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Stalin's Last Crime: The Plot Against the Jewish Doctors, 1948-1953

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When the Second World War was over in 1945, First Secretary of the Communist Party, Joseph Stalin seemed to be at a personal peak of power. Despite monumental losses of dead Russian soldiers and civilians, Stalin had led Russia to a victory over Hitler and National Socialism that left him in control not only in Russia but of all of Eastern Europe as well. Further, because of his earlier purges in the late 30's, there was no one left to challenge him either within the Communist party or outside it. Yet, in STALIN'S LAST CRIME, Jonathan Brent and Vladimir Naumov picture a Stalin who, by the time of his death in 1953, was far from the omnipotent ruler that most Russians assumed he was. Brent and Naumov present Stalin as a man who could not change to match changing times. When the war in Europe was over, Russia was not the insular country it had been just ten years earlier. An increasing number of Russians had an equally increasing contact with Western, and hence, democratic ideas and values. The horrors of the war reaffirmed in the collected minds of Russians of the need for a legitimate government that followed its rule of law. The once all consuming fear of Stalin had diluted to the point where some of his less visionary peers would dare to contemplate in the pages of PRAVDA no less of who would follow Stalin once he was dead. Finally, there was Stalin's health, which by the late 1940's had regressed to the point that his Politburo comrades might legitimately wonder about the line of succession. Stalin took note of all this and was determined to turn back the clock to 1937 when he could purge millions of his countrymen merely by snapping his fingers. But by 1949, he could not do so. He needed more, and the so-called plot of the Jewish doctors allowed him to crank up the old machinery that would spin out huge nets to catch anyone whom Stalin suspected needed killing.

Much of the first half of STALIN'S LAST CRIME is a minute examination of the death of a party comrade, A. A. Zhdanov, who unexpectedly suffered a heart attack and was ordered to recuperate at Valdai, a health resort for members of the Soviet political elite. Zhdanov died there, and Stalin saw in his death the first filmy web of a plot that he knew would ultimately ensnare at least as many as he purged in the 1930's. Brent and Naumov progress from Zhdanov's death to blaming that death on a cabal of Jewish doctors. From there, they detail how Stalin began laying traps for nearly the entire leadership of the Soviet Secret Police, the MGB. Hundreds of high-ranking MGB officers were purged. Thousands of Jews were rounded up and shot or sent to a gulag. Clearly, Brent and Naumov portray a Russia that was only in the first stage of Stalinist immolation. Yet, when Stalin died, the entire apparatus of destruction came to a thankful halt. Russian society returned to a business as usual routine. The gloomy concluding chapters of STALIN'S LAST CRIME suggest that the monstrous vision of a bloody thug leader does not necessarily end with the death of that leader. In fact, many of the inner circle of Stalin's closest comrades were themselves arrested and shot by Stalin's successor, Nikita Khruschev, who decided that to hold onto power might require a Stalinist approach to housecleaning: a new broom must sweep most thoroughly every generation or so. Stalin's own virulent form of anti-semitism as suggested by Brent's and Naumov's subtitle: The Plot Against the Jewish Doctors, well indicates that for Stalin at least, recycling Soviet anti-semitism must always give way to creating demons that only he could vanquish.

As someone familiar with Russian history, I enjoyed this book. Among others, it debunks the myth that Stalin was weak and out of touch at the time of his death. The fact is he was clearly in control up until the time he died. Reading this book also raises more questions than it seems to answer. For example, how does this plot fuse with his foreign policy? The military? Was this strictly an internal affair or actually a prelude to Nuclear War with the United States? Although beyond the scope of this book, the reader was left wondering how Khruschev, Beria, Malenkov, et al worked out power arrangements after Stalin's death. We know, of course, that Beria was shot in December 1953; but what formed the BASIS for each person's power in what was clearly a lawless state?

