Why Didn't Stalin Murder All the Jews (Paperback)

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The book starts with the author and his terminally ill wife, a Jewish activist, unexpectedly stumbling upon the fact that Stalin collapsed exactly on the Jewish festival of Purim. They also find that according to an 800 year old rabbinical tradition, such an event should be retold and commemorated every year. They wrote a short story in 1996, a megillah, which was since used in Purim celebration in over 100 synagogues, and is reproduced in the book. This imparts on the event a religious meaning.

However, it compelled the author, a scientist, to look also for rational or other human motives behind the infamous campaign. This led through hundreds of books, newspaper articles, memories and rumors. Which of them could be trusted? It soon became apparent that most ‘revelations’ about the campaign were orchestrated by KGB and should be handled with care.

Therefore, the author turned to the search for patterns in the events of the 1920s-1970s and in the characters, indicative of what might have happened and what various actors in the drama were capable of. He also uses an analogy between the reconstruction of what happened from bits and pieces of information and a reconstruction of a true image of an object from a set of noisy or distorted photographs taken from different directions.

The author came up with an unexpected but consistent theory:
1) Stalin’s last campaign pursued both internal and geopolitical goals.
2) Internal goals included a restaging of the great purges of the 1930s.
3) The geopolitical thrust was in making Israel Stalin’s puppet and using its army to fight the West in the Middle East.
4) The Biblical Book of Esther (the basis of Purim) was used as a script for the purge.
5) Stalin would accuse his henchmen of indiscriminately persecuting all Jews.
6) Arresting perpetrators on Purim would give Stalin a Biblical stature and an opening for subverting the Israeli democracy.
7) Beria was ordered to conduct the arrests of the leadership but instead secured their cooperation in Stalin’s assassination.
8) Stalin was poisoned, as indicated by the reported unusual hemorrhages in all internal organs.
9) An implication in organizing the Doctors’ Plot remained a political bomb and a nightmare for the Soviet leaders, which was used as blackmail even in the 1970s.

A dramatic personal line and the stories of ordinary Soviet Jews directly told by the author’s relatives add an extra human dimension to this meticulously researched book.

The author does not impose the choice between a divine intervention in the events and a political miscalculation, and leaves the reader to grope for the truth. This riveting account is of great interest to any student of modern Russian and Jewish history and to anyone pondering its mysteries.

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