The dissident biologist who argued the archives contain no evidence Stalin planned a Jewish deportation
After his 1970 release from the psychiatric hospital: "No honest and principled scholar can be sure of his safety if such grounds can lead to repression in the form of indefinite confinement in a psychiatric hospital."
A Soviet biologist and dissident historian. Born in Tbilisi, he studied at the Timiryazev Agricultural Academy and researched the molecular mechanisms of aging. In 1962 he wrote a samizdat manuscript exposing Trofim Lysenko's pseudoscience, published in the US in 1969 as The Rise and Fall of T.D. Lysenko, which brought international attention to the corruption of Soviet biology. In 1970 he was forcibly confined in a psychiatric hospital and released after protests by Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn, and others; in 1973, while on a scientific visit to London, he was stripped of his Soviet citizenship and spent the rest of his life in exile. His late work Stalin and the Jewish Problem (2003) argued that no archival documents support the claim that the Doctors' Plot was meant to trigger a mass deportation of Soviet Jews.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1925Born in Tbilisi (Tiflis), named after French socialist leader Jean Jaurès
- 1943Drafted into the Red Army, seriously wounded on the Taman Peninsula and discharged
- 1950Graduated from Timiryazev Agricultural Academy; Candidate of Biological Sciences
- 1962Dismissed from Timiryazev Academy over samizdat manuscript criticizing Lysenko's pseudoscience
- 1963–1969Head of molecular radiobiology lab, Institute of Medical Radiology, Obninsk
- 1970Forcibly confined in Kaluga psychiatric hospital; released after protests by Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn, and others
- 1973Stripped of Soviet citizenship while on research leave in London; remained in exile in Britain
- 1990–1992Soviet citizenship restored by Gorbachev; joined Chernobyl exclusion zone radiobiological expeditions
Related historical events
- 1941–1945The Great Patriotic WarRed Army soldier wounded on the Taman PeninsulaDrafted into the Red Army in 1943, he was seriously wounded in the Battle of the Taman Peninsula and discharged.
- 1952–1953The Doctors’ PlotHistorian who noted the absence of deportation-plan documentsIn Stalin and the Jewish Problem (2003) he argued that no archival documents support the existence of a Jewish deportation plan, siding with Kostyrchenko.
Documenting the Kyshtym disaster and Chernobyl
After being stripped of Soviet citizenship in 1973, Medvedev settled in England and continued investigating and writing about Soviet science and nuclear safety. His 1977 book with Alan Roberts, Hazards of Nuclear Power, mentioned the 1957 Kyshtym disaster at the Mayak plutonium-production facility. In Soviet Science (1978), he answered Western doubts about the event by tracing evidence of it in published scientific literature. He then presented a fuller account in Nuclear Disaster in the Urals (1979). In The Legacy of Chernobyl (1990), he treated the 1986 Chernobyl accident alongside Kyshtym as part of a broader problem of nuclear safety in the Soviet system. His Soviet citizenship was restored in 1990, and his books began to be published in the Soviet Union.