Valéry Dunaévsky | From the memories of the era of the Doctors’ Plot

(Based on several excerpts from the book [1] by the author)

In the late 1940s, my parents’ good friends in Murmansk were my father’s boss and his wife. The boss was the department’s chief engineer for mechanization and automation of the fishing port and the fish-processing equipment, and his last name was Khronovsky. He was a handsome, tall man of Russian-Polish descent, who I also remember, probably because he wore a leather coat, which was rare. Something in his face suggested a decency and determination of nature. His wife was a slim, petite, and lively lady. Although she did not occupy a high position in the city’s public life, she was self-confident, well-spoken, and, most importantly, in the opinion of my mother, who enjoyed her company, she had a delicate feminine taste in clothes.

Being well-dressed, practical, and fashionable was not easy. The clothing industry in the USSR was far from European standards, and there were also financial barriers to consider. Because of this, knowing a good dressmaker to sew new clothes or repair old ones was important. Such a figure turned out to be the wife of one of my father’s acquaintances, the engineer Goldstein. Sometimes, when we visited them, she served lunch with borscht. It happened after discussing, trying on, or repairing some clothes. Much to the embarrassment of my grandmother, who was also present at one of the dinners, I once declared that I liked the Goldsteins’ borscht more than the borscht she cooked.

Despite the good dinners and the tailoring skills of Goldstein’s wife, meeting him created trouble for my father. He was summoned to the office of the Ministry of State Security (MGB, the KGB of that time), which occupied a huge building that took up an entire block. My father was asked to become an informant and keep an eye on the Goldstein family, reporting on all their guests, correspondence, etc. This invitation coincided with the anti-cosmopolitan and anti-American campaigns instigated by Stalin. The campaigns primarily targeted the cultural and professional Jewish elite. Goldstein was targeted because, I heard, he had some connections with the Americans. Perhaps this was during the war in the context of his professional activities.

The American contacts were enough to slander Goldstein and suspect him of anti-Soviet activity. The Soviet-American alliance of World War II opened the way for the Cold War, with mutual accusations of espionage and fomenting conflict. According to my mother, my father refused to be an MGB informant. However, until the mid-1950s, they periodically urged him to cooperate, but to no avail. And as for my father, as I understand it, his resistance cost him his health.

The Goldstein episode was a relatively mild example of the antisemitism that flourished in the USSR, especially from 1948 until Stalin’s death on March 5, 1953. There were several intertwined motives for creating this post-war atmosphere. The Cold War that began in 1946 between the US and the USSR and Israel’s orientation toward America became fertile ground on which Stalin continued to play his «chess games» in a permanent «witch hunt.» An internal enemy was necessary for the system Lenin and Stalin had created. It was an old trick – beat your own so that strangers would be afraid.

The anti-cosmopolitan campaign, having begun in 1947, developed on a chauvinistic platform with an overvaluing of everything Russian and Soviet and an undervaluing of everything foreign and bourgeois. The following joke ridiculed the spirit of the time. A monograph entitled Introduction to Elephant Science was published in France. Then, in the USSR, a book was published entitled The USSR – the Homeland of Elephants. In turn, Bulgaria, a satellite of the USSR, published a book entitled The Bulgarian Elephant – the Younger Brother of the Soviet Elephant. Under the political and ideological terror of the Stalinist regime, entire scientific fields that had been abolished and declared bourgeois even before the war continued to remain in the same state, and their leaders were persecuted, which ultimately led to the USSR and then the CIS countries that emerged after its collapse, lagging in the fields of cybernetics, genetics, agriculture, and other areas.

The anti-cosmopolitan campaign also downplayed the Nazis’ concentrated efforts to exterminate the Jews. It downplayed the contribution of Jews during the war in industry, government, science, the partisan movement, and the Soviet Army itself. Meanwhile, even with the official policy of suppressing their promotion and award (and the fact that they did not always identify themselves as Jews for fear of discrimination), Jews ranked fourth (after Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians) in terms of the number of awards received, including the Hero of the Soviet Union, at the end of the war (and third in 1943), the atmosphere of the time, especially at the level of ordinary people, portrayed Jews as people lacking patriotism, evading the draft, as «Tashkent partisans.»

