea.
Accounting of Atrocities
Restored to respectability, Mr. Medvedev in 1989 published the most
detailed accounting of Stalinist atrocities ever presented to a mass
audience in the Soviet Union, writing in the national weekly Argumenti
i Fakti (circulation 20 million) that 20 million people had died in
labor camps, forced collectivization, famine and executions, and that
40 million had been arrested, driven from their lands or blacklisted.
In 1990, “Time of Change: An Insider’s View of Russia’s
Transformation,” by Mr. Medvedev and Giulietto Chiesa, the Moscow
correspondent of the Italian Communist newspaper L’Unità, detailed Mr.
Gorbachev’s tenure in a nation battered by economic problems, crime
and ethnic conflicts, and moving toward collapse even as Mr. Yeltsin
began to emerge as his successor.
Mr. Medvedev became a consultant to Mr. Gorbachev and Mr. Yeltsin and,
over the next decade, he wrote political biographies of the Soviet
leaders Leonid I. Brezhnev and Yuri V. Andropov, and volumes on
capitalism and politics in post-Soviet Russia as well as on Vladimir
Putin, who succeeded Mr. Yeltsin as president.
That book, sometimes translated as “Putin’s Time?,” appeared in 2002
and was soon on sale in the Kremlin bookshop. It detailed Mr. Putin’s
K.G.B. work and the early stages of his rise to power and painted him,
as he said in an interview at the time, as part of a “sober and
pragmatic” generation born after World War II.
The work’s hopeful portrait — of a leader with “character and
intellect” — came too soon to document Mr. Putin’s suppression of
Russian democracy and political opponents, his annexation of Crimea
and his invasion of Ukraine, which drew international economic
sanctions and condemnation.
Roy Aleksandrovich Medvedev (pronounced Mid-VADE-yeff) and his
identical twin, Zhores, were born on Nov. 14, 1925, in Tbilisi, the
capital of Soviet Georgia.
Their father, Aleksandr Romanovich Medvedev, a Red Army political
commissar in the civil war that followed the 1917 Revolution and later
a professor of Marxist philosophy at Leningrad State University, was
arrested in Stalin’s purges in 1938 and died in a Siberian labor camp
in 1941. Their mother, the former Yulia Isaakovna Reiman, was a
cellist from a Jewish family in Leningrad.
After Red Army service in World War II, Roy received a bachelor’s
degree in philosophy from Leningrad State University in 1951 and a
doctorate from the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences in Moscow in 1958.
Between degrees, he taught history at a high school in Sverdlovsk (now
Ekaterinburg) and was principal of a high school near Leningrad (St.
Petersburg).
In 1956, he married Galina A. Gaidina, a physiologist. They had a son,
Aleksandr. A list of his immediate survivors was not immediately
available.
The same year Mr. Medvedev married — three years after Stalin’s death
— he and his brother were successful in rehabilitating their father’s
standing in the Communist Party.
“The fact that my father was arrested was something frightening and
completely incomprehensible, completely out of accord with the ideas
of Leninism or Marxism or socialism,” Roy Medvedev later said. “I
understood that our lives had been visited by a great evil, but the
extent of that evil I could not then understand. But I wanted to
figure it out even then, so I decided in my earliest years to busy
myself with politics, with social science, to examine what is good and
what is bad in our society.”
In the late 1950s, Mr. Medvedev was deputy editor of the Publishing
House of Pedagogical Literature in Moscow. In the 1960s, he was a
researcher at the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences and, in 1970-71, was
a senior social scientist. Zhores became a biologist and wrote books
on aging, heredity and other subjects.
The brothers joined the Communist Party in the 1950s, but in 1961 they
began writing major books that would be published abroad and
circulated in samizdat at home, and would shape their destinies —
Zhores from exile in London and Roy from a fifth-floor walk-up in
Moscow, each writing a canon of dissent that eventually became, more
or less, politically correct.
Zhores’s 1969 book, “The Rise and Fall of T.D. Lysenko,” attacked the
pseudoscience of Stalin’s director of biology, whose unscientific
theories corrupted Soviet sciences, contributed to disastrous crop
failures and led to the banishment and death of uncounted opponents.
In the 1970s, Zhores was arrested, declared insane, confined in a
mental institution and later stripped of his citizenship while working
in London.
Meanwhile, Roy’s landmark book, “Let History Judge,” documented as
never before the staggering crimes of Josef Stalin, who ruled from
1928 until his death in 1953. It was based on party archives dating to
1917, affidavits of concentration camp survivors, memos of victims
retrieved posthumously, and reports by a commission that after
Stalin’s death investigated his mass purges and accounts by hundreds
of witnesses.
