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writing a pioneering study of the Great Purge of
the 1930s that was published in English as Let
History Judge. Although harassed by the KGB
(secret police), his excellent connections in the
party allowed him to develop a remarkably pro-
lific and successful career as a dissident historian
whose books were regularly published in the
West. Among his many publications from this
period are On Socialist Democracy (1975), Khrush-
chev (1982), and All Stalin's Men (1984). He also
maintained links with the Soviet samizdat com-
munity, editing a samizdat magazine, Politicheskii
dnevnik ( Political Diary ) and an almanac, Dvadsatyi
vek ( Twentieth century ). He also cowrote a number
of books with Zhores, including A Question of Bal-
ance (1971) and Khrushchev: The Years in Power
(1975). With the liberalization of politics under
Mikhail Gorbachev, Roi Medvedev, a staunch
Leninist, emerged as a strong defender of Gor-
bachev's policies. He was elected to the 1989
Congress of People's Deputies, where he spoke
out forcefully on human rights, ethnic issues,
and East-West relations.
workers' leisure, Melnikov contributed seven
worker clubs and four garages to the city's land-
scape. He also designed the sarcophagus used to
display LENIN 's body after his death in 1924. His
innovative designs for the Soviet pavilion at the
1925 International Exhibition of Decorative Arts
in Paris brought him international acclaim. But
the most talked about of his buildings was the
house he built for himself on a plot of land he
received from the government as a reward for
the successful Paris show. Long fascinated by
cylinders, circles, and curves, Melnikov designed
a house composed of two intersecting cylinders,
forming the footprint of the numeral eight, with
hexagonal windows. Melnikov participated in
the polemical discussions that were a central
part of architectural professional discourse, but
he was too much of an individualist to formally
join one of the existing associations with ideolog-
ical platforms. Thus, he never joined the Con-
structivists led by Moisei GINSBERG and Aleksandr
VESNIN , and his association with the Association
of New Architects (ASNOVA) was brief. With the
spread of government-controlled socialist realism
to all fields of creative activity in the 1930s, Mel-
nikov was labeled a “formalist” and denied most
major commissions by the architectural estab-
lishment. The exception was the interior to the
Central Department Store in Saratov, which he
designed in 1949. He devoted his last years to the
painting that had been the source of his first cre-
ative work.
Melnikov, Konstantin Stepanovich
(1890-1974)
architect
A visionary architect who came into prominence
during the experimental 1920s but, unwilling to
adapt to the changing ideological directives that
affected his field, spent the last four decades of
his life in relative obscurity. Melnikov began his
creative career as an artist, studying painting in
Moscow (1905-11) before switching to architec-
ture, and enrolling in the Moscow School for
Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, between
1912 and 1917. After the 1917 Revolutions,
Melnikov found employment with the Moscow
city soviet, while teaching at the influential
Vkhutemas (Higher State Art and Technical Stu-
dios) from 1921 to 1923. His first work was the
design of the façade and factory structures of the
AMO automobile works in Moscow. In a decade
that sought to find innovative approaches to
everyday problems such as mass housing and
Mendeleyev, Dmitrii Ivanovich
(1834-1907)
scientist
One of Russia's most prominent scientists, Men-
deleyev's best-known contribution to world sci-
ence was the periodic table of elements, which
he first devised in 1869. He was born in the
Siberian town of Tobolsk, the son of the head-
master of the local secondary school, and edu-
cated at the St. Petersburg Pedagogical Institute.
After postgraduate work in Germany at Heidel-
berg University, Mendeleyev returned to Russia
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