Stalin helped create Israel. Although the US was the first to recognize Israel 11 minutes after it declared independence on May 14, 1948, the USSR was the first to officially recognize Israel on May 17, 1948, three days after it declared independence. Moreover, Moscow allowed arms to be delivered from Czechoslovakia to Israel and turned a blind eye to the fact that many Jews repatriated from the USSR to Poland fled from there to Palestine. Interestingly, the recognition of Israel occurred after the assassination of Mikhoels in early 1948, i.e., despite it. Stalin hoped that Israel would become a military base in the Middle East under Soviet command and would act against British and American interests in the area. However, this did not happen.

Stalin, an internationalist, could not understand the enthusiasm of the Jewish population (at least part of it) for the restoration of Jewish culture and language, and he could not understand their ardent attachment to Israel. His vision of communist doctrine was strongly opposed to nationalism. Stalin, himself a Georgian (or Ossetian, according to other sources), nevertheless persecuted Georgians and other nationalities for what he considered nationalism. He saw the enthusiasm with which Jews greeted the Minister Plenipotentiary to the Soviet Union from Israel (its future Prime Minister Golda Meir) during her visit to Moscow in 1948 while Polina Zhemchuzhina, the Jewish wife of the Soviet Minister of Foreign Affairs V. Molotov, even spoke with Golda (at that time still Goldie Myerson) in Yiddish. However, she was soon arrested and expelled from Moscow. These actions were a symbolic attack on Molotov and a reminder of the purges of the 1930s that could be repeated in the near future.

In this atmosphere, and as part of the newly launched official anti-Semitic campaign, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC) was disbanded in November 1948. The committee was created by the NKVD in early 1942 under the Soviet Information Bureau from among the Soviet Jewish intelligentsia, including one non-Jew, Pyotr Kapitsa, to influence international public opinion and organize political and material support for the Soviet struggle against Nazi Germany, especially from the West. However, the organization disappeared six months after the birth of the state of Israel. That same year, the chairman of the committee, actor, and director of the Moscow Jewish Theater, Mikhoels, was killed (as already mentioned) on Stalin’s orders.

Most of the committee members were arrested. They were accused of spying for the United States, nationalism, and pushing the idea of Crimea as a national hearth instead of Birobidzhan. This idea was justified, among other things, by the existence of Jewish agricultural communes which (destroyed by the Holocaust) had existed in Crimea since the 1920s, supported by the Joint (American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee), a Jewish charity that somehow became a symbol of the American-Zionist conspiracy in the eyes of the Stalinists. The word «Joint» even became a household word in a certain sense, sometimes replacing more expressive epithets such as Jew or Yid, which were sometimes used simply to express hostility towards someone, regardless of their nationality. I remember a comical situation in Sochi in 1952 or 1953 when a street vendor angrily shouted at a gang of kids bothering him, «Joints, go to bed already.» It is unlikely that there were Jewish kids in the gang. In turn, people who wore dark sunglasses were often identified with Jews for some reason and could be subjected to ridicule and nitpicking by passers-by.

It could be said that a new terrible drama of Soviet justice was being prepared. Almost four years had passed since the case of the JAC members reached the court. At the same time, cruel interrogations with anti-Semitic insults beat phantasmagoric confessions out of the prisoners. After such confessions, they often recanted and, subjected to more pressure, capitulated to recant again. The investigations fell apart, unable to find evidence of subversive activity, even plausible, and the torture continued again. On August 12, 1952, thirteen of the fifteen convicted members of the JAC, including five Jewish poets (writing in Yiddish), were executed in the cells of the Lubyanka prison. This secret was kept long after Stalin died in 1953.

In parallel with the events described above, a conspiracy against Jewish doctors was developing. However, it did not begin with anti-Semitic overtones. It was a growing intrigue in the upper echelons of power and the security apparatus, mixed with denunciations and revelations. The immediate impetus for the beginning of the Doctors’ Plot, as Stalin characterized it, was the death of Zhdanov, a prominent Soviet leader, in the Kremlin hospital in Valdai on August 31, 1948. According to fundamental research [2], Stalin’s last crime. The Plot against the Jewish doctors, 1948-1953   by Brent, J. and Naumov, V., two days before his death, doctor Lidiya Timashuk, who was responsible for Zhdanov’s last electrocardiogram, sent a secret letter to Stalin’s head of security, Vlasik.

