Doctors conspiracy

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January 20, 1953. With this Soviet ukase , Lidija Timaschuk was rewarded with the Order of Lenin for exposing alleged “murderer doctors” .

The so-called medical conspiracy ( Russian дело врачей ; also conspiracy of the врачи-вредители 'saboteur doctors' or врачи-убийцы 'murder doctors') was a conspiracy invented by Josef Stalin and some followers of primarily Jewish descent by doctors at the end of 1952 . These allegedly planned to eliminate Stalin