Stalin was already upset with Abakumov for not completing the case against the JAFC, and on July 4, 1951, the head of State Security was relieved of his duties. A committee led by Malenkov and Beria checked Ryumin’s allegations, and sensing what Stalin expected of them, they arrived at far-reaching conclusions. They alleged that indeed “among physicians there was a conspiratorial group” who were “intending through medical treatment to shorten the life of leaders of the party and the government.” They also claimed that Abakumov had hindered the investigation, so that he and others in the MGB should be dismissed and the Etinger file taken up.7 In addition, on July 11 Stalin ordered a special police inquiry on former patients and all doctors who had worked at the Kremlin medical center. Included among the police investigators was Mikhail Ryumin, who was soon put in charge of the JAFC case. On August 10, Stalin began his last vacation and stayed away from Moscow for four and a half months.
In the meantime, Ryumin tortured more information out of suspects to feed Stalin’s appetite for conspiracies and succeeded enough to be promoted to deputy minister of state security on October 19. The Kremlin Boss ended his holiday on December 22, and on his return he spoke with top MGB officials and threatened them with dire consequences unless they got results. In January 1952 the cross-examination of those involved in the JAFC file resumed, and the case was finalized on March 31. A report was sent to Stalin within the week containing Ryumin’s recommendation for punishment—execution for all but one of the main culprits.8
A closed trial before three military judges—notably not a show trial for the public—took place between May 8 and July 18, with the result a foregone conclusion. The main theme in the indictments was that “Jewish nationalists” had spied for the United States. They wanted to establish a homeland for the Jews in the Crimea and would thereby open the door into the USSR for the Americans. The JAFC members were accused of promoting a special status for the Jews, and the Black Book on the Holocaust in the Soviet Union was mentioned as evidence on that charge. The most important defendant, Solomon Lozovsky, formerly a distinguished veteran of the Communist Party Central Committee, was sentenced and finally shot on August 12, along with twelve others. An additional 110 people were given varying sentences for “crimes” ranging from supporting Zionism to espionage and nationalism.9
In the course of uncovering and concluding the JAFC conspiracy, the police found or invented more secret schemes. For Stalin, the most important concerned the physicians. By the end of 1952, his special team investigating the “wrecker doctors” confirmed that indeed the late Dr. Etinger was responsible for the death of Alexandr Shcherbakov. Moreover, so the report went, Andrei Zhdanov’s heart condition might have been misdiagnosed. Arrests of more than twenty-five doctors culminated on November 4, when no less a figure than Dr. Vladimir Vinogradov, Stalin’s own physician, was taken into custody.
The dictator grew emotionally involved and reminded his enforcers of the tradition of police torture dating from Lenin and Dzerzhinsky. They were told not to be so timid: “You work like waiters in white gloves. If you want to be Chekists, take off your gloves.”10 One way or another, he got evidence to present to a special meeting of the Central Committee that sat from December 1 to 4. After deliberations it concluded that indeed there was a plot involving two former administrators of the Kremlin hospital, four doctors that included Vinogradov, as well as two “Jewish nationals” and Dr. Etinger. All supposedly worked for the Anglo-American intelligence services and were implicated in the deaths of Zhdanov and Shcherbakov, incidents, it was asserted, that the MGB leadership should have known about and prevented.11
Off the record at the meeting, Stalin sounded a note reminiscent of the Great Terror: “The more we progress, the more enemies will try to harm us. Under the influence of great successes, there has been complacency, gullibility, arrogance.” He had used almost the identical words in 1937. Now, however, he was particularly aggravated by the Soviet Jews who did not want to assimilate. “Every Jewish nationalist,” he asserted, “is an agent of the American intelligence. Jewish nationalists think that the U.S. (where you can become rich, bourgeois, and so on) saved their nation. They feel obliged to the Americans. Among the doctors are many Jewish-nationalists.”12
Stalin was triumphant, but no matter how strongly he felt, he avoided making public charges. Given the widespread anti-Semitic feeling in parts of the Soviet Union, if he had done so, it would not have been difficult to mobilize pogroms. The wily dictator, however, liked to keep his followers guessing. And in any event, he was temperamentally ill disposed even to staged popular violence, which could easily take on a momentum of its own. Thus it came to pass that Stalin introduced official anti-Semitism into the Soviet Union, the country that had once prided itself on its ideology of emancipation.
The story of a “doctors’ plot” finally made the news in mid-January, 1953, when Pravda ran a story headlined: “The Arrest of a Group of Wrecker-Doctors” (vrachei-vreditelii). The paper mentioned all their names and noted that “most of the terrorist group” had ties to an “international Jewish bourgeois nationalist” organization that was “guided by American intelligence services.” Its goal was to kill the leading Soviet politicians. These “monsters in a human face” were not only linked to the deaths of Zhdanov and Shcherbakov, the story said; they also had threatened leading military officers. More charges were mentioned. The Jews and Zionists, it was claimed, had “exposed themselves as agents of American imperialism and enemies of the Soviet state.” TASS and the newspapers carried similar articles, heightened suspicions about the Jews, and called for their exclusion from various institutions, newspapers, and factories.13
Officially condoned anti-Semitism, not open violence, spread, and Lev Kopelev, a prisoner in a special camp near Moscow, heard civilian employees whispering among themselves: “Beaten up at school… Pushed from a bus… Beaten almost to death… They say they gave shots in the hospital that infected people with syphilis… Hanged himself… Thrown out of the institute.” Some prisoners were appalled, and one said, “This is just like Hitler.” A few rejoiced that the Jews had been “tripped up” and caught.14
Although the doctors’ case never went to trial, some historians have suggested that it was intended as a prelude to the mass deportation of the Jews.15 At the time there were widespread rumors that they would all be deported, just like the Chechens, the Crimean Tatars, the Balkars, and all the others. There were whispers that the regime would build a city of camps somewhere in Siberia and that the doctors might even be publicly executed in Red Square.16 However, in spite of an exhaustive hunt through the archives for documentation in the 1950s, and again since the 1990s, no evidence has come to light that a mass deportation was in the works.17