Exiled dissident revealed horrific truth about nuclear disaster in Soviet Union

In 1976 the exiled Russian scientist Zhores Medvedev revealed to the West the nightmarish truth about a nuclear accident in the Urals two decades earlier. Writing in a British magazine, he told of an explosion at a nuclear weapons factory in Kyshtym, more than 1500 kilometres east of Moscow, that had killed hundreds of people and left a vast radioactive wasteland. Medvedev called it ‘‘the biggest nuclear tragedy in peacetime the world has known’’.

Evidence of the disaster had been suppressed by the Soviet authorities, and they continued to deny the story. Medvedev’s claims were also treated with initial scepticism and even outright rejection by

Western experts and nuclear officials. Sir John

Hill, then chairman of the UK

Atomic Energy

Authority, said the revelations were ‘‘rubbish’’ and ‘‘a figment of the imagination’’.

Yet Medvedev, a scientist who had once worked on the Soviet nuclear programme, was a courageous dissident, with formidable insight into how Soviet society worked. Despite now living in enforced exile in Britain, he set out to discover in as much detail as possible how the accident had happened. Using his detective powers and determination, as well as hints and clues revealed in Soviet sources reporting studies of ‘‘radiation damage’’, he wrote a book, Nuclear Disaster in the Urals, published in 1979.

‘‘It is very dangerous,’’ he argued, ‘‘when an incompetent, corrupt and totalitarian political regime isolated from free debate and dissent tries to operate nuclear power.’’

Zhores Medvedev was born in Tbilisi, Georgia, to Yulia Reiman, a cellist, and Alexander Medvedev, who was caught up in the Stalinist purges of the 1930s, suddenly arrested and sent to Siberia, where he was tortured and died. That prompted Zhores’ twin brother, Roy – to whom he was always very close – to become an influential historian focusing on the terrible legacy of Stalin’s rule.

Zhores came to focus his intellectual energies on science. He became a geneticist and microbiologist, acquiring an international reputation. He was well equipped to observe how damaging the effect was of slavish Soviet adherence to the beliefs of Trofim Lysenko, who insisted animals and plants could somehow be altered in the service of rapid Soviet development. This had catastrophic consequences for Soviet science generally and agriculture and the environment in particular.

In the early 1960s Medvedev wrote a scathing study of Lysenko’s work and career entitled Biology and the Cult of Personality, but publication was forbidden in the Soviet Union. However, it circulated underground.

Medvedev was sacked from his post as head of a department of molecular biology

Medvedev joked about his official 1970 diagnosis of ‘‘paranoid delusions of reforming society’’, saying he had ‘‘never lost those delusions’’.

near Moscow, and was drawn more and more into dissident circles that included the nuclear scientist Andrei Sakharov and writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

KGB surveillance and official persecution affected his family too. He had married a fellow scientist, Margarita Busina, in 1951 and they had two sons, Dima and Aleksandr, who was later detained in a prison camp and died before his parents.

Medvedev’s conflict with the authorities came to a head in 1970 when police officers accompanied by psychiatrists arrived at his home and began to interrogate him about his writings and activities. He was driven to a psychiatric hospital and detained in a locked ward, diagnosed as having ‘‘creeping schizophrenia’’ leading to ‘‘paranoid delusions of reforming society’’, which made him ‘‘dangerous to the public’’.

There were protests from his international scientific contacts and dissident friends, including Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn. After nearly three weeks’ detention, Medvedev was released, but warned to ‘‘put an end’’ to his ‘‘publicist activities’’.

That was not in Medvedev’s nature, however, and he swiftly wrote an account of his experiences entitled A Question of Madness, which described more broadly how Soviet psychiatric care was being abused to suppress political dissent. The authorities decided that Medvedev would be perhaps less challenging to them abroad and in 1973 he was given permission to take up a year’s post at the National Institute for Medical Research in London. Once there, his Soviet citizenship was revoked and he remained at the institute until retiring in 1991.

By then the Soviet Union was collapsing, and Gorbachev authorised Medvedev’s return to advise on the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster. His Soviet citizenship was restored, but he opted to remain resident in the West.

Stalin’s Soviet Union had attempted to crush his family and its inquiring spirit since the 1930s, but never succeeded. Medvedev joked about his official 1970 diagnosis of ‘‘paranoid delusions of reforming society’’, saying that he had ‘‘never lost those delusions’’. –