Doctors' Plot - Arrests

Arrests

Initially, 37 were arrested, but the number quickly grew into hundreds. Scores of Soviet Jews were promptly dismissed from their jobs, arrested, sent to GULAG or executed. This was accompanied by show trials and by anti-Semitic propaganda in state-run mass media. Pravda prepared publication of a letter signed by many Soviet notables (including Jews) containing incitive condemnations of the "plot"; however, some notable Jews refused to sign it (general Yakov Kreizer, singer Mark Reizen, writers Veniamin Kaverin and Ilya Ehrenburg, etc.). The letter was never published because of the termination of the campaign soon after. According to Khrushchev, Stalin hinted to him to incite anti-Semitism in Ukraine, telling him "The good workers at the factory should be given clubs so they can beat the hell out of those Jews."

On February 9, 1953, there was an explosion in the territory of the Soviet mission in Israel, and on February 11 the USSR broke off diplomatic relations with the Jewish state (restored in July). The next day Maria Weizmann, a Moscow doctor and a sister of the first President of Israel Chaim Weizmann (who had died in 1952), was arrested.

Outside of Moscow, similar accusations quickly appeared. For example, Ukraine discovered a local "doctors' plot" allegedly headed by famous endocrinologist Victor Kogan-Yasny (the first in the USSR who treated diabetes with insulin and saved thousands). Thirty-six "plotters" were arrested there.

Newly opened KGB archives provide evidence that Stalin forwarded the collected interrogation materials to Georgy Malenkov, Nikita Khrushchev and other "potential victims of doctors' plot".

Stalin also used the occasion to purge his security services, who he had called "waiters in white gloves, ordinary nincompoops," whom he no longer trusted to get the job done. And so, Viktor Abakumov, the former head of SMERSH (i.e., Russian acronym for “Death to Spies”; the counterintelligence, death-squad units) during World War II, was arrested and tortured. He was, like his predecessors, Nikolai Yezhov and Genrikh Yagoda, simply expendable now. He was charged with being a sympathizer and protector of the nonexistent, criminal Jewish underground — even though, just recently, Abakumov had arrested and wiped out the Jewish Antifascist Committee.

Stalin harangued the MGB Minister, Semyon Ignatiev (who had succeeded Abakumov) and accused the MGB of incompetence. The security organs “see nothing beyond their noses,” and yelled, “If you want to be Chekists, take off your gloves. You are degenerating into ordinary nincompoops!” Stalin demanded and insisted that torture be used to obtain the necessary confessions.

Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill and other world dignitaries sent condemning telegrams to the Soviet ministry of Foreign Affairs and demanded an investigation.