Some very interesting books are emerging concerning the former Soviet Union now that their archives are open for scholarly investigation. This book is certainly one of them, a well-written and carefully documented investigation of one of the darkest aspects of the Stalin era. No one, with the possible exception of Adolph Hitler's Nazi Germany, was directly responsible for the deaths of more human beings during the 20th century than was Joseph Stalin, the Soviet Union's first comrade, a brilliant psychopath so deluded in his paranoid fantasies that he suspected everyone, always, of continuous conspiracy and perfidy against him. His resulting excesses included the campaign of terror, first instituted in the 1930s, and the systematic purges that became an integral aspect of the terror campaign. During the 1930s alone, he is estimated to have worked millions to death in enforced labor camps, creating what is now described as a "Gulag" in recent books such as Anne Applebaum's recent book of the same name.

Yet although the Gulag and the terror campaign that supplied the bodies for its proliferation was most pronounced both before and during the Second World War, it was after the war that the extent of his murder and mayhem reached it horrific peak. Indeed, on the eve of his death in 1953, Stalin was actively planning to execute a bizarre and insane plan to kill hundreds of thousands of additional Russian citizens in what Jonathan Brent and Vladimir Naumov describe in their book, "Stalin's Last Crime: The Plot Against The Jewish Doctors, 1948-1953" as constituting what they refer to as the "Doctor's Plot". The authors trace the evidence linking Stalin and the development by his staff produced false documentation of such a plot by doctors within the Soviet Union of intending to purge the Soviet Ministry of Security as well as the elite elements of government in a bizarre alleged conspiracy between Jewish M.D.s living in Russia and the American government to foist a coup d'etat of the Soviet regime.

Stalin had concocted the idea based on the fact that he knew the lingering anti-Semitism within the Soviet Union would help convince the people that such a plot was both feasible and logical, which of course, it was not. What it really was a clever Machiavellian ruse to give Stalin the excuse he needed to purge the very institutions he was about to accuse the Jewish doctors of attempting to damage. In their stirring narration of the events and their consequences, the authors offer both provocative and damaging evidence of the standard Stalin course of action; by first obtaining a series of forced confessions, he would develop asset of anecdotal information files that he would then twist into a substantial set of circumstantial evidence supporting his theory.

One of the more interesting of the findings was he evidence that late in life he seemed to develop a more cautious and deliberate approach to his domestic terror program, as though he sensed the overall mood of the country to have changed in the direction of wanting and supporting legitimacy, and he wanted to continue to ensure his power base both by working within the framework of what he believed to be the public consciousness on the one hand, and undermining his imagined foes by creating the docile of false evidence he could use to disarm and defeat them on the other. Most fascinating of the authors' theories is the idea that in attempting to foist yet one more purge on the feckless party hierarchy, Stalin set the stage for his own demise, which the authors argue may well have been a disguised assassination and not the natural death the rest of the outside world was led to believe it was. This is a wonderful book, and I am sure it is only the latest of what promises to be a steady stream of excellent books rewriting the history of the Soviet experiment with new information coming from the treasure trove of the Soviet archives. Enjoy!

This is a fine-grained look at Stalinist terror. Based on original archival research by the authors and additional new information published primarily by Russian scholars, this book is a careful examination of the so-called Doctor's Plot, the last gasp of Stalin's systematic terrorization of Soviet society. The Doctor's Plot was a conspiracy fabricated by Soviet security organizations purporting to show an organized effort to undermine the Soviet State by destroying its leadership via negligent or murderous medical care. The Plot was viewed previously as an irrational and relatively (compared to the great purges, executions, and deportations of the 20s and 30s) minor aspect of Stalinist state terror. The authors argue that the Doctors' Plot was actually the likely prelude to a planned major convulsion that would reproduce many features of the great purges of the 30s. This is impossible to prove definitively but the authors make a good case that the Doctors' Plot was developed carefully by Stalin to eventually start a series of purges and trials that would result in a large scale terrorization of Soviet society. The authors also place the Plot in the context of other important Stalinist campaigns of the period, notably the anti-Semitic actions that preceded and are to some extent coincident with the events of the Doctors' Plot. In this case, the attack would expand to involve a wholesale assault on Jewish citizens of the Soviet Union. The authors conclude that Stalin pursued this end as a means of maintaining his absolute power and that only his death in 1953 prevented terrible atrocities on a scale with the crimes of the 20s and 30s. The result probably would have been something similar to the Cultural Revolution in China.
A surprising aspect of the book is the apparent demonstration of how relatively difficult it was for Stalin to piece together the Plot. The book contains fascinating details such as Stalin's dissatisfaction with coerced confessions because they were too inconsistent to be used for credible public show trials. There are also remarkable episodes of some figures in the Soviet securiry organizations criticizing documentation of these purported crimes. As the Soviet State matured, it appears that there were expectations that Soviet justice, claimed by Stalin to be essentially perfect, had to meet some realistic and rational expectations. This type of relative resistance probably only increased Stalin's desire to unleash a major purge.
Some prior reviewers comment that this book is not smoothly written. This is a fair comment as the authors use quotations from original documents and much of the text is a very careful analysis of the signficance of the original documents. In my opinion, however, this approach enhances the value of the book. The extensive quotations give readers a very good sense of the Kafkaesque and bizarrely bureaucratic nature of Soviet repression in a way that a more conventional approach cannot accomplish.
The book includes also a discussion of Stalin's death. Following the suggestion of the American scholar Amy Wright, the authors argue that Stalin may have been poisoned by Lavrenti Beria, the out of favor former head of the security services, with the anti-coagulant warfarin. This suggestion based on the fact that Stalin died from a cerebral hemorrhage and had a gastrointestinal hemorrhage during his final illness. This is plausible but his final illness is typical of individuals dying from major hemorrhagic strokes and gastric erosions (so-called stress ulcers) are fairly common in acutely and severely ill individuals and may cause significant gastrointestinal bleeding. It is more likely that Stalin died as a consequence of years of untreated hypertension.

