Narym was a group of famous Soviet labor camps in the Krasnoyarsk Region in Siberia.195 Also, to some extent, there is a parallel between Lysenko and the Nazi doctors who experimented on humans. Several of them, like Lysenko, believed in the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Lysenko declared that through “training” at particular temperatures, plants can change their inheritance or even become new species; or that a change in diet can result in the transformation of one animal species into another. The Nazi doctors went even further. One of the most sordid SS doctors in Auschwitz, the University of Münster anatomy professor Johann Paul Kremer, believed in the inheritance of traumatically acquired deformities.196
In 1939, Lysenko became a full academician. He had already been president of the Agricultural Academy. He received Stalin’s personal attention and represented the Party line in biology. In 1940, his archenemy Nikolai Vavilov was arrested by the NKVD (not without Lysenko’s help) and then perished. However, World War II postponed Lysenko’s final triumph, which occurred in August 1948. I will describe all these events in Chapter 4.
THE DOCTORS’ PLOT CASE, THE ALLILUEVA CASE, AND THE JAC CASE
After World War II, in 1947, Stalin began one of his last campaigns against the intelligentsia, especially those of Jewish origin (“Cosmopolitans without the Motherland” as they were called in the mass media), which ended in 1952–1953 with the arrests of high-ranking physicians, members of the so-called Doctors’ Plot, which allegedly aimed to murder Soviet leaders, including Stalin. It is necessary to explain that in the Soviet Union, as in Nazi Germany, Jewish identity meant not religion but ethnic origin (or “race” in Nazi terminology). This critical point has created a lot of misunderstanding in the American public of events during the Holocaust in Europe and of Russian anti-Semitism in general. The Nazi laws against the Jews were racial, not religious.197 In Nazi Germany, half Jews who had a Jewish father and a non-Jewish German mother (Mischling of the first degree) were treated as full-blooded Jews.198 In the same manner, half Jews with a Jewish family name (father’s name) were treated as full-blooded Jews in the Soviet Union. Moreover, the personnel department in any institution usually wanted to know the names of not only parents but also of grandparents of employees.
However, the arrest of Jewish doctors had a long history. The first time “doctor-killers” were discussed was at the trial of the “anti-Soviet organization of the Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists” in Kharkov in March–August 1930. One of the accused supposedly said: “We expressed desires that doctors, using their positions and providing the outstanding Communist patients with a poison or an inoculation of a bacterial culture, would help them to die.”199 The next step was in 1938: As I will describe in Chapter 2, the doctors Dmitrii Pletnev, Lev Levin, and Ignatii Kazakov were accused at the Bukharin trial of killing prominent Soviet writers and party leaders. Levin and Kazakov were shot just after the end of the trial, and Pletnev was shot in 1941.
It appears that the sentencing of Levin and Pletnev was Stalin’s personal revenge. In 1932, both refused to sign a false death certificate for Nadezhda Allilueva, Stalin’s second wife, who allegedly committed suicide with a gun. However, members of her family and others who knew Nadezhda Allilueva were convinced that Stalin had shot his wife himself, because the bullet entry wound was at the back of Nadezhda’s head.200 The Kremlin Hospital’s doctors were ordered to certify her death from appendicitis. Levin and Pletnev refused.201
But this was not the end of Nadezhda Allilueva’s story and the implication of Stalin’s estranged family members and their friends as part of the effort to cleanse society of unsavory elements. The Allilueva case was just beginning. In 1937, Nadezhda’s brother, Pavel Alliluev, political commissar of the armed forces, was first put under NKVD surveillance and then dismissed from his post.202 He “mysteriously” died on December 2, 1938, from poisoning. Stalin kept Nadezhda Allilueva’s “History of Illness” and Pavel Alliluev’s postmortem report in his private archive at his apartment in the Kremlin.203
Before that, on January 20, 1938, Stanislav Redens, the husband of Nadezhda’s sister Anna Allilueva, received a new appointment: He became the NKVD commissar of the Kazakh Republic.204 In fact, this was a form of exile. Before that Redens had worked with NKVD Commissar Genrikh Yagoda and then was one of the deputies of the next commissar, Nikolai Yezhov. In December, 1938, he was recalled to Moscow, and three weeks after Pavel Alliluev’s death, on December 22, 1938, was arrested. In vain, Stalin’s sister-in-law Anna tried to see Stalin and persuade him to take pity on Redens: Stalin refused to see her.205 On January 21, 1940, Redens was condemned to death and was shot in 1941.