In the letter, she alleged the criminal, in her opinion, negligence of his leading doctors in the treatment of comrade Zhdanov, which could lead to a fatal outcome. These doctors were high-ranking in Soviet medicine and the Kremlin system, and none were Jewish. Timashuk was an MGB informant, and she hoped that her information would be appreciated. She hoped that the accused of negligence professors would be brought to trial for their anti-Soviet activities, which may have also led to the death of another Soviet leader, Shcherbakov, and that they would be exposed. At the same time, she was acting in her interests. If she had not exposed the other doctors, she would have been in danger of being exposed. Timashuk’s plan did not work as expected. Timashuk felt insecure and sent several more letters to the security organs and the highest party authorities, but her situation did not improve.

Being a natural Machiavelli, Stalin often maintained the appearance of impartiality, apparently for external consumption. For example, the famous writer Ilya Ehrenburg was awarded the Stalin Prize twice in the late 1940s. In turn, at various mass meetings of the period described, Stalin raised his voice against antisemitism, sarcastically asking questions like: «How is it possible that there are anti-Semites in our ranks?» He is also known for the expression (although of 1931): «Antisemitism, as an extreme form of racial chauvinism, is the most dangerous relic of cannibalism.»

In Stalin’s world of 1948, Timashuk was wrong, and the doctors were right. However, given his diabolical mind, which was aimed at restoring the political climate of the Great Purge of the 1930s, and some other opportunistic events (notably the Leningrad affair, the execution of the communist leaders of Leningrad and the purge of the state security apparatus), the pendulum that Timashuk had swung began to gradually shift in her favor, forming the Doctors’ Plot, which alleged a widespread conspiracy of Soviet medical workers, mainly Jewish doctors, against the Kremlin leaders. The doctors were accused of murdering such leaders as A.A. Zhdanov, A.S. Shcherbakov, and others and of planning their murders in cooperation with American and British intelligence.

Hundreds of doctors were arrested over five months, from September 1952 to February 1953. Timashuk even received the Order of Lenin (after Stalin’s death and the closure of the case, the order was revoked). From the words of Dr. Yegorov [2] (one of the Kremlin non-Jewish doctors accused of the medical malpractice that led, allegedly, to A.A. Zdanov’s death,  and who, along with other accused doctors,  was arrested in the fall of 1952) of the warning he received from one of his interrogators, «We will beat you every day, we will tear out your arms and legs, but we will, all the same, learn everything down to the last detail about the life of A.A. Zhdanov, and all the truth,» one may get an impression about the treatment the arrested doctors were exposed to at the hands of their jailers. Fantastic rumors circulated that Jewish doctors were poisoning Russian children by giving them diphtheria injections and killing newborn babies in maternity hospitals.

The full might of the reborn Soviet state was now turned against the «killers in white coats,» as they were called in the press. Reports came in that new concentration camps had been built, supposedly for Jews, who were supposed to be deported from the country’s cities beyond the Urals. According to various rumors and reports published after perestroika, this deportation was to end in a complete genocide of the Jews, which was only prevented by the «timely» death of the leader.

A vicious anti-Semitic campaign allegedly found evidence of «international espionage, treason, with horrific plans to overthrow the government and plans to poison the health of the nation.» Although the main hysteria over the Doctors’ Plot raged in Moscow and Leningrad, its echoes resounded throughout the Soviet Union. At the Murmansk clinic for long-voyage sailors, where the author’s mother worked as an X-ray doctor, her colleague, a small Jewish woman dentist, Dr. Kornibat, whose office I visited quite often, was accused of infecting her patients with cancer. As was the case with victims of such accusations, she was fired and went through several staged pseudo-trials involving her colleagues before formal charges were brought. Fortunately, the world is not without good people, and in this case, the clinic director showed courage and defended Kornibat from absurd charges. Although the participants in these trials and discussions understood the absurdity of the charges, they typically remained silent or supported them. They «took the masks off the criminals» while fearing their fate.

