A man of words and letters: Roy Medvedev has died

Historian, writer and publicist Roy Medvedev died at the age of 101. He has written more than 50 books on historical subjects. He also wrote biographies of many Russian and Soviet political figures, including Nikita Khrushchev, Yuri Andropov, Yuri Luzhkov, and current Russian President Vladimir Putin. Read about Medvedev's life and career in the Izvestia article.

Family

Roy Medvedev, a Soviet and Russian publicist, writer, and author of many historical and political biographies, was born on November 14, 1925 in Tiflis (now Tbilisi, Georgia). His father— Alexander Medvedev (1899-1941), served as an army political officer and deputy head of the Department of Dialectical and Historical Materialism at the Lenin Military Political Academy in Moscow. He was repressed in 1938 and died in custody in 1941. His mother, Yulia Isaakovna Medvedeva, was a cellist.

The writer had a twin brother, biochemist and geneticist Zhores Medvedev, who lived in exile in the UK since 1973 and died in London in 2018. His parents named Roy after one of the founders of the Communist Party of India, Manabendra Roy.

Education and career

In 1943-1946, Medvedev served in the USSR Armed Forces in auxiliary logistics units in Tbilisi, without participating in hostilities.

After the Great Patriotic War, Medvedev graduated with honors from the Philosophy Department of Leningrad State University (1946-1951), where he was also secretary of the Komsomol Committee. In 1958, at the Moscow State Pedagogical Institute. He defended his dissertation "Productive work of high school students in industry and the problem of industrial specialization" and received a PhD in pedagogical sciences.

From 1951 to 1954, he worked as a teacher at a secondary school in the Sverdlovsk region, and in 1954-1957, he was the director of a seven—year school in the Leningrad Region.

From 1958 to 1961, he held the positions of editor and deputy editor in the educational and pedagogical state publishing house of the RSFSR Uchpedgiz (now Prosveshchenie). In 1959 he joined the CPSU. In 1961-1970, he worked as a senior researcher and then as the head of the sector at the Research Institute of Industrial Training of the USSR Academy of Pedagogical Sciences.

Since the early 1960s, he was actively involved in public activities: he published the Samizdat magazine Political Diary (1964-1970) and became one of the leaders of the socialist wing of the dissident movement.

In 1969, Medvedev was expelled from the CPSU because of the manuscript of the book "To the Court of History: the Genesis and Consequences of Stalinism." On March 19, 1970, he, along with Andrei Sakharov and Valentin Turchin, sent an open letter to the leaders of the Communist Party and the government of the USSR, calling for the democratization of public life in order to strengthen the Soviet socialist system.

In 1971, Medvedev was searched and his archive was seized. After that, the publicist temporarily left Moscow for the Baltic States. In the early 1970s, his books (including those co-authored with his brother Jores) were published in the United States and Great Britain. In the 1970s and 1980s, Medvedev lived on royalties from foreign publications, continuing to engage in journalism. In 1975-1976, he and his brother published the almanac "XX century. Voices of the Socialist opposition in the Soviet Union" (abroad).

The books "To the Court of History" and "They Surrounded Stalin" became bestsellers in the West.

In 1989, Medvedev was reinstated in the CPSU at his own request. In 1989-1991, he was elected a People's Deputy of the USSR from the Voroshilovsky district of Moscow, became a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR and a member of the Committee on Legislation, Legality and Law and Order.

In 1990-1991, he was a member of the Central Committee of the CPSU (elected at the XXVIII Congress) and the commission on the new party program. In September 1991, at the Fifth Congress of People's Deputies of the USSR, Medvedev opposed the ban on the Communist Party, did not recognize the dissolution of the congress, and in 1992 participated in an attempt to hold the Sixth extraordinary congress. In December 1991, he became co-chairman of the Socialist Workers' Party (SPT, later liquidated).

In the autumn of 1993, he entered the list of candidates for the State Duma of the first convocation from the Fatherland bloc, but he did not collect the necessary 100,000 signatures. Subsequently, Medvedev focused on creating historical and journalistic books. He was awarded a Certificate of Honor from the Government of the Russian Federation (2010) and the prize of the FSB of Russia (2007) for the book "Andropov" (the series "The Lives of Wonderful People").

He is the author of over 50 books, including "To the Court of History ..." (1971 — English, 1974 — Russian), "Khrushchev. Political Biography" (1986), "Personality and Epoch..." about Brezhnev (1991), "Yuri Luzhkov and Moscow" (2008), "Dmitry Medvedev..." (2009), "Putin's Time" (2014) and "Socialism and Capitalism in Russia" (2017 G.).

Death

Medvedev died on February 13, 2026 at the age of 100. According to preliminary information, the cause of death was heart failure. This is reported by RIA Novosti with reference to the historian's daughter-in-law Svetlana.

According to her, the farewell to Medvedev will take place on February 17 at the Odintsovo morgue. There, the historian will be cremated, and his ashes will be buried in Laikovo.