For all its admirably meticulous documentation, this book does not pierce the mystery of the Doctors Plot. For all the correspondence, interrogation transcripts and memos excavated from the Soviet archives, one archive remains forever closed: Stalin's implacably bloody mind.

Brent and Naumov chillingly recreate the omni-paranoiac climate among the Soviet leadership in the late Stalin era. These people had survived wildly irrational purges in the Thirties, but they best of all knew on what shaky ground they stood. Any hint of independence, any perceived threat to Stalin's dominance, could land them in the execution cellars.

The trouble is, Stalin rarely confided his plans to paper, so there is no smoking gun to be found. This sheaf of documentation fleshes out what the people involved said, certainly, and when they said it. But as the authors admit, they are not really much closer to learning the purpose of the whole grim charade. We don't even get as much detail in some instances, such as the Stalin-ordered murder of the prominent Soviet theater director Solomon Mikhoels, as was available in some Soviet-era books.

The elusiveness of the authors' task is illustrated by their use of sources. In addition to the archival material, they draw material from the memoirs of Molotov, Khrushchev, and retired NKVD assassin Pavel Sudoplatov. The authors are perfectly above board about the general unreliability of these memorists, so it says something that, even with the availability of the archives, they are reduced to consulting those books.

This admirable but ultimately unsuccessful book demonstrates the enduring mystery of the evil of Stalin.

This book will change the way that anyone thinks about the doctors plot. It has new evidence to the poisoning of Stalin (probably by Beria) and also opens up documents lost in KGB archives since the death of Stalin. It is very well written and is worth the making of a movie for because of all the newly unveiled plot sequences. For example- General Vlasik was questioned by KGB because they thought all the people with lines next to their names in his address book were spies. It turns out that he changed all of his many lovers names to their masculine form (which is very easy in Russian) so that his wife wouldn't know and he put lines next to their names so that he'd know which ones they were. Come on people that's great! But that's far from the best here. This has all of the correspondense between Timashuk and KGB higher-upers, all the interrogation files of the Jewish doctors, everything you could possibly want to know about the Doctor's Plot and don't get any of the other books on it. Trust me, they're all lies. This is the real deal.

I agree with the reviews that cite serious flaws in this book: "tedious", "ruminative", "repetitive". However, I consider STALIN'S LAST CRIME well worth reading, because the authors have produced an analysis with a high degree of granularity that illuminates the actual mechanics of Stalin's use of terror.

The weaknesses in the book are the obverse of its great strengths: teasing out the many subtle filaments that Stalin wove into his hideous plots requires sustained intellectual concentration, for example. The intense focus on seemingly minor details--which is the only way to detect the subtle discrepancies that are the only clue to the presence of something monstrous--can be tedious, and also tends to distract from the panoramic perspective required to get the structure right.

