Abakumov personally visited Lefortovo Prison to witness the “confession” of Goldstein. The final version of the “confession” was prepared by the deputy head of Abakumov’s secretariat, Colonel Yakov Broverman, and sent to Stalin. It said that Mikhoels, supposedly on behalf of his American friends, ordered Goldstein to get close to Svetlana Stalina through her Jewish husband, Grigory Moroz.245
Finally, in the official MGB document to the Politburo “On the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee,” dated March 26, 1948, the MGB (i.e., Abakumov) accused the JAC of anti-Soviet nationalistic activity and contacts with the American secret services. On November 20, 1948, the Politburo approved a document in which the MGB was ordered to dissolve the JAC. At the end of 1948, the arrests of JAC members started.246 Stalin appointed a Politburo member, Georgii Malenkov to supervise the JAC case.
Even family members of Soviet leaders were not safe from arrest and investigation. As “honorary academician” and the second in command in the Soviet Union, Vyacheslav Molotov recalled in his memoirs, in 1948 at a Politburo meeting Stalin ordered Molotov to divorce his wife, Polina Zhemchuzhina (1897–1970), a candidate member of the Central Committee. “At the end of 1948 we were divorced. But in 1949, in February [in fact, on January 21] she was arrested,” recalled Molotov.247 Zhemchuzhina was accused of long-standing connection with the Jewish nationalists: She was a Jewess by origin and was considered to be a part of a Jewish plot within the JAC case.
Before her arrest, Zhemchuzhina was expelled from the Party at a Central Committee meeting. At first Molotov abstained, but after several days, on January 20, 1949, he wrote a top-secret note addressed to Stalin: “I hereby declare that after thinking the matter over I now vote in favor of the Central Committee’s decision… Furthermore, I acknowledge that I was gravely at fault in not restraining in time a person near to me from taking false steps and from dealings with such anti-Soviet nationalists as Mikhoels.”248
The note did not prevent the punishment of Molotov for his hesitation and abstention: He was dismissed from his post of foreign minister and another “honorary academician,” General Prosecutor Andrei Vyshinsky, replaced him.
Besides torture, Zhemchuzhina’s investigation involved another sordid tactic. Two male prisoners were forced to “testify” that they had participated in “group sex” with the elderly Bolshevik woman.249 Finally, Zhemchuzhina was tried by the OSO, condemned to five-year exile, and sent to the distant Kustanai Region in Kazakhstan as “Prisoner No. 12.”
Concerning the accusations against Lina Stern, besides her membership in the JAC, there was one more “incriminating” fact about her participation in the “Jewish plot.” She was connected with the Allilueva case through Iosif Moroz, the father of Stalin’s son-in-law, Grigory, who had already been convicted for alleged Jewish nationalistic “anti-Soviet propaganda.” In 1945, Lina Stern had employed Moroz as her deputy director at the Institute of Physiology. At the time of the arrest, Stern was seventy-two years old. At the interrogation, when MGB minister Abakumov roared at her, “You old whore!” she replied: “So that’s the way a minister speaks to an Academician.”250
In late March 1950, the investigation of the JAC case was completed. Grinberg died in prison before that, on December 22, 1949 (officially of a heart attack). The Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court heard the case for two months, starting on May 8, 1952. All defendants were accused of nationalistic and espionage activity for the United States. In the courtroom, four prisoners, including Stern, recanted the statements they made during interrogations and denied their guilt.251 On July 18, 1952, the court convicted fifteen members of the JAC, thirteen men and two women, all of them being famous Jewish writers, poets, actors, translators, and so on, to death. The chair of the collegium, Justice Lieutenant General V. Cheptsov, tried in vain to appeal to Chief Prosecutor General Safonov and then to Georgii Malenkov, insisting on the necessity of returning the case for further investigation.252 He also sent Solomon Lozovsky’s (the main defendant) statement after sentencing with the denial of guilt to Stalin (Lozovsky was an Old Bolshevik, whom Stalin had known personally for many years). No new instructions followed from the Politburo, and the convicts were executed on August 12, 1952. Among them was Boris Shimeliovich (1892–1952), chief doctor of the Botkin Central Clinical Hospital in Moscow. His arrest and conviction was a prelude to the Doctors’ Plot case.
Lina Stern was lucky: She received three and a half years’ imprisonment and five years of exile to the town of Jambul in Central Asia (Kazakhstan), from which she returned after Stalin’s death.253 It was quite unusual that she had not been expelled from the academy, and because of that, soon she was appointed head of a laboratory at the Academy Institute of Biophysics.
The relatives of the executed were arrested and exiled to Kazakhstan. They were not told that their loved ones were already dead.254 On the whole, about 110 people were arrested and persecuted in 1948–1952 in connection with the JAC case.255 During all these years, there was a massive propaganda campaign in the Soviet press against “Cosmopolitans without a Motherland” (as the Jews were called). Step by step, professionals of Jewish origin were cleansed from their jobs.256
However, the JAC case sealed the career of Minister Abakumov. As I have already mentioned, on July 12, 1951, Abakumov was arrested. He was accused of “treason against the Motherland committed by a military person” (Article 58-1b of the Russian Criminal Code).257 Also arrested were the main creators of the JAC case and many other political cases of the late 1940s: head of the OVD Department, Major General Aleksandr Leonov and his deputies, Komarov, Likhachev, and Schwartzman, as well as the head of Abakumov’s secretariat, Ivan Chernov and his deputy Broverman. The list of accusations against Abakumov was prepared by the new head of the OVD Department, Mikhail Ryumin (see Chapter 2). Ryumin’s main accusation was that Abakumov prohibited him, Ryumin, from interrogating the arrested professor Yakov Etinger about an alleged plot to murder a candidate of the Politburo, Aleksei Shcherbakov, and the intentional placement of Etinger in severe conditions in Lefortovo Prison, where Etinger died without revealing information about the “Jewish plot” of medical doctors.
Dr. Yakov Etinger (1887–1951), professor of the Second Moscow Medical Institute, was arrested on November 18, 1950. He had been singled out before that by MGB investigators. Etinger regularly visited the JAC, where he had read international Jewish periodicals. During an interrogation in 1949, he had been mentioned as one of the leaders of Jewish nationalists in Soviet medicine by the arrested JAC secretary, a Jewish poet named Isaak Fefer: “His [Etinger’s] nationalistic views were entirely shared by the Academician B. I. Zbarsky, Professor of the Second Moscow Medical Institute A. B. Topchan, Director of the Clinic of Remedial Nutrition M. I. Pevzner, senior general practitioner of the Soviet Army M. S. Vovsi…”258 In fact, Abram Topchan had numerous positions: chief doctor of the Moscow Gradskaya (City) Hospital, director of the Clinic of Urology, and from 1937, rector of the Second Moscow Medical Institute.259 As for the last person, Miron Vovsi (1897–1960), he was not only a member of the Medical Academy, chief therapist of the Soviet army, a consultant-therapist of the Kremlin Medical Directorate, and the editor in chief of the journal Klinicheskaya Meditsina (Clinical Medicine) but also a cousin of Solomon Mikhoels, who had already been assassinated.260