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“... in 1990. The privatisation of industry which accompanied this decline is graphically described by Roy Medvedev. At first, vouchers were issued, which were supposed to give every citizen an equal share of state property. This merely led to the transfer of industry into the hands of its old managers. Yeltsin then launched the so-called ‘monetary ...”

“... own children and to raise up, in Danton’s words, ‘tyrants worse than those they overthrew’. Roy Medvedev’s first book to be published in the West, Let history judge, was a brilliant and minutely-researched account of one such tyrant: Stalin. His latest, Khrushchev, is very different in both scope and subject. Yet it is a logical continuation of ...”

“... and terror in the midst of which he grew up left its mark on all the adults who lived through it. Roy Medvedev estimates that at least four to five hundred thousand people – above all, high officials – were shot and several million imprisoned. ‘The spiritual atmosphere of the USSR cannot be explained without harking back to this era,’ Sakharov ...”

“... Party line. The proposal was accepted with enthusiasm. A few dissident Soviet historians like Roy Medvedev have, of course, for some time been challenging the official orthodoxy of Soviet history, in which the Kremlin never makes mistakes and always prevails against capitalist enemies. In the West, revisionist historians have frequently been in ...”

“... that ‘as a Soviet leader, Chernenko was impossible and even indecent.’ According to Zhores Medvedev, ‘Chernenko had no authority among the party leaders ... everyone knew that he would be no more than Brezhnev’s ghost.’ Martin McCauley predicted that Andropov would ‘wish to replace his defeated rival as soon as possible’ as head of the ...”

“... Charter at San Francisco for the USSR, was in the habit of adding obscene comments (according to Roy Medvedev) against the names of those condemned to die in Stalin’s purges? Fortunately for us, Bevin seems to have approached the Russians without idealistic urges or evangelical zeal. In his hyper-empirical way, he was always ready to learn by ...”

“... society. * The former – notably, Robert Tucker, Adam Ulam and the Soviet dissident historian, Roy Medvedev – have followed the classic studies of Trotsky, Souvarine and Deutscher in stressing the way in which Stalin undid Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev and, finally, Bukharin, his rivals in the party leadership, by opportune changes of ideology and a ...”

“... Soviet moles, including Gordievski, against their country; made friends with dissidents like Roy Medvedev who only now, under Gorbachev, have won acceptance; and shared their belief that the regime had to tell the truth about the horrors of the past. The sad thing is that he died two years before the man who might have confirmed his faith in the ...”

“... on publishing work abroad outside official channels. This is what happened to the historian Roy Medvedev (whose Leninist critique of Stalinism, Let History Judge, came out in English in 1971) and his twin brother, Zhores Medvedev, a biologist who tried to expose the persecution of Soviet geneticists under Trofim ...”

“... the Order of Lenin at the end of the year. ‘What attracted so many people to Brezhnev,’ wrote Roy Medvedev, later a dissident who had no reason to like him, ‘was his softness, the lack of the usual hardness and cruelty associated with party bosses of the time, a kindness that sometimes also came at the expense of business.’ He detested the old ...”

“... back in the Kremlin, dissolved it by decree, he was not only breaking its own statutes, as Roy Medvedev pointed out, but yielding up his independence too. Savouring the repudiation they had forced, his enemies were not to be satisfied with it. Within a few hours, Russian television was showing footage from the Crimea hinting that he might himself ...”

“... Kim (the acronym for the Communist Youth Festival), Ninel (Lenin spelled backwards) and so on. Roy and Zhores Medvedev, twins born into a communist family in 1925, were named respectively for the Indian revolutionary M.N. Roy and the French socialist Jean Jaurès, assassinated in 1914 ...”

“... Prize.The courage of these dissidents was matched by their ingenuity. In 1969 the biologist Zhores Medvedev reopened an old wound by publishing an account of Lysenko’s rise and fall, first in samizdat and then in translation in the West. Medvedev was diagnosed as schizophrenic – on the grounds that he was interested in ...”