So it is only on pages 66 - 67, for example, that we learn what Stalin's motive for inventing the Doctor's Plot was. It would have been handy to have the scene set right up front before taking the reader into the bewildering labyrinth of accidental screw-ups, lies, denunciations, misunderstandings, and confessions extracted under torture that were the building blocks of the Doctor's Plot. Stalin's motive was his need to retain total control of the Soviet Union after World War II, when the victory over Nazi Germany, and the experiences of many Soviet soldiers and other Soviet citizens with countries where much higher standards of living prevailed, reduced the atmosphere of crisis and ignorance that had produced the abject national obedience to Stalin that he had enjoyed in the first part of his reign.

This theme is then fully illuminated only on page 105, when the authors quote the letter that the doomed Bukharin wrote in prison to his colleague and former friend Stalin in 1937, shortly before Stalin had him shot in the Great Terror: "There is something great and bold about the political idea of a general purge . . . . people inescapably talk about each other and in doing so arouse an everlasting distrust in each other . . . In this way, the leadership is bringing about a full guarantee for itself."

Only a deeply cynical man--or a total fanatic--like Bukharin could admire the logic of Stalin's decision to poison an entire society with distrust and fear in order to provide a "full guarantee" for himself and his comrades at the top of the Soviet pyramid. But this was still a possible reaction in the Great Terror of the 1930s; it was no longer so easy to traumatise an entire society again by using systematic deception to invent an artificial crisis.

And this is what Stalin was up to--he needed to create instability again throughout the Soviet Union in order to confirm his personal position on top, and to do so he began to weave together the most obscure threads into the elaborate image of a widespread conspiracy that had a false political meaning he could exploit to persuade the Soviet masses of his indispensability.

What makes this book so interesting is that it was much more difficult for Stalin to pull this off in the early 1950s, despite the comparative ease with which he had done so in the mid- to late-1930s. Spare a thought for his dilemma when he tried to kick off a new conspiracy by putting the members of the Jewish Anti-fascist Committee (mainly a bunch of poets, theatre producers, and other cultural types) on trial for their lives in 1950: "despite the painstaking collection and falsification of evidence, the merciless interrogations, physical torture, and threats of death, the government could not extract the necessary confessions from the defendents (Pages 173)."

Of course, the defendents were all found guilty and shot, but unlike the Great Terror of the 1930s, when senior Communists had publicly confessed to fantastic crimes that they could never possibly have committed, the JAC members refused to do so in 1950, so the trial had to be kept secret to avoid embarrassing public recantations of confessions extracted under torture.

Stalin had to work much harder to spin his web in the 1950s, and this is what makes this book so interesting. Of course, all the usual ironies, tragedy, and almost over-whelming examples of absurdity and futility that one has become accustomed to in the best books about the Soviet Union abound in this one.

But what makes this book special is that the authors seem to have successfully reverse-engineered Stalin's development of the Doctor's Plot, and as a result, this book is truly a step-by-step master class in the techniques of manipulation and terror.

Why is this important? Why does it make this book worth reading despite its flaws? Because much of the manipulation and gratuitous deception portrayed in this book, minus the Lubyanka torture chambers and firing squads, is a recognisable feature of the corporate and institutional world in the 21st century. And all indications appear to suggest that this atmosphere is only going to get worse with globalisation. The cant, the hypocrisy, the jealousy, the perversion of language, and the Schadenfreude that was keyed up to a murderous degree in Stalin's system is recognisable everywhere in large organisations today, from the corporate to the government sectors to the transnationals and the NGOs.

If for no other reason than as self-protection against the ambitious mediocrities who always seem to thrive in large organisations (and Trotsky doomed himself by calling Stalin the "outstanding mediocrity of the Revolution"), read this book.

The doctor's plot would make an interesting 30 page chapter in a larger book on Stalin's life, but there's just not enough material of interest for it to sustain a 300+ page book. There is quite a bit of repetition and tedious exploration of obscure documents and characters. The author demonstrates that the book is well researched, but in this case that does not translate into a well crafted story.

