(b. 1925), biochemist and author.
Zhores Alexandrovich Medvedev was born in Tbilisi, Georgia. He is the identical twin brother of
historian Roy Alexandrovich Medvedev. Zhores Medvedev graduated from the Timiryazev Academy of Agricultural Sciences in 1950 and received a master’s degree in biology from the Moscow Institute of Plant Physiology that same year. Between 1951 and 1962 he conducted research at the Timiryazev Academy and soon earned international acclaim for his work on protein biosynthesis and the physiology of the aging process.
In addition to his reputation as a biologist and a gerontologist, Medvedev is known for his criticism of the Lysenko regime in Soviet science. His book The Rise and Fall of the Lysenko Regime circulated in samizdat versions in the Soviet Union in the 1960s and was published in the West in 1969. Medvedev was forbidden to travel abroad and was kept under strict KGB surveillance. On May 29, 1970, Medvedev was arrested in his home and put into a mental hospital in the provincial town of Kaluga. He was kept there for two weeks while a psychiatric committee attempted to rationalize his confinement in medical terms.
On his first trip abroad, to London in 1973, Medvedev’s Soviet citizenship was revoked, and he settled in London as an ?migr?. His Soviet citizenship was restored in 1990, and his numerous works have subsequently been published in Russia. Apart from numerous articles and papers on gerontology, genetics, and biochemistry, he has authored books on such important figures as Yuri Andropov and Mikhail Gorbachev and written on Soviet nuclear disasters and Soviet science in general. See also: LYSENKO, TROFIM DENISOVICH; MEDVEDEV, ROY ALEXANDER
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Medvedev, Zhores A., and Medvedev, Roy A. (1971). A Question of Madness. New York: Knopf.
simplicity and avoidance of decorative rhetoric, bold use of color, windowed front facade, and unusual exterior staircase that cut diagonally across the rectangular two-storied building. But his most impressive work in the Soviet Union was his club architecture, none more striking than the Rusakov Club, designed and built between 1927 and 1929 for the Union of Municipal Workers.
A graduate of the prestigious Moscow school of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, Melnikov in 1920 joined the Soviet parallel to the Bauhaus, the Higher State Artistic and Technical Studios (VKhUTEMAS), where the struggle for control over the direction of revolutionary architecture was fought until discussion was terminated by a new Stalinist orthodoxy. Melnikov refused to join either of the two competing architectural organizations, but remained closely associated with the Association of New Architects (ASNOVA), especially in his quest for a new “architectural language” for the age. Despite this association, his work influenced architects in both camps. Melnikov concerned himself with the functional demands of a building and with the rational organization of the composition. But he was most concerned with devising a unique expressive appearance that would unite spatial organization with innovative interior design, employing such forms that would make the buildings appear “as individualists against the general backdrop of urban building.” Melnikov’s architectural language consisted of elementary geometric forms such as cylinders, cones, and parallelepipeds. It is the cylinder that forms the basis for Melnikov’s own home, built between 1927 and 1929 on Krivoarbatsky Lane off Moscow’s famed Arbat.
In 1937 Melnikov was accused of practicing the grotesquerie of formalism and of obstructing and perverting the resolution of the problem of the type and form of Soviet architecture. He was driven from architectural practice. See also: ARCHITECTURE
MELNIKOV, KONSTANTIN STEPANOVICH
(1908-1974), a leading theoretician among modernist architects. Konstantin Stepanovich Melnikov rose to fame in the West as a result of his design for the Soviet Pavilion at the Paris Exhibition of Decorative Arts in 1925, a building marked by its dramatic formal
Khan-Magomedov, Selim Omarovich. (1987). Pioneers of Soviet Architecture: The Search for New Solutions in the 1920s and 1930s. New York: Rizzoli. Starr, S. Frederick. (1978). Melnikov: Solo Architect in a Mass Society. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Memorial, a self-described “international, historical-educational, human rights, and charitable society,” was founded in Moscow in 1988. Its original inspiration lay in the work of scattered professional and amateur historians who had quietly and often covertly done independent research on Soviet history, realizing that their works might never see the light of day, at least in their lifetimes. In some cases they had given their work to the young Leningrad historian Arseny Roginsky, who from 1976 to 1981 included them in his anonymously produced samizdat (typewritten, self-published) journal Pamyat, or Memory. He then smuggled the journal abroad, where successive issues were published in Russian as separate volumes.
Memorial emerged in 1987, when individuals started to collect money to erect a monument to the victims of Josef Stalin’s “great terror.” This goal was achieved when a short tribute to these victims was carved on a boulder from a concentration camp near the Arctic Circle, and, on October 30, 1990, the boulder was installed in a square facing the Moscow headquarters of the KGB. In the meantime, Memorial had chosen the former dissident leader Andrei Sakharov as its honorary chairman and established groups in dozens of towns all over the USSR. However, official resistance to the new organization remained tenacious. Only in 1991 did the authorities give it the legal registration that it needed.
Memorial’s mandate for historical research concerns all varieties of official persecution and discrimination conducted against individuals and groups during the Soviet era. Its researchers have sought access to governmental archives, rummaged through the buildings of abandoned concentration camps, and searched for the many unmarked and overgrown burial grounds that hold the remains of millions of prisoners who died in captivity. They have also solicited documents, letters, and oral history from surviving victims and witnesses. Apart from building up Memorial archives in Moscow and elsewhere, the researchers have had their work published by Memorial in Russian and other languages in hundreds of journals, newspapers, and books.
Memorial also researches current violations of human rights in Russia and other former Soviet republics, especially when these occur on a large scale. Examples are atrocities committed during the two Chechnya wars, and continuing official discrimination against the Meskhi Turks, who were deported from southern Georgia in 1944.
Memorial’s charitable work consists of helping victims of oppression and their relatives (e.g., materially and with legal problems).
Memorial’s activities have been directed from Moscow by a stable core of individuals, including Roginsky, Nikita Okhotin, and Alexander Daniel. Its funding has primarily come from bodies such as the Ford Foundation, the Soros Foundation, and the Heinrich Boll Stiftung in Germany, and a few domestic sources.
Since the early 1990s most of public opinion in Russia has become indifferent or even hostile to the work of Memorial. However, its members derive hope from pockets of societal support and the launching in 1999 of an annual competition for essays on Memorial-type themes by high-school children that attracted 1,651 entries during its first year. Some members recall that, after the fall of Adolf Hitler in Germany, three decades went by before German society began seriously to confront the Nazi era and to create a more reliable national memory. A similar or longer period may be needed in the former USSR, before Russian society, in particular, can face up to myriad grim truths about the seven decades of communism. In the interim, Memorial has unearthed small pieces of truth about hundreds of deportations and millions of deaths. See also: CHECHNYA AND CHECHENS; HUMAN RIGHTS; SAKHAROV, ANDREI
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adler, Nanci. (1993). Victims of Soviet Terror: The Story of the Memorial Movement. Westport, CT:
