The boys grew up in Leningrad. While Zhores embarked on biology, Roy became a historian whose books on the Stalin era won world acclaim but were banned at home. In 1950, Zhores graduated from the Timiriasev Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Moscow and received a master’s degree from the Institute of Plant Physiology at the Soviet Academy of Sciences. He earned a doctorate in biochemistry from Timiriasev in 1954.
His innovative research at Timiriasev, where he worked until 1963, led to books that were hailed in academic circles. Among them were “Protein Biosynthesis and Problems of Heredity, Development and Aging” (1963) and “Molecular-Genetic Mechanisms of Development” (1968). He was with the Academy of Medical Sciences at Obninsk from 1963 until his dismissal in 1969.
Dr. Medvedev’s book “Ten Years After ‘One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich’ ” (1973) recounted Solzhenitsyn’s struggles to publish the novel in the title, which was about life in Stalin’s prison camps, and it detailed the tactics used by the Communist Party and the secret police to frustrate independent writers.
Dr. Medvedev’s book “Nuclear Disaster in the Urals” (1979) exposed a 1957 explosion of radioactive wastes at a nuclear weapons factory at Kyshtym, about 1,000 miles east of Moscow, that killed hundreds of people, forced the evacuation of thousands and created a radioactive wasteland of 400 square miles.
For years, Soviet officials had denied that such an accident had happened. But in 1989, Tass, the government-controlled Soviet news agency, finally acknowledged the incident, though it insisted that there had been no casualties. Questions had swirled since Dr. Medvedev first mentioned the event in a 1976 article, and his book broke through a fog of confusion by citing more than 100 Russian unpublished studies on the accident’s terrible effects.
In “The Legacy of Chernobyl” (1990), he detailed the 1986 nuclear accident that showered hundreds of thousands with radiation. He condemned the plant’s primitive design and careless management and contended that Kremlin secrecy had made the ensuing economic and political crises worse. His “Soviet Agriculture” (1988) reprised the history of crop disasters, famines and displaced millions, and posed questions on the future of Soviet farming.
Complete information on Dr. Medvedev’s survivors was not immediately available.
At Mr. Gorbachev’s invitation, Dr. Medvedev returned to Moscow in 1989 to testify before legislative panels investigating Chernobyl and the Urals accident. He had testified earlier in Britain in the House of Commons and in the United States Senate, and was flabbergasted by the amateurishness of the Soviet legislators. One wanted to know if his sore throat might be a symptom of radiation poisoning.