Brent's and Naumov's harrowing, unforgettable account of an episode which has been rather slighted in most English-language literature on Uncle Joe - after all, the 1930s Yezhovshchina offers more obvious possibilities for vivid character-delineation than do Stalin's postwar antics - suggests that the Big Kahuna was even more dangerous, if possible, than one had ever suspected.

A caveat: this is very dense prose indeed, not for persons who want merely a Monarch-Study-Notes type of guide to the topic. Although gripping, the result is somewhat turbid. This is one of the two reasons it gets four stars rather than five. (The other is, couldn't we have had some pictures?) Clearly the research involved was prodigious, and - to complicate matters for the tyro - by 1948 most of the leading dramatis personae from early Stalinist days were either pushing up the daisies or, like Molotov, in temporary eclipse. So most readers will need to do as I did: look up the list of personalia in the back of the book to remind themselves, every so often, just whom they are reading about.

That said, STALIN'S LAST CRIME could well be a masterpiece. The best volume of its kind in our language since THE BLACK BOOK OF COMMUNISM was translated from the French? I, for one, am prepared to say a tentative yes.

This book is an in-depth study in psychological survival in a nightmarish police state---Stalin's Russia, circa 1948-1953.

The problem for the protagonists and antagonists in this Stalinist nightmare, the unfolding Kafkaesque drama of the plot against the Jewish Doctors, is that of survival. The moral conundrum is how to survive without denouncing other innocent human beings. And yet perceived survival, or at least the delaying, as long as possible, the loss of life and limb by the avoidance of physical torture could only possibly be attained at the expense of the lives of others in similar, dire circumstances. Moreover, what is one to confess to without knowing what it is one needs to confess to, without divining what was in Stalin's evil mind?

Thankfully for some, there was the critical issue of timing. Some of the victims beat the clock and survived; others did not and perished.

The untangling of this Gordian knot of conspiracies and plots is the convincing achievement of the authors of this incredibly suspenseful, historical drama. They accomplished the impossible; they unraveled the master plan behind Stalin's plot against the Jewish doctors.

During the period 1945 to 1947, overt anti-Semitism was suppressed in the USSR. Why? Firstly, because Stalin was considered the savior of the Jews, the man who defeated Hitler and had liberated the eastern European concentration camps from the Nazis. Secondly, many of the Bolsheviks were Jewish, Leon Trotsky, Lev Kamenev, Zinoviev, Lazar Kaganovich, Maxim Litvinov, Yakov Sverdlov, Genrikh Yagoda, P. Zhemchuzhina (the wife of Molotov), etc. Thirdly, Stalin had initially supported the birth of Israel, the Jewish state.

But then about the time that Golda Meir visited the Soviet Union in the fall of 1948 Stalin decided Israel and Jewish internationalism, including Russian Jews, were a threat to the Soviet State. Jews had been too festive and had shown too much admiration for the Israeli Prime Minister! And then members of the Jewish Antifascist Committee (JAFC) had traveled extensively outside the USSR, and the vozdh ("the great leader") had become suspicious of this as well!

Suddenly all Jews were becoming potential traitors, enemies of the Soviet state, spies in the service of American and British intelligence services. On Stalin's order Solomon Mikhoels, leader of the JAFC was assassinated in Minsk (1948) and by 1952 virtually all of the members of the committee had been arrested and shot.

So, as stated by Talleyrand, treason is only a matter of timing. And 1948 was that pivotal year, not only for the answering of the Soviet Jewish question, but also because Stalin had come to believe that the old guard of the MGB (i.e., the feared Soviet repressive security organs and precursor of the KGB) and its Minister, Victor S. Abakumov, could no longer be trusted.

The security chief and former head of SMERSH ("Death to Spy"; military counter-intelligence, death-squad units during World War II) knew too much. He was, like many of his predecessors, such as Nikolai Yezhov and Genrikh Yagoda, simply expendable. He would be charged with being a protector of the nonexistent Jewish underground, even though, just recently, Abakumov had arrested and wiped out the Jewish Antifascist committee.

For good measure, the communist officials involved in "the Leningrad Affair," who had already been executed would be added to the developing plan and linked to the Jewish Doctors' Plot as well. These officials had been arrested and executed simply because they had had the temerity of staging a trade fair in Leningrad without Stalin's permission!

