Let History Judge [antikvár]

Editor's IntroductionUp to now scholarly analyses of Stalinism have appeared only outside the Soviet Union, nearly all of them written by non-Communists. With this book, a Soviet Marxist is trying to begin the discussion at home. He submitted the work to a Soviet publisher; it was turned down; so he has authorized publication abroad. The author's motives for writing it in the first place are amply explained in his own introduction, written for the intended Soviet audience. This introduction is primarily for the benefit of outsiders, who may wish to know who the author is, how his analysis of Stalinism compares with previous interpretations, and how this translation compares with the Russian original.The author is one of twin sons born in 1925 to a Soviet Marxist philosopher, Alexander Romanovich Medvedev, who coined names for his children that were in keeping with the timesas many believers in a revolutionary break with the past were then doing. Roy (or Roi) means "Dig" (the imperative of ryt'), and Reis, the original name of his twin, means "A Route." When Reis altered his name for euphonic reasons to Zhores, the brothers seemed to be named for the French Socialist Jaures and the Indian Communist M. N. Roy, a pleasant coincidence of revolutionary tradition and linguistic innovation.In the late thirties, when the father was teaching dialectical materialism at the Tolmachev' Military-Political Academy, an institution that trained commissars for the Red Army, the terror snatched him away. The sons nevertheless followed his example, both of them becoming scholars with strong social consciences. Zhores is now a distinguished biochemist who has written exposés of tyranny in Soviet intellectual life.^ (In reprisal, the tyrants dissolved his labora-' N. G. Tolmachev, a Bolshevik who died in the Civil War, not to be confused with the Tolmachev who was expelled from the Party in 1933 and killed by the terror. They may have been brothers. The Academy seems to have been renamed for Lenin when the terror struck it. See below, pp. 155 and 212. ' See his Rise and Fall of T. D. Lysenko (New York, 1969), and The Medvedev Papers (New York, 1971).