On March 3, Barbara Martin will give a lecture “Roy and Zhores Medvedev: between loyalty and dissent”. The lecture will begin at 18.00 in the Golden Hall (429 audience). The working language is English. Free admission.
Roy and Zhores Medvedev: Between Loyalty and Dissent
This talk will explore the biography of two dissident twin brothers, Roy and Zhores Medvedev, who became famous in the West in the 1970s for their publications on Soviet history and politics. Emboldened by the Thaw and the de-Stalinization course opened up by the 20th Party Congress, the Medvedevs tackled in their research the sensitive issue of Stalinist repression. Deprived of access to archives, they benefitted from the support and testimonies of hundreds of veterans of the October Revolution, prominent scientists and writers. But the Brezhnev leadership swiftly moved on to close public discussion on this question after 1965, turning those who dared write and circulate their works on the subject into dissidents. While their views were widely publicized in the West, the Medvedev brothers were no political opponents of the regime and voiced ideas that were discussed in some higher circles in the Brezhnev era. The Medvedevs’ biography thus allows us to re-examine the traditional dichotomy between dissent and collaboration with the regime and to question the image of dissidents as isolated fighters for truth. The Medvedevs were very well-connected to the intelligentsia and to party members, including in the Central Committee, and Roy Medvedev’s short-lived political career under Gorbachev underscored his affinities with the reformists who would seek to salvage socialism in the 1980s.
Barbara Martin is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Basel, Switzerland, where she is working on a four-year project on the religious revival in the late Soviet Union, funded by an Ambizione grant of the Swiss National Science Foundation. She received her PhD in 2016 from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. She is the author of Dissident Histories in the Soviet Union: from de-Stalinization to Perestroika (2019) and co-author of Istoricheskii sbornik Pamiat’: Issledovaniia i dokumenty (2017). She is currently writing a biography of Roy and Zhores Medvedev.