Prominent Soviet-era dissident Roy Medvedev dies at 100
A prominent critic of Stalin’s policies and Soviet- era political analyst and author Roy Medvedev died on Friday at the age of 100, Russia’s state media reported. Medvedev, a critic of Marxism practiced by the Communist Party of Soviet Union (CPSU) under Khrushchev and Brezhnev, was expelled from the CPSU in 1969 after his book ‘Let History Judge’ was published in the West.
His father Alexander, a Commissar in the Red Army, was arrested under Stalin’s purges and died in a labour camp part of the GULAG network described by Nobel Laureate Alexander Solzynytsin in The Gulag Archipelago. Medvedev died on Friday at the age of 100, Russian State TV Rossiaya 24 reported, quoting his wife.
The report, however, did not give any other details. Medvedev’s father named his son after a prominent leader of Comintern M N Roy (founder of Communist Party of India). Let History Judge reflected the dissident thinking that emerged in the 1960s among Soviet intellectuals, who sought a reformist version of socialism like Medvedev.
Along with Andrei Sakharov and others, he announced his position in an open letter to the Soviet leadership in 1970. In the book ‘A Question of Madness,’ co-authored with his twin brother Zhores, a dissident biologist, Medvedev describes Zhores’ involuntary confinement in the Kaluga Psychiatric Hospital. Medvedev rejoined the Communist Party in 1989, after Mikhail Gorbachev launched his perestroika and glasnost programme of gradual political and economic reforms.
