13 January 1953 — Soviet newspapers published a report on the exposure of the “Kremlin doctors’ plot” (the so-called “Doctors’ Plot”).
The “Doctors’ Plot” was a high-profile criminal case in the history of the USSR against a group of prominent Soviet physicians accused of conspiracy and of murdering a number of Soviet leaders. This anti-Jewish campaign, undertaken by the authorities in 1952–early 1953, went down in history as one of the many provocations of I.V. Stalin’s dictatorial regime. On 13 January 1953, the newspaper *Pravda* and other major Soviet newspapers published a TASS report about the “exposure of a conspiracy and the arrest of a group of Kremlin wreckers-doctors,” under the headline “Vile spies and murderers under the mask of professor-doctors.”
It claimed that the Soviet security services had uncovered the terrorist activities of a group of doctors whose aim was, “through sabotage in treatment, to shorten the lives of active figures of the Soviet Union.” The report said that nine people had been arrested in the case—Professors M.S. Vovsi, M.B. Kogan, B.B. Kogan, A.I. Feldman, Ya.G. Etinger, A.M. Grinshtein, V.N. Vinogradov, P.I. Egorov, G.I. Maiorov—and that documentary evidence, medical expert opinions, and the detainees’ confessions had fully confirmed their guilt. The arrested doctors were accused of making false diagnoses and ruining patients through improper treatment.
In particular, one count of the indictment was the poisoning of A.A. Zhdanov and A.S. Shcherbakov and an attempt to “incapacitate” senior Soviet military commanders—Marshals A.M. Vasilevsky, I.S. Konev, L.A. Govorov, and others.
The article also emphasized the Zionist nature of the case. The main accusation was the claim that “most members of the terrorist group had been bought by American intelligence,” specifically that they had been recruited by the international Jewish bourgeois-nationalist organization “Joint,” allegedly created to conduct terrorist and other subversive activity in a number of countries, including the Soviet Union. Active “operational-investigative measures” in the “Doctors’ Plot” began as early as 1952 and were carried out by the MGB under the leadership of Lieutenant Colonel M.D. Ryumin. A wave of arrests of medical personnel connected to “Kremlin” medicine swept through Moscow. At the same time, the MGB leadership officially formulated the group “Doctors’ Plot,” incorporating into a single proceeding the investigation materials relating to 37 detainees. Most of the accused were Jews. Stalin demanded that the version of the conspiracy’s Zionist character and the conspirators’ ties to foreign intelligence be developed to the maximum extent.
In October 1952, he ordered that torture be used on the arrested doctors. A caricature from the magazine *Krokodil* dedicated to the “Doctors’ Plot.” And after the publication about the exposure of the conspiracy and the arrests of doctors, a new phase of the anti-Jewish campaign began in the USSR. The “Doctors’ Plot” led to persecution of the relatives and co-workers of those arrested, as well as a wave of antisemitic sentiment across the country. The vilification of Jews became open and took on an all-Union character—the Soviet press was flooded with satirical feuilletons devoted to exposing the dark deeds of people with Jewish names; mass dismissals of Jews from work began, above all from medical institutions.
But in March 1953 (after Stalin’s death), preparations for the trial in the “Doctors’ Plot” came to an end. Beria took the initiative: having become First Deputy Chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers and Minister of Internal Affairs, on 13 March he ordered a specially created investigative group to review the “Doctors’ Plot,” which was declared a fabrication, and the accused were acquitted; two of them died during the investigation (M.B. Kogan and Ya.G. Etinger). All those arrested were released on 3 April, later reinstated at work and fully rehabilitated, as were their family members. On 4 April it was officially announced that the confessions had been obtained using “inadmissible methods of investigation.” The authorities placed all the blame for organizing the case on Ryumin.
By that time already dismissed from the state security organs, he was immediately arrested and later, according to official reports, shot. The “Doctors’ Plot” concluded the largest anti-Jewish campaign of the final years of Stalin’s regime. No information or materials about this case were subsequently published in the USSR.
1 Kopeck 1953.
