Exile for Dissenters

Unwilling to resort to Stalin's mass purges and executions, Soviet officials have dismissed dissenters from their jobs, sent them to forced-labor camps, and confined them to prison mental institutions. Their most recent method appears to be a kind of involuntary exile: they allow a dissenter to travel abroad and then snatch away his passport. Last week, after eight months of research in Britain, Zhores Medvedev, a geneticist and gerontologist of international reputation, was called to the Soviet embassy in London where his passport was revoked and he was told that he was no longer a Soviet citizen.

Medvedev had long been an irritant to the Soviet authorities. His first sin, in 1969, was to write The Rise and Fall of T.D. Lysenko, a chronicle of Stalin's favorite scientist, a crackpot biologist who was the final, arbitrary word in Russian genetics for more than two decades. His second sin, in 1971, was to write The Medvedev Papers, a tale of Soviet censorship and suppression of intellectuals. Neither book was published in the U.S.S.R., but Soviet officials were so angered by their publication in the West that they finally confined Medvedev to a madhouse for what they termed a "split personality, expressed in the need to combine scientific work . . . with publicist activities."

So embarrassing was the protest, not only in the West but in Russia itself, that Medvedev was released from the asylum after 19 days. His latest round with the Soviet government may have been provoked by his plans to publish a "factual tribute" to Solzhenitsyn entitled Ten Years After One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (TIME, May 28). It is a chronicle of the novelist's rise to fame and his later harassment by Soviet authorities after he published his bestselling novel.

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