Obituary Note: Zhores Medvedev

Zhores A. Medvedev, the Soviet biologist, writer and dissident "who was declared insane, confined to a mental institution and stripped of his citizenship in the 1970s after attacking a Stalinist pseudoscience," died November 15, the New York Times reported. He was 93. With his twin brother, historian Roy Medvedev, as well as physicist Andrei Sakharov, author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and others, Zhores Medvedev "was a central figure in the seething intellectual dissidence that exposed, largely through underground literature known as samizdat, the repression of ideas, science and human rights in the Soviet Union."

An authority on biochemistry, gerontology and molecular evolution, he played a large role in discrediting the doctrines of Stalin's director of biology, Trofim D. Lysenko, who was behind a pseudoscience known as Lysenkoism. In 1969, Medvedev's book, The Rise and Fall of T. D. Lysenko, "was published by the Columbia University Press to wide acclaim and international attention," the Times noted, adding that by then he had acquired a growing reputation abroad, but was denied permission to travel for conferences in Europe and the U.S.

In 1970, he was arrested at his home in Obninsk and taken by doctors to a mental hospital, where he was pronounced acutely ill with "incipient schizophrenia" and "paranoid delusions of reforming society." After a storm of protest, including a letter to the Ministry of Health signed by, among others, Roy Medvedev, Dr. Sakharov and two Nobel laureates in physics, Pyotr Kapitsa and Igor Y. Tamm; as well as a passionate attack on the detention by Solzhenitsyn, he was released after 19 days in the asylum.

A Question of Madness, a book chronicling his ordeal and the state of Soviet citizens being held in mental asylums for political reasons, was written by the Medvedev brothers and smuggled out of the country. It was published in London and New York in 1971.

Medvedev was finally permitted to go to London in 1973, but soon after arriving he was told his Soviet citizenship had been revoked and his passport was seized. He remained in London, doing research and writing books. His works include The Legacy of Chernobyl; Ten Years After 'One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich; Soviet Agriculture; Andropov; Gorbachev; and, with Roy Medvedev, Khrushchev: The Years in Power; and The Unknown Stalin.

In 1990, a year before the Soviet Union collapsed, President Gorbachev reinstated Medvedev's Soviet citizenship. He accepted, but chose to remain an expatriate in London, the Times wrote.

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