Doctors' plot
'doctors' case') was a Soviet state-sponsored antisemitic campaign based on a conspiracy theory that alleged a cabal of prominent medical specialists, predominantly of Jewish ethnicity, intended to murder leading government and communist party officials.
[4][5] The campaign against the doctors was presumably set in motion by Stalin as a pretext to launch a massive purge of the Communist Party,[6] and, according to Edvard Radzinsky, even to consolidate the country for a future World War III.
Timashuk "exposed their criminal designs" and as such the security bodies of the Soviet Union were made aware of the existence of the alleged conspiracy against Stalin.
[9] Stalin's daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, stated that her father was "very saddened by the turn of events" and that the housekeeper heard him saying that he did not believe the doctors were "dishonest" and that the only evidence against them were the reports of Timashuk.
[10] In 1951, Ministry for State Security (MGB) investigator Mikhail Ryumin reported to his superior, Viktor Abakumov, Minister of the MGB, that Professor Yakov Etinger, who was arrested as a "bourgeois nationalist" with connections to the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, had committed malpractice in treating Andrei Zhdanov (died 1948) and Alexander Shcherbakov (died 1945), allegedly with the intention of killing them.
In 1948, Timashuk wrote a letter to the head of Stalin's security, General Nikolai Vlasik, explaining that Zhdanov suffered a heart attack, but the Kremlin doctors who treated him missed it and prescribed the wrong treatment for him.
To portray the conspiracy as Zionist, Ryumin and Semyon Ignatyev, who had succeeded Abakumov as head of the MGB, had the Jewish doctors Etinger supposedly specified also added to the arrest list; many of them, like Miron Vovsi, had been consulted by the Kremlin's medical department.
[25] Newly opened KGB archives provide evidence that Stalin forwarded the collected interrogation materials to Malenkov, Khrushchev and other "potential victims of the doctors' plot".
[32] On 13 January 1953, nine eminent doctors in Moscow were accused of taking part in a vast plot to poison members of the top Soviet political and military leadership.
This terrorist group, uncovered some time ago by organs of state security, had as their goal shortening the lives of leaders of the Soviet Union by means of medical sabotage.
Killer doctors, by incorrect use of very powerful medicines and prescription of harmful regimens, shortened the life of Comrade Shcherbakov, leading to his death.
Other participants in the terrorist group (Vinogradov, M. Kogan, Egorov) were discovered, as has been presently determined, to have been long-time agents of English intelligence, serving it for many years, carrying out its most criminal and sordid tasks.
The Soviet people should not for a minute forget about the need to heighten their vigilance in all ways possible, to be alert for all schemes of war-mongers and their agents, to constantly strengthen the Armed Forces and the intelligence organs of our government.
[39] Chief MGB investigator and Deputy Minister of State Security Mikhail Ryumin was accused of fabricating the plot, arrested and later executed.
[40] A Komsomol official, Nikolai Mesyatsev, was assigned by Malenkov to review the doctors' plot case and quickly found that it was fabricated.
[41] There is a tale in the Hasidic Chabad movement that Stalin became sick as a consequence of some metaphysical intervention of the seventh Chabad leader, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, during the recitation of a public discourse at a Purim gathering in 1953, which supposedly caused Stalin's death and averted massive deportations of Soviet Jews to Siberia that were to take place as a result of the antisemitic campaign surrounding the doctor's plot affair.
"[45] Khrushchev also claimed that Stalin hinted to him to incite antisemitism in Ukraine, saying, "The good workers at the factory should be given clubs so they can beat the hell out of those Jews.
[6] Soviet historian Samson Madievsky [ru] has advanced a view, based on various memoirs and secondary evidence, that the doctors' plot case was intended to trigger the mass repression and deportation of the Jews to the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, similar to the deportations of many other ethnic minorities in the Soviet Union, but the plan was not accomplished because of the sudden death of Stalin.
[50][51][52] Nikolay Poliakov, the presumed secretary of the "Commission", stated years later that, according to Stalin's initial plan, the deportation was to begin in the middle of February 1953, but the monumental tasks of compiling lists of Jews had not yet been completed.
[52] Historian Yakov Etinger described how former CPSU Politburo member Nikolai Bulganin said that Stalin asked him in the end of February 1953 to prepare railroad cars for the mass deportation of Jews to the Jewish Autonomous Oblast.