Mr. Medvedev concluded that Stalin was not a madman, but was a
paranoid obsessed with power who became an evil force that corrupted
Communism. Avoiding another Stalin was critical to a socialist
democratic future in the Soviet Union, he insisted. These were
divisive judgments inside the Soviet apparatus and in a world that had
often compared Stalin to Hitler and regarded Soviet Communism as
irretrievably befouled.
Despite Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization speech before
a party congress in 1956 and later investigations that exposed many
Stalinist crimes, censors rejected Mr. Medvedev’s book twice in the
1960s, wavering in an uncertain Orwellian climate that acknowledged
Stalin’s misdeeds, but sought to de-emphasize them in order to
resurrect him as a monumental, if flawed, leader.
When the book was published in New York in 1971, the Pulitzer
Prize-winning journalist Harrison E. Salisbury, in a review for The
New York Times, hailed it as a milestone. “On the basis of Medvedev’s
work,” he wrote, “every history of Russia from Lenin’s death to
Khrushchev’s fall will have to be revised.” Edward Crankshaw, a
journalist, author and authority on Soviet politics, wrote in the
British newspaper The Observer that the book was “nothing less than a
one-man attempt to rescue the history of the Soviet Union from the
party hacks and to salvage the honor of the revolution.”
Acts of Defiance
During the book’s years in limbo, from 1964 to 1971, Mr. Medvedev and
his brother produced 79 issues of an underground monthly, Political
Diary, which discussed censorship, socialist democracy and other
subjects.
They also wrote “A Question of Madness,” on Zhores’s 19 days in a
mental institution and the protests that won his release. The book,
charging that 250 people were held in Soviet mental asylums for
political reasons, appeared in London and New York in 1971 and
generated international shock waves.
In addition, Roy Medvedev and Andrei D. Sakharov, the nuclear
physicist who later won the Nobel Peace Prize, sent an open letter to
the Kremlin analyzing failures of the Soviet system. These acts of
defiance soon ended a period of relative freedom for Mr. Medvedev.
Political Diary was closed, he quit the Academy of Pedagogical
Sciences, his archives were raided and he went into hiding for a time.
In “On Socialist Democracy,” published in the United States in 1975,
Mr. Medvedev identified himself with a small group of Communists who
favored democratization of Soviet society, civil rights, free
elections, a multiparty system and decentralized government. To
advance these ideas, he founded an underground journal, Twentieth
Century, in 1975. The authorities closed it after 10 issues.
But his books reached the West with drumbeat regularity: “Khrushchev:
The Years in Power” (1976), with Zhores; “Problems in the Literary
Biography of Mikhail Sholokhov” (1977); “Philip Mironov and the
Russian Civil War” (1978), with Sergei Starikov; “The October
Revolution” and “On Stalin and Stalinism” (both 1979); “Nikolai
Bukharin: The Last Years” and “On Soviet Dissent” (both 1980);
“Leninism and Western Socialism” (1981); “An End to Silence” (1982);
“Khrushchev” (1983); and “All Stalin’s Men” (1984).
Roy and Zhores Medvedev often criticized what they regarded as abuses
by the West, particularly in stockpiling nuclear armaments. In “A
Nuclear Samizdat on America’s Arms Race,” published in The Nation in
1982, they condemned American Cold War attitudes as “primitive” and
tending to “greatly oversimplify complex social and historical
processes.” In 1983, Roy Medvedev accused President Ronald Reagan of
bombast in calling the Soviet Union an “empire of evil.”
Western critics sometimes disagreed with Mr. Medvedev’s evaluations,
and some said his hopes for a democratic Russia were pipe dreams. He
was often accused of biases of selection and of playing loose with
facts for the sake of an argument. His writing, though exhaustive, was
not of great literary quality, some said, but the patient reader was
rewarded with thorough research, an insider’s knowledge and insightful
conclusions.
Although they did not see one another for many years, Roy and Zhores
communicated frequently by mail and sometimes through intermediaries.
They helped each other with projects, exchanged books and maintained a
relationship that was at once scholarly, practical and familial.
The New Yorker editor David Remnick, then a Moscow correspondent for
The Washington Post, noted in 1989 that the brothers each kept a
picture of the other at hand and, above their respective desks in
Moscow and London, photographs of their father as a handsome young
Soviet military officer.
After the Soviet collapse, as Russia fragmented into a federation of
republics and provinces, Roy Medvedev joined former Communist deputies
and members of the Russian Parliament in founding the Socialist Party
of Working People, one of many new political organizations. He became
its co-chairman.
And in later years, he continued to write commentaries — about Lenin,
Trotsky, Stalin, Khrushchev, Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and the long gray
line of ghosts from the past.
