Zhores Medvedev – författare

This portrait by two noted Soviet authors and dissidents of Nikita S. Khrushchev's years in power reveals the former leader of the Soviet Union as a decisive, even impetuous, innovator, a side of him little known before in the West. Khrushchev emerges as a man impatient to destroy Stalinism, to remedy defects in the Soviet system, and to solve the problems of Soviet agriculture. As no other book before it, Khrushchev brings into focus the many sides of the shrewd and complex Soviet leader and the interrelation between Soviet politics and agricultural policy that brought about his removal from power.

Zhores Medvedev, a Soviet biochemist and outspoken critic of the Soviet bureaucracy, who was railroaded into a mental hospital, and his brother, historian Roy Medvedev, who rallied the Soviet scientific and intellectual community in protest, together tell the story of “repression by psychiatry” in Russia today.

"A richly instructive exercise in the craft of Kremlinology . . . . Fascinating." -Serge Schmemann, New York Times Book Review

"A damning history of the Chernobyl affair, from its origins in the plant's primitive design and careless management to the economic and political crisis the accident precipitated." -Clenn Garelik, New York Times Book Review

The story of the explosion and contamination was and still is suppressed in the Soviet Union and, the author contends, by the CIA and other Western intelligence organizations fearful of public resistance to nuclear power plants. Now, after an intensive study of Soviet scientific articles (written to disguise the fact that they were about the Ural explosion) and after many interviews and reports from friends in the scientific community as well as from witnesses, the author has pieced together the story of what actually happened. He analyzes the extent and consequences of the contamination and draws forbidding conclusions about the possibility of similar disasters in the rest of the world.

The first comprehensive analysis of Soviet agriculture from its historic origins to the present, explaining why collectivization failed and why contemporary methods are inefficient. Medvedev, a noted biochemist, shows why agriculture holds the Soviet future.