Roy Aleksandrovich Medvedev (Russian:Рой Алекса́ндрович Медве́дев; born 14 November 1925) is a Russian politician and writer. He is the author of thedissident history ofStalinism,Let History Judge (Russian:К суду истории), first published in English in 1972.
Medvedev was born to a Jewish family[1] inTbilisi,Transcaucasian SFSR,Soviet Union. Roy received his name in honor of the Indian communist of the 1920s, Manabendra Nath Roy (M. N. Roy), a member of the Executive Committee of the Comintern and one of the founders of the Communist Party of India.[2] He had anidentical twin brother, the biologistZhores Medvedev, who died in 2018. Roy and Zhores Medvedev's father was Alexander Romanovich Medvedev (1899-1941), a Soviet military officer with the rank of commissar of a regiment; his mother was the cellist Yulia Isaakovna Reiman (1901-1961). Medvedev's father, Alexander Medvedev, served as a senior lecturer in the philosophy department of the Military-Political Academy in the 1930s. On August 23, 1938, he was arrested and accused of belonging to a Trotskyist organization and "smuggling Trotskyism" into textbooks he had compiled and edited. On June 5, 1939, he was sentenced to 8 years in a labor camp. He served his sentence in Kolyma, where he died on February 8, 1941.[3]
Medvedev was expelled from the Communist Party in 1969 after his bookLet History Judge was published abroad.[4] The book criticized Stalin and Stalinism at a time when official Sovietpropagandists were trying to rehabilitate the former General Secretary.Let History Judge reflected the dissident thinking that emerged in the 1960s among Soviet intellectuals who sought areformist version ofsocialism like Medvedev. Along withAndrei Sakharov and others, he announced his position in anopen letter to the Soviet leadership in 1970. In a book co-authored with his twin brother,Zhores,A Question of Madness, Medvedev describes Zhores' involuntary commitment in the Kaluga Psychiatric Hospital (seePolitical abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union). Zhores, adissident biologist, was questioned in the hospital about his involvement with samizdat, and his bookThe Rise and Fall of T.D. Lysenko. Zhores was exiled to Britain in the 1970s.
Medvedev rejoined the Communist Party in 1989, afterMikhail Gorbachev launched hisperestroika andglasnost program of gradual political and economic reforms. He was elected to the Soviet Union'sCongress of People's Deputies and was named as member of theSupreme Soviet, the permanent working body of the Congress. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 Medvedev and dozens of other former communist deputies of the Soviet and Russian parliaments founded the Socialist Party of Working People, and became a co-chair of the party.[5] In 2008, Medvedev wrote a biography ofVladimir Putin where he gave his activities as president a positive evaluation.[6]
In 2025, at the age of 99, he gave an interview toMoskovsky Komsomolets, in which he supported the policies of President Putin.[7]
Medvedev, Roy (March 1996). "Russians and Germans fifty years after World War II".Russian Politics and Law.33 (2):82–96.doi:10.2753/RUP1061-1940340282.
Medvedev, Roy (June 2007). "The Russian language throughout the Commonwealth of Independent States: toward a statement of the problem".Russian Politics and Law.45 (3):5–30.doi:10.2753/RUP1061-1940450301.S2CID143887460.
Medvedev, Roy (July–September 2007)."A splinted Ukraine"(PDF).Russia in Global Affairs.5 (3):194–213. Archived fromthe original(PDF) on 19 January 2016.
^Ефимович Р. С. Мои контакты с Жоресом Медведевым, My contacts with Zhores Medvedev // Историко-биологические исследования — 2019. — Т. 11, вып. 2. — С. 102—121. — ISSN 2076-8176.