Stalin also believed that the USSR was becoming stagnant. The Russian people had been overcome with "thoughtlessness," losing sight of "wreckers" and failing to "unmask enemies of the people" in their midst. Even the members of the Politburo, his close inner circle, "could no longer see the enemy in front of their noses." "What," Stalin asked them, "would they do without him?" And the MGB security officers had become "waiters in white gloves." And to Minister Semyon Ignatiev (who had succeeded Abakumov), he yelled, "If you want to be Chekists, take off your gloves. You are degenerating into ordinary nincompoops!"

The trigger for the plot against the Jewish physicians was the death from a heart attack of A. A. Zhdanov, a leading member of the politburo and Stalin's Minister of Culture and the Arts, in August of 1948, followed by the letters of denunciation of Dr. Lidia Timashuk, alleging that Zhdanov's medical treatment was criminal. The Kremlin doctors led by Professor P. Yegorov were implicated. These physicians, as it turned out, were not Jewish but Russian physicians, part of the Soviet nomeklatura that even included Stalin's own personal physician, Professor V. N. Vinogradov. But just recently, Professor Vinogradov had the temerity to recommend to Stalin that he should step down as head of government for health reasons (e.g., cardiovascular disease and high blood pressure), a grave mistake!

As the accusations mounted and the nightmare unfolded, imaginary plots were uncovered (under torture); gradually the denunciations came to include the necessary Jewish physicians, Drs. S. Karpai and Y. G. Etinger, the latter the most eminent physician in Russia.

But it took time, Stalin had to connect the threads is his own mind, and the MGB had to do his bidding. By December of 1952 and January of 1953, Stalin was ready to act, and he ordered the arrest of the doctors, whom he called "criminals in white coats." He ordered the MGB to "beat them with death blows" until they confessed of being part of his invented grand conspiracy, a world Jewish conspiracy.

The trial against the MGB "nincompoops" (most of them, but not all Jewish) was to simultaneously take place in close session, while the Doctors' were to be used in open show trials to make the nation aware of the vast conspiracy threatening mother Russia. What was this conspiracy? A vast plot by a Jewish underground network directed by the American and British intelligence services to annihilate the Kremlin leaders, including the vozdh himself, his son Vasili and his daughter Svetlana--- and to overthrow the Soviet government.

How this vast conspiracy was invented by Stalin and unraveled by the authors is the subject of this book. I don't want to reveal more of the plot because I don't want to spoil it by unwrapping the diabolical enigma contained within the dark recesses of Stalin's multidimensional mind. The Jewish Doctors' Plot was really Stalin's concocted plan against the Jewish physicians and the Russian nation, for his own ulterior, political motives, and it was not just anti-Semitism and paranoia. He wanted to unleash a new reign of terror in Russia and perhaps even commence World War III before his own health failed him.

Let us only say that Stalin had several conspiratorial threads and objectives going on simultaneously in his own mind, and only he was privy to how they interconnected in his master plan. These threads were remote events, separated in space and time, but they would converge, when the time to act was right, and then heads would fall.
Stalin wanted to replicate the times of the great purges and the Red Terror of the terrible 1930s, to arouse the stagnant Soviet nation and preserve his power. Illegitimate power can only be preserved in a climate of fear and terror, and Stalin was a master in creating such environment for the perpetuation of his own power.

I highly recommend this book for history buffs, Soviet scholars, and avid readers of Stalin and his time, as well as students and academicians in the field of the social and biological sciences. Doctors, nurses, and health personnel will be enchanted with this book and pleased with the incorporation of the secret document entitled "The History of the illness of J. V. Stalin." This bonus material, summarized in the penultimate chapter, describes the clinical course of Stalin's final illness and death (March 1-5, 1953).

Moreover, as a final treat, this bonus document adds forensic evidence to the suspicion that Stalin may have been poisoned by members of his own inner circle, who also feared for their own lives. The only detractions in this otherwise highly recommended book is that it is at times slightly repetitive, and although it is well-annotated and contains a nice glossary and chronology, it has no illustrations, for which I have, regrettably, given it 4 stars rather than 5. These are minor detractions, and I again recommend for you to get this book and read it!

Miguel A. Faria, Jr., M.D. is the author of Cuba in Revolution---Escape From a Lost Paradise (2002)