Medvedev deserves a shout out just for endurance. He was born in 1925 and survived even with the epithet of “dissident historian.” His father was not so fortunate and was caught up in Stalin’s purges of the 1930s. Medvedev was born in Georgia, but is not a Georgian. He is Jewish and his father was a professor in Tbilisi when ROy was born. Medvedev is the consummate outsider;yet, he attended Leningrad State University.
The Medvedev book we consulted for Jewish Luck was Let History Judge, a book published in 1969 that earned Medvedev expulsion from the Communist Party. In Russian the book is entitled, К суду истории, which translates as Before the Court of History. We also consulted an interview of Medvedev in 1977 on dissidents. His definition aligned well with the feelings of Alisa and Vera that they were not dissidents even though they felt imprisoned and spoke to each other about their desire to escape the “system.” Medvedev’s rule for identifying a dissident:
I’d say a dissident is someone who disagrees in some measure with the ideological, political, economic or moral foundation that every society rests on, including the Soviet Union. But he does more than simply disagree and think differently. He openly proclaims his dissent and demonstrates it in one way or another to his compatriots and the state. In other words, he doesn’t just complain in private to his wife or close friends.
(On Soviet Dissent: Interviews with Piero Ostellino. p. 1)
And why did I think about Medvedev as we approach December, Hanukkah, and bone chilling cold in Minnesota? This past summer, Leslie wrote about our meeting in 2011 with the mother of her Russian friend, Volodya-- Nadezhda Simonovna-- while she was enjoying a rest at a spa close to the Finnish border.
Leslie first met Nadezdha in 1976, the same summer she met Vera. She was attracted to Nadezdha’s warmth – a warmth I could feel as soon as I saw her smile. Sadly, she died last week. She had already escaped death a number of times—during the purges, during World War II, but she thrived as a civil engineer working to upgrade the transportation arteries of Peter the Great’s city, then known as Leningrad. Like Medvedev, she witnessed Soviet history unfold and then fold up for good.
Medvedev risked his life to write the truth as he witnessed and understood it. It’s worth checking Medvedev’s understanding if you’re curious how this brave professional Soviet historian wrote about the Soviet past. Let the Reader Judge!