Roy Medvedev, Soviet dissident historian who exposed Stalin’s brutality but later endorsed Putin

Roy Medvedev, who has died aged 100, was a Soviet historian and dissident best-known for his pioneering account of the brutalities of Stalinism, Let History Judge (1969).

Medvedev joined the Soviet Communist Party in 1956, approving of the First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” denouncing his predecessor Stalin, who had died three years previously. He worked intermittently on a history of Stalin’s regime, and was galvanised to complete it in the mid-1960s when de-Stalinisation stalled and there were widespread attempts to rehabilitate the tyrant’s reputation.

In 1968 he was expelled from the Communist Party for writing a letter to a leading Soviet journal criticising its defence of Stalin. The following year, the manuscript of Let History Judge was circulated in samizdat; it was translated into English in 1972.

Unable to gain access to official archives, Medvedev had secured oral testimony from survivors of the Stalinist camps, copies of unpublished memoirs and interviews with veteran apparatchiks such as Anastas Mikoyan. He was the first writer to provide figures for the number of victims of Stalin’s purges: “In 1937-38 there were days when up to a thousand people were shot in Moscow alone. These were not streams, these were rivers of blood, the blood of honest Soviet people… Not one of the tyrants and despots of the past persecuted and destroyed so many of his compatriots.”

Condemning Stalin’s “wilfulness, gigantomania [and] incompetent and adventuristic leadership”, Medvedev rejected theories that he was mad or manipulated by his advisers. “Stalin was beyond doubt a responsible man, and in most cases was fully aware of what he was doing.”

The Daily Telegraph’s critic mirrored most of the Western reviewers in praising the book as “an enormously important work by a brave man” while also questioning whether Medvedev, a Marxist-Leninist and believer in the “moral purity and strength” of Communism, was right to see Stalinism as an aberration rather than the logical consequence of Leninism.

Roy Aleksandrovich Medvedev was born in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, on November 14 1925. His father, Alexander, was a Red Army officer turned academic philosopher and his mother, Yulia, was a cellist; he was named in honour of the Indian Communist guru MN Roy.

When he was 13 Roy witnessed his father being arrested in the night by the secret police, accused of being a Trotskyist; he died in a Siberian labour camp in 1941. The ordeal prompted Roy “to busy myself with politics, with social science, to examine what is good and what is bad in our society”.

He served with the Red Army during the Second World War, then studied at Leningrad State University and the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences, going on to become a publisher and academic. With his twin brother Zhores, a distinguished biologist, he edited an underground monthly journal, Political Diary, between 1964 and 1971.

In 1971 Roy and Zhores co-wrote a book called A Question of Madness. This was an account of Zhores’s detention in a psychiatric institution in 1970, after he had published a denunciation of the pseudoscientific theories of Stalin’s pet agronomist TD Lysenko.

Zhores was stripped of his Soviet citizenship in 1973 while on a visit to London, and became an exile. But although the two brothers were unable to meet in person until the 1990s, they continued to collaborate on books, including a biography of Khrushchev (1978).

Roy Medvedev refused any opportunity to go into exile himself, despite being sacked from his teaching job at the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences and enduring some two decades of harassment: for many years KGB officers were stationed outside his Moscow flat to intimidate visitors.

In 1983 he was summoned to an interview with senior KGB men and security officials, and told to cease his “slanderous political scribblings”. Medvedev defied them to their faces: “I told them… I was going to go on doing precisely what I have been doing for the past 20 years.”

The stream of books and articles was unstaunched, and eventually, with the advent of glasnost, Medvedev was given government positions including membership of the Supreme Soviet. However, he disapproved of the “savage capitalism” of post-Soviet Russia under Gorbachev and Yeltsin, and observed in 1992 that “the country that was the Soviet Union in 1985 when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power was incomparably better, given all its deficiencies, than it is today.”

This led Medvedev to endorse the “sober and pragmatic” Vladimir Putin, of whom he wrote an admiring biography in 2002. To the distress of many of his admirers, he reiterated his admiration for Putin in a newspaper interview last year.

Roy Medvedev married Galina Gaidina in 1956; they had a son.

Roy Medvedev, born November 14 1925, died February 13 2026

[Source: Daily Telegraph]