Here is how my relative, E.A. Dombrovskaya (1927-2015), Dr. Med., described the «trial» of her father, «An atmosphere of hypocrisy was blossoming all around, from which it was impossible to hide. I attended a meeting of the scientific committee of the Rostov Medical Institute, where my father [3] was the object of a show trial by his colleagues. It is still painful to remember this meeting even now – many employees and students with whom my father had worked for many years stood up and accused him. The only person, his former student, Dr. Vladimir Palamarchuk, found the courage to tell the truth. He was then the head of the radiology department of the district military hospital. He said that all these accusations were nonsense and that he felt outraged by participating in this farce. He confirmed that the new method of angiography developed by my father was the latest, helping diagnose the most serious diseases. My father was very grateful to Vladimir for his support until his life’s end. Fortunately, in March 1953, this whole disgusting campaign ended, and my father was not repressed.» This meeting took place in mid-March 1953, after Stalin’s death and the end of the anti-Semitic campaign. However, in the provinces, they were still cautiously watching the changes, fearing the winds of change could change direction.

Anti-Semitic sentiments from adults began to penetrate the world of children. It became unsafe to play with some of your peers if they knew that you were Jewish. One day, I went to the yard, where we usually played our favorite war game. There were three boys there, two of whom I knew. One of them was the son of a lieutenant colonel and went to school with me. The other was the son of a sea captain and lived in our house. The conversation was started by an officer’s son, who asked if I was Jewish because he had seen my parents in the company of officers, who, as he knew, were Jews. I knew that if I said that I was Jewish, the boys would start making fun of me, or they could even beat me up. I also suspected that the new boy was from a street gang and that he and his buddies would come after me. Since I did not yet have strong moral convictions, and to avoid trouble and to participate in the game, I told these guys, to their obvious disappointment, that I was not a Jew. To this, the son of the trawler captain cheerfully informed me that Jewish pogroms were normal, and the new boy added that it was too bad that Hitler had not finished off all the Jews. The officer’s son said nothing.

Dark clouds were gathering on the horizon of Soviet society. According to [2], the Doctors’ Plot was not the end. It also states that: «Concurrent with the early phase of the Cold War … Stalin’s plot against Jewish doctors … was much broader than internal Kremlin squabbles, Stalin’s antisemitism, or the glee of the subordinates in the state security service who were entrusted with fabricating the Doctors’ Plot.» To start a new purge among the security organs and those close to him was, presumably, the main goal of the entire campaign.

The Doctors’ Plot was a natural result of the bureaucratic, political, psychological, and moral structure of the Stalinist regime. There were rumors that the great people’s trial of the evil doctors was planned for the end of March 1953. However, on March 5, 1953, Stalin died, and the Doctors’ Plot was almost immediately stopped. On March 31, 1953, the Ministry of Internal Affairs (which replaced the MGB) recommended that the arrested doctors be acquitted and fully rehabilitated.

On April 6, 1953, the newspaper Pravda published an article fully indicting the secret services and the former Minister of State Security S.D. Ignatiev for violating service regulations, putting an end to the organized madness that threatened to destroy Soviet society. The surviving doctors were fully released and rehabilitated. At the same time, several key figures who carried out the Doctors’ Plot were arrested and executed. However, the book [2] raised a provocative question, which it analyzed in great detail. Was the group of non-Jewish Kremlin doctors, who were initially accused by  Lidiya Timashuk, completely innocent, given that nothing in the totalitarian Soviet state happened without the direct or indirect influence of its boss, Uncle Joe?

Some researchers, without denying the anti-Semitic nature of the Doctors’ Plot, question the existence of plans to deport Jews [4,5]. Zhores Medvedev [6], in his book, «Stalin and the Jewish Problem,» also writes that the existence of a plan to deport Jews, mentioned in many books, is not supported by any archival documents, and the available evidence is still weak and can be interpreted in different ways. In particular, he believes that Soviet leaders of that time could have made up stories to improve their reputation, stating, for example, that they tried to dissuade Stalin from deportations.

At the same time, there are publications with quite weighty arguments (to which, however, there are also counterarguments) that put forward the theory that on the «ill-fated» night of March 1-2, and before he suffered a stroke, Stalin, being in a good mood, gave the order to Pravda to stop the anti-Semitic campaign, believing that it had already gone too far, having done its job, enough to begin a new purge in the party ranks and the «decayed» cadres of state security.

