Jonathan Brent - Stalins Last Crime: The Plot Against the Jewish Doctors, 1948-1953

N othing impressed me so much as the doctor story, Winston Churchill wrote to President Eisenhower on April 11, 1953, a little over a month after Stalins death, noting, This must cut very deeply into communist discipline and structure.1 Churchill intuitively recognized that this story held particular significance for Soviet and world affairs. Though it was difficult to say what that significance was, he urged the American president to take it as a sign of potential change in future U.S.Soviet relations.

As Churchill divined, the doctor story was a tangled, complicated affair, deeply embedded in the structure of Kremlin leadership. It reflected many of the intentions of Stalins foreign policy as well as the tensions within his government. Had the plot against the Jewish doctors succeeded, much subsequent world history might have been quite different. Many leading Kremlin figures would have been purged and probably shot; the security services and the military would have been decimated by purges; Soviet intellectuals and artists, particularly Jews, would have been mercilessly repressed; and the surviving remnant of Soviet and Eastern European Jewry would have been gravely (perhaps mortally) imperiled, while grievous suffering would have been inflicted on all the citizens of the Soviet Union. Another Great Terror, such as occurred in the late 1930s, was averted when Stalin suddenly died on March 5, 1953. Stalins version of a final solution remained unfulfilled, and the new Soviet leaders immediately backed away from the abyss toward which Soviet society was headed. The Great Terror was a prelude to Stalins preparations for World War II, and much new evidence shows that the Doctors Plot would have served a similar purpose. In the thirties the enemy was Germany; after the war, it was the United States.

The doctors story is difficult to sort out into a clear, linear unfolding of events. A great many tiny details from a great many different sources within the Soviet government and internationally contributed to its development. To see Stalins signature on each detail he hammered into place requires the vision of the cross-eyed, left-handed craftsman in Nikolai Leskovs famous story, who engraved his initials on the head of each microscopic nail used to shoe the czars golden flea. The doctors story has many such nails, and this book seeks to read the inscriptions they bear. Like those of the czars flea, its ponderous, if tiny, shoes disclose a marvel of intricate workmanship.

Unlike Leskovs left-handed craftsman, Stalin, the illegitimate son of a Georgian shoemaker, in many respects worked backward. To be sure, the investigation into the death of A. A. Zhdanov, who died in 1948, and the alleged crimes of doctor Yakov G. Etinger progressed over a period of several years, ending in 1953. But this forward progress of the investigation was something of an illusion. The investigation proceeded from the death of Etinger in March 1951 to the Pravda announcement of the Doctors Plot in January 1953 as if it were uncovering facts, piecing together details, drawing conclusions, exposing crimes. In reality the crimes had been determined in advance, at least as early as the July 1951 secret letter of the Central Committee. What was proved in 1953 had been stated as fact and established from the beginning. A good example of this general principle of working from conclusion to fact is the January 1953 article in Pravda revealing the sensational confessions of various doctors, even though the doctors had not yet confessed to these crimes; another example is the evolving, if posthumous, role of Politburo member A. A. Kuznetsov throughout the investigation; a third example is the invisible but all important shift in the 1951 secret letter from a case against one man, Dr. Etinger, to a conspiratorial group . While it appears that the evolution of Kuznetsovs role, and the change from an individual crime to a group conspiracy may have occurred as the investigation gathered more facts, the truth is that Kuznetsovs role and the mass nature of the conspiracy were essential to the plot from the outset. As a result, the story we tell must zigzag back and forth from 1948 to 1953 so that details occurring at an earlier stage can be understood in their final context. Narratives move linearly in time; Stalins plots did not.

Stalins Doctors Plot came to worldwide attention in January 1953, two months before his death. It has been called the provocation of the century it has also been described as the irrational product of the aging dictators diseased mind. Though Stalin died before he realized his intentions, the archival record allows us to reconstruct his purpose with some confidence. This record shows that until February 17, 1953,2 thirteen days before his stroke, Stalin retained a vigorous, purposive mind; his ambitions were clear; his hold on power assured and complete. Nothing in the archival record suggests that Stalins last days as leader of the Soviet Union were not consistent with his first.

From the distance of fifty years it is now possible to see more clearly what Churchill only guessed, that the story of the doctors was a state-sponsored conspiracy of mass proportions in the service of Stalins political vision. It grew together gradually over a period of several years. Though sketched out in July 1951, it achieved its final form only in the late fall of 1952. Announced to the world on January 13, 1953, it came to an abrupt halt with Stalins death in March. Those who followed him were quick to obliterate all trace of it.

The dyelo vrachey (case of the doctors), as it was called by the Soviet government, was alleged at the time to be a widespread conspiracy in the Soviet medical profession organized by Jewish physicians against Kremlin leaders. A. A. Zhdanov was one victim; A. S. Shcherbakov was another. Many other prominent names were added including Georgi Dimitrov, former head of the Comintern; several Soviet generals; Georgi Malenkov, a powerful Politburo member; and important foreign communists as well. Jewish doctors were accused of either murdering these leaders or planning their murders in league with American intelligence and a corrupt Ministry of state security (MGB). Hundreds of doctors were arrested over a period of five months, beginning in October 1952 and ending in February 1953. The consequences of the plot did not stop there, however. Fantastic rumors circulated that Jewish doctors were poisoning Russian children, injecting them with diphtheria, and killing newborn infants in maternity hospitals.3 Terrible clouds gathered on the horizon of Soviet society. After Stalins death, in March 1953, the core group of thirty-seven doctors and their wives was released from prison. More releases followed in a general amnesty; apparent calm returned to daily life. Of the thirty-seven, only seventeen were Jews. Of the original group of six doctors accused of murdering A. A. Zhdanov in 1948, none was Jewish with the exception of the EKG technician, Sophia Karpai. This fact is one of the plots deepest tangles.

Today it is generally thought that the Doctors Plot instead of being a conspiracy of doctors against the government was a conspiracy by the government against the Jewish doctors. The documents assembled in this book tell a different story. They show us that the case of the doctors was actually a conspiracy of the government, in the person of Stalin, against itself. Had it succeeded, its rabid, anti-Semitic character would have had devastating consequences for the trapped Soviet Jewish population, but it had far wider implications, well beyond those of the 1952 trial of the Jewish Anti-fascist Committee or the ugly suppression of Jewish rights that occurred during the so-called anticosmopolitan campaign that had begun in 19471948.