Zhores Medvedev
Soviet dissident scientist who attacked ‘Lysenkoism’ and broke news of a nuclear disaster in the Urals
ZHORES MEDVEDEV, who has died aged 93, was a biochemist and geneticist who became a prominent Soviet dissident and was briefly incarcerated in a psychiatric institution for having the temerity to attack the pseudoscientific ideas of Trofim Lysenko, Stalin’s “chief biologist”; after his release he described his treatment in A Question of Madness (1971), coauthored with his identical twin Roy, and was stripped of his Soviet citizenship.
He settled in Britain, where he continued to write about the darker side of Soviet science, most notably in his book The Nuclear Disaster in the Urals (1979) in which he revealed details of a major nuclear accident that had occurred in 1957. The book was banned for years in the Soviet Union, which denied any such catastrophe had occurred, and it was only in 1989, during glasnost, that the authorities acknowledged that an explosion in a nuclear waste dump had devastated a swathe of land in the Urals in 1957 and led to the evacuation of thousands of residents. Medvedev reckoned that the accident had disseminated a larger quantity of Strontium-90 than Chernobyl and had caused the deaths of hundreds of people.
Zhores Aleksandrovich Medvedev was born on November 14 1925 in Tbilisi, then in the Soviet Union, now in Georgia. The twins’ mother was a cellist, and father a Marxist professor of philosophy in Leningrad. Zhores and his identical twin brother Roy were 13 in 1938 when they witnessed their father being taken away in the night by the secret police during Stalin’s “purges”. They never saw him again.
The brothers were lucky not to follow their father to the gulag, or be prevented from getting an education. Roy became a historian (against his mother’s advice – “too dangerous,” she told him), Zhores a biologist.
Roy joined the Communist Party, working within the system to chronicle the excesses of the Stalin era in a book, Let History Judge, published in 1969. It cost him his party membership. Zhores’s writings, however, earned him exile.
Zhores Medvedev spent the war years in Rostov-on-don and later attended school in Moscow. He studied at the Timiriazev Academy of Agricultural Sciences in 1950 and received a master’s degree in biology from the Moscow Institute of Plant Physiology. He conducted research at the Timiriazev Academy from 1951 to 1962 and the following year moved to the Institute of Medical Radiology in Obninsk, where he published books on protein biosynthesis and ageing which won him an international reputation.
When Medvedev began his scientific career the prevailing scientific orthodoxy in the Soviet Union was “Lysenkoism” – named after the peasant-turned-agronomist Trofim Lysenko who rejected Mendelian genetics in favour of his own theory that acquired traits could be inherited. Lysenko’s idea appealed to Soviet leaders who believed that they could mould a new “Socialist Man” who would pass on his acquired traits to his offspring. At least some of the blame for the disasters that befell Soviet agriculture under Stalin can be attributed to the theory that crops and livestock could be magically transformed by exposure to Soviet ideals.
Dissent from Lysenko’s theories had been formally outlawed in the Soviet Union in 1948 and scientists who dared raise questions were executed, sent to labour camps, dismissed or forced into exile. But in the early 1960s some detected what they thought was a new willingness among the Soviet leadership to tolerate criticism and by the mid-1960s the Soviet press was full of anti-lysenko articles.
The movement against Lysenko, which included such figures as Vitaly Ginzburg and Andrei Sakharov, was part of a broader movement of political dissent, notably represented by the writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, for whom Medvedev acted as a go-between in his dealings with western journalists.
Medvedev himself had been one of the first to attack Lysenko when in 1962 he wrote a history of Soviet science, but he soon found there were limits to the authorities’ tolerance of dissent. They refused to publish the book, which was circulated in samizdat, bringing him the unwelcome attentions of the KGB.
Smuggled out and published in the West as The Rise and Fall of TD Lysenko in 1969, it led to Medvedev’s dismissal from his job, but he refused to be silenced. He wrote two more books which were widely circulated in samizdat in Russia before being published in London as The Medvedev Papers: The Plight of Soviet Science Today in 1971.
One evening in May 1970 a group of policemen, along with the head doctor of the Kaluga psychiatric hospital, barged their way into Medvedev’s flat and detained him on the grounds that he was suffering from “paranoid delusions of reforming society”. He was released after 19 days following protests by prominent figures including Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn.
During the 1960s Medvedev had been banned from travelling abroad, and a trip to America in the autumn of 1968 marking an apparent thaw was abruptly cancelled by the Kremlin after the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia. Medvedev wrote to the British gerontologist Alex Comfort that “our car has taken an unexpected turning.” So he was surprised in 1972 when he was given permission to go to London to undertake research with the British National Institute for Medical Research. On his arrival in 1973, however, he was stripped of his Soviet citizenship.
In 1958 Medvedev had turned down an invitation to join a team embarking on secret work in the southern Urals. Piecing together information acquired then and later, he came to the conclusion that a disaster involving stored nuclear waste had occurred in the region in late 1957.
When he published his conclusion in an article in 1976, it was dismissed as science fiction by western nuclear experts. Determined to prove his claim, Medvedev combed Russian scientific literature for studies of radiation damage. He uncovered about 100 such studies, all purporting to be “experiments” in which the environment was deliberately contaminated, and with the location carefully concealed. However, such details as the numbers of pike mentioned in one article, and the size of a deer herd inferred from another, together with one outright slip, enabled him to pinpoint a site near the town of Kyshtym.
His detective work, which he set out in his 1979 book, continued to be dismissed by nuclear experts until later the same year, when scientists at the US Oak Ridge National Laboratory noticed that the names of 30 villages had vanished from Soviet maps of the area, and that an elaborate canal system had been built to bypass some 15 miles of river valley below the site.
In an article in the Washington Post, shortly after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster (about which he wrote another book), Medvedev recalled how he had become aware of the problems with the Soviet nuclear programme while living and working in Obninsk, less than a mile from a research facility operated by the Institute of Nuclear Physics.
“Quite a few small-scale local accidents related to the nuclear research facilities occurred,” he wrote. “When signs were put on the beach of the local Protva River temporarily forbidding bathing and swimming there, we knew that an emergency discharge had occurred from one of the many reactors operating in town.
“But villages down river were never advised about the dangers … When human tissues were brought to the radio-toxicology and pathomorphology departments for an urgent assessment, we also knew that somebody had had the misfortune to die from inhaling radioactive dust … Nothing about the victims of the radiation sickness was published in the local or general press.”
Chernobyl, he argued, was a product not only of faulty design, but “of the whole system of Soviet-style central planning and politically oriented decision making … It is not nuclear power that is too dangerous for society. It is very dangerous when an incompetent, corrupt and totalitarian political regime isolated from free debate and dissent tries to operate nuclear power.”
Medvedev’s Soviet citizenship was restored in 1990 and his books began to be published in the Soviet Union. They included Soviet Science (1978) and Soviet Agriculture (1987) and an early biography of Mikhail Gorbachev.
He also produced more than 200 papers and articles on gerontology, genetics, biochemistry and other topics, and published several more books jointly with his brother Roy, with whom he had remained in touch throughout his exile. These included Khrushchev: The Years In Power (1978), Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov: Two Prophets (2004) and The Unknown Stalin: His Life, Death, and Legacy (2005).
He is survived by his wife Margarita, and by a son. Another son predeceased him.