Given that the parties to the issue of possible Jewish deportations are playing with hypothetical scenarios without enough information to make a final decision, it seems that the Latin proverb,

Mors certa, incerta vita,

which speaks of the certainty of death, mors certa (in this case, Stalin’s), as an accomplished fact, and the uncertainty and unpredictability of life’s paths, incerta vita (in this case, the unknown outcome of the deportation issue) is appropriate for this situation.

Stalin’s death, followed by four days of national mourning, was an epochal event. Many people cried and lamented, asking, «How will they live now?» behaving like children who have lost their father. In Moscow, hundreds, if not thousands, died, trampled by the crowd due to the improper organization of traffic by the city’s leaders during the people’s visit to Stalin’s body, which lay in the House of Unions in the center of Moscow. March 9th was the day of Stalin’s funeral. At noon, all traffic in the country stopped, and all sirens were turned on. In our class that day, the boys decided not to laugh, and those who broke this rule would be beaten. However, these rules were not very strong, and giggling and skirmishes occurred periodically. In the evening, one of my classmates, a round-faced, freckled, red-haired boy named Yakovlev, came to our apartment to play chess with me. When current events were discussed over a cup of tea, he declared that, according to his parents, all Jews were happy that Stalin had died. My grandma began to dissuade him from such «wrong» thoughts. No one knew which way the political winds would blow.

Looking at Stalin’s death from a distance of more than seven decades, I would like to cite another, this time Russian Proverb.

You are dead, but your cause lives on.

In this case, by the word cause, the author means Stalin’s introduction of antisemitism into Soviet politics, which had far-reaching consequences, in particular, the mass exodus of Jews from the Soviet Union and then the CIS, starting in the 1970s

CHILDREN OF THE ERA

At my birthday party, 12/25/1954, I am 12 years old, Murmansk, USSR. In the back row, left to right: Sasha Mikhailov, the author, and Seva Rudin. In the bottom— children (Alik and Allochka) of Major Rafael Mekinulov (1918-1998, Tbilisi – New York).

Rafael Mekinulov was a family friend and combat officer who went a long way to Berlin from the first days of the war and was responsible for maintaining the automotive sector in the Northern Military District. The Major mentioned he felt awkward receiving significant food rations, given his high salary. He tried to refuse them several times, but his superiors stopped his noble undertakings.
Sasha’s father was the director of the stadium. Among the kids, he was nicknamed Khren (Russian for horseradish) for his fight against ticket dodgers who got into the stadium. When drunk, he often told all sorts of frivolous stories, poems, and songs in the circle of his close ones. Sasha then happily shared them with me and other comrades.
Seva Rudin was a little arrogant as the son of a high-ranking officer, i.e., from a wealthy family. Perhaps that is why he was repeatedly the target of aggression from hooligan students from families with less income who studied with us in 1955-1956. With the waning of the policy of official antisemitism, the violent impulses of these young rascals switched from the Jew-hatred to «a class hatred.»
As for me, being a nonconformist since childhood, I avoided wearing a pioneer necktie. In the photo, I proudly show off a striped mariniére (telnyashka) blouse a symbol of courage, given to me by my parents after much begging – it was not easy to get a small striped shirt.

A copy of a digital banner from an agency presenting a book [1] by the author at the LA Times Book Festival, April 26-28, 2025.

REFERENCES
1. Dunaevsky, V., A Daughter of the ‘Enemy of the People,’ Xlibris, 2015.
2. Brent, J. and Naumov, V. Stalin’s Last Crime: The Plot against the Jewish Doctors, 1948–1953. New York: Perennial, 2003.
3. Профессор А.И. Домбровский, 1889-1972. Ростов н/Д, Россия, РНИОИ (Ростовский Научно Исследовтельский Онкологический Институт) [Professor A.I. Dombrovsky, 1889-1972. Rostov-on /D, Russia, RNIOI (Rostov Scientific Research Oncology Institute)], 1998.
4. Doctors’ Plot. http://en.wikipedia.org. Accessed March 7, 2025.
5. http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Дело врачей. Accessed March 7, 2025
6. Медведев, Ж. А. Сталин и еврейская проблема: Новый анализ. – М.: «Права человека», 2003. – 288 с. [Medvedev, Zh. A. Stalin and the Jewish Problem: A New Analysis. – M.: «Human Rights,» 2003. – 288 p.] – ISBN 5-7712-0251-7.

Copyright © 2025 by Valery Victorovich Dunaevsky