At the end of 1937, Stalin dealt with the family of his first wife, Yekaterina Svanidze. Her brother, Aleksandr Svanidze (who was commissar of finance in Georgia), his wife Maria, and their small son (Stalin’s nephew) were arrested.206 Maria’s diary was passed to Stalin, and he kept it in his personal archive together with the Alliluevs’ documents: The diary contained too many secrets about Stalin’s relatives and Stalin himself.207 Aleksandr Svanidze was shot to death in a labor camp on August 20, 1941, and his wife was shot on March 3, 1942.208 Their son, Jony Svanidze, was released from a labor camp, where he had spent seventeen years, after Stalin’s death.
Finally, the arrest of Anna and Yevgeniya Allilueva (Yevgeniya was Pavel Alliluev’s widow) and their friends in December 1947 (Allilueva case) was a “prelude” to the anti-Semitic cases of 1947–1953, which ended up as the Doctors’ Plot case. Anna and Yevgeniya were sentenced in 1948 to ten years’ imprisonment for espionage and were released in 1954, after Stalin’s death.209 Stalin explained to his daughter Svetlana that “they knew too much and they talked too much. And it helped our enemies.”210 Both spent more than six years in solitary confinement in Vladimir Prison, the main Soviet prison for the most important political convicts (Chapter 3). For reasons of secrecy, some of the prisoners were deprived of their names and kept there under numbers assigned to them after the trials. The arrested high-ranking members of the Soviet nomenklatura were given numbers even during the investigation. Thus, after his arrest in 1938, former NKVD commissar Yezhov was put in the hospital of Sukhanovo Prison as Patient No. 1,211 and later on, arrested MGB minister Abakumov was kept as No. 15.212 The same system of numbers instead of names for victims of show trials condemned to imprisonment was introduced by the Soviet MGB “advisers” in Hungary and, possibly, in all of Eastern Europe.213 After conviction, Yevgeniya Allilueva was kept in Vladimir Prison as No. 22, and Anna, as No. 23 (Documents 1 and 2, Appendix II).
According to prisoner cards in Vladimir Prison (many of which are recorded in Appendix II as numbered documents), the accusations and terms for Yevgeniya and Anna Allilueva in 1948 differed (Documents 1 and 2, Appendix II). Yevgenia was accused of various violations of the dreaded Article 58 of the Russian Criminal Code: treason against the Motherland (Article 58-1a), anti-Soviet propaganda (Article 58-10, pt. 1), and membership in an anti-Soviet organization (Article 58-11); she received ten years’ imprisonment. Anna was condemned initially to five years’ imprisonment. During this period, the transfer of these prisoners through different cells of Vladimir Prison was definitely coordinated and frequently happened on the same day (see numbers of corpuses and cells in Documents 1 and 2). However, on December 27, 1952, Anna Allilueva was retried and convicted of five more years for alleged anti-Soviet propaganda (Article 58-10, pt. 2) and membership in an anti-Soviet organization (Article 58-11). Both Alliluevs were released soon after Stalin’s death, in late April 1953. When Anna returned to Moscow in 1954, she was mentally ill and suffered from auditory hallucinations.214 Yevgeniya could not talk for a while. “All the muscles of her mouth had been idle for such a long time while she was in solitary with no one to talk with,” recalled her son.215