Overview

Roy and Zhores Medvedev, two identical twins with a unique fate, not only lived through a whole century of history, from Stalin to Putin, they wrote and made history. Their research on Stalinism, the first to come out of the Soviet Union in the 1960s-1970s, turned them into famous dissidents overnight, but their criticism of the regime always remained loyal to Soviet power. The story of their lives provides a snapshot into the history of Soviet dissent, from psychiatric hospitalization to forced exile, and from KGB interrogations to collaboration with Western news correspondents. Yet their trajectory was also marred by controversy with fellow dissidents, and in the post-Soviet era active support of authoritarian rulers, including Vladimir Putin.

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Reviews

“Roi and Zhores Medvedev are amongst the most fascinating and important figures in the history of Soviet dissent, but much about them has remained unknown or poorly understood until now. Barbara Martin’s account offers a meticulously researched and richly detailed history of the brothers’ parallel, but very different, lives in the Soviet Union, Western Europe, and the USA. Drawing on a huge amount of new archival and interview material, Martin traces their lives and activities across many fields, including history, science, and political activism, and through the Soviet and post-Soviet eras. The first joint biography in English, this landmark study is likely to remain the standard work for many years to come. More than just a biography, though, this new study also casts new light on the diverse practices and politics of dissidence, representing a major contribution to the new wave of scholarship on Soviet dissent.”  — Polly Jones, Professor of Russian, University of Oxford “If we want to understand today's Russia, we need to know the biographies of its people and their winding lives, which are almost unimaginable in the West. Barbara Martin presents two such keys to Putin's Russia in the form of the ‘loyal dissidents,’ the Medvedev twins, one the famous author of Let History Judge, the other a recalcitrant biologist forced into exile in Britain in 1973. One can have been persecuted, arrested, and harassed by the Soviet state himself and still conclude that Russia must be led by a ‘strong hand.’ An important book!” — Susanne Schattenberg, author of Brezhnev: The Making of a Statesman (2022) “Historian Barbara Martin has written a compelling dual biography of brothers Zhores and Roy Medvedev, who gained fame for their ‘dissident’ writings in the late Soviet period even as they advocated for the reform of socialism not its abandonment. Martin traces their respective careers, deftly summarizes their prolific writings, and shows how they navigated pressure from the state and rebutted critiques from the regime’s more radical opponents.  This study is particularly valuable for its meticulous and judicious delineation of differences among Soviet era non-conformists. Martin also analyzes Roy Medvedev’s turn toward writing laudatory biographies of Nazarbaev, Lukashenko, and Putin.” — Dr. Kathleen Smith, Professor of Teaching, Georgetown University

Author Information

Dr. Barbara Martin is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Basel, Switzerland. Her historical research, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, focuses on Soviet dissent and the religious revival in late Soviet Russia. She is the author of Dissident Histories in the Soviet Union: From De-Stalinization to Perestroika (Bloomsbury, 2019).

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