Dissident writer Roy Medvedev dies

Dissident writer and historian Roy Medvedev died at the age of 101. His daughter-in-law Svetlana Medvedeva reported the death of the publicist to the TASS agency.

The probable cause of the historian’s death could be heart failure, she clarified.

Roy Medvedev was born in 1925. He had a twin brother, Zhores Medvedev, a scientist and dissident. In 1938, their father was arrested “for Trotskyism” and given eight years in the camps, where he died in 1941.

Since the 1960s, Medvedev, as a publicist, has participated in the dissident movement and edited samizdat. From the mid-1960s, he published typewritten bulletins, which were later published in the West under the title “Political Diary.”

“Roy Medvedev, one of the most insightful representatives of the nascent dissident movement, who was also one of the main ideologists of “self-reform,” formulated an entire program for an informal “party-democratic current” seeking to change the system from within,” says the book about the history of the Soviet political underground, “Dissidents Among Dissidents.”

Among his historiographical works are biographies of Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, Yeltsin, Solzhenitsyn and many others. Medvedev became widely known for his book “To the Judgment of History,” in which he critically analyzed the era of Joseph Stalin.

In 1970, Medvedev, together with academician Andrei Sakharov and cyberneticist Valentin Turchin, sent an open letter to the leadership of the USSR calling for democratization of the political system and expansion of citizens' rights.