Volume 17, Number 4 · September 23, 1971
A Hero in the USSR
By David Joravsky
The Medvedev Papers
by Zhores A. Medvedev, translated by Vera Rich, with a Foreword by John Ziman F.R.S.
St. Martin's Press, 472 pp., $11.95
Soon it will be the twentieth anniversary of the death of Stalin, and the chances are growing that he, rather than the liberation that followed his death, will be celebrated. The liberation was real; under Stalin the Soviet intelligentsia simply were unable to read such books of protest as this one by Zhores Medvedev, the Soviet biochemist whose book on Lysenko also appeared in the West two years ago.[1] But the freedom has been stunted. Intellectuals see such books now only in samizdat, 'self-publication' in typed or photographed copies passed about cautiously among friends, as were Medvedev's book on Lysenko and the papers in this book.
Review, 2121 words
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