Vadim Markovich Medish

Medish
Vadim Markovich Medish
October 28 marks the centenary of Vadim Markovich Medish's birth in 1924 in Minsk, USSR. His family's story is like a tableau of European history over a millennium. His parents were Mark Nikolaevich Medish and Anna Nikolaevna née Saks. His father, a botanist educated at Geneva, Paris and Heidelberg, hailed from Kharkov in the northeastern Ukrainian guberniya of the Russian Empire. He considered himself Ukrainian. His mother Anna was born in Alushta on the Crimean peninsula. They were both from Germanic landowning families who had homes in St. Petersburg. Mark was from the easternmost Baltic branch of the von Kleist clan of counts and barons tracing its roots to Stettin in Pomerania in the mid 13th century. Vladimir the Great of Kiev, Byzantine Emperor John Komnenos and Ferdinand of Aragon were direct ancestors. The Medish line of the family were originally Dalmatian Serbs and Croats who fled Ottoman encroachment in Slavonia around 1690, first to the Kingdom of Hungary, then to the Russian Empire for service as hussars settling the areas of Bakhmut and Izyum in eastern Ukraine in the 1750's. Vadim was named after Anna's uncle, a naval captain who survived sinking at the Battle of Tsushima in 1905 during the Russo-Japanese War. Her father Nikolai Eduardovich Saks, an accomplished landscape painter, was amanuensis to the writer Ivan Turgenev. Saks had assimilated Jewish roots from Austria-Hungary. His father had been a prominent Vienna-trained medical doctor who moved to Russia and treated the Tsar. Vadim's parents met in Simferopol, Crimea during the retreat of White Army forces fleeing the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War, which was largely fought in Ukraine and Southern Russia. They missed the last boat to Constantinople and remained in the new Soviet Union. Lenin's younger brother Dmitri Ulyanov had placed Mark and other fellow scientists in Crimea on a "no-kill" list. As a "class enemy," to melt into Soviet society Mark took research positions far away from the family's homesteads, at universities in Minsk and later Krasnodar, where Vadim grew up in the 1930s. Mark, an expert on mycology and crop hybridization, was an associate of famous botanist Nikolai Vavilov and a rival of Stalin's favorite quack geneticist the anti-Mendelian Trofim Lysenko. Vadim attended regular Soviet schools but was secretly tutored in a classical curriculum at home. He was drafted into the Soviet Air Force immediately after graduating high school in 1942. His father was arrested because of his extensive Western scientific ties and perished at the hands of the NKVD during an evacuation of prisoners to Central Asia. Because his father was condemned as an "enemy of the people," Vadim lost his officer commission and was reassigned to an anti-tank unit in the regular Red Army infantry. His unit battled Axis forces in the North Caucasus and was captured by the Wehrmacht on the outskirts of Stalingrad in September 1942. He recalled being reviewed among thousands of other Soviet POWs by Wehrmacht Panzer General Ewald von Kleist, a distant cousin he never met. The Kleists had by then produced more generals than any other Prussian family. As a POW Vadim entered a series of work camps ending up at Breslau in 1945. His mother also survived, having escaped the Soviets during the brief occupation of Krasnodar. After the war, mother and son lived in Bayreuth and Munich, where Vadim took a law degree. As DP's in Germany, they managed to avoid forced repatriation to the USSR thanks to Vadim's Polish language skills and his having changed his birthplace from Minsk to Pinsk in pre-war Poland. In 1949 they emigrated to the United States together with friends from Krasnodar on the USS General Hersey sailing from Bremerhaven and settling in Philadelphia. Within a year, Vadim was conscripted into the U.S. Army and sent to Korea. He was with a G2 Army intelligence unit in Pyongyang when the Chinese crossed the Yalu River. He was later assigned to HQ in Tokyo and served directly under Generals MacArthur and Willoughby. After the end of the occupation of Japan in 1952, Vadim stayed in Tokyo working in the U.S. clandestine services throughout the Far East, ultimately transferring to headquarters in Washington in 1960. He was among the few CIA analysts to predict the Sino-Soviet rift. He earned a B.A. at the University of Pennsylvania and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees at American University where he became a professor of international affairs. His Ph.D. commencement speaker was JFK who gave the famous detente address at AU on June 10,1963. Vadim retired in 1994 after 30 years of teaching and did consulting work on the former USSR. His textbook "The Soviet Union" was a standard for undergraduate courses through the 1980's. Vadim succeeded in having his father officially "rehabilitated" in Russia in the early 2000's. A polyglot of voracious intellectual appetite and Prussian discipline, he prided himself on reading a book a day and could recite Pushkin's "Eugene Onegin." In early 1962 Vadim met Ruth Elise Harris née Petersen, a Danish diplomat and artist at her going away party - she planned to return to Copenhagen - but some magnetism must have been at play. They married that year and had a son, Mark. Ruth passed away in 1999. Vadim got to know and spend time with all four of his grandchildren, Vadim, Nikolai, Kira and Max. He died of cardiac failure at eighty-six, hours after learning that his namesake grandson of St. Albans School had won gold at the Stotesbury crew regatta at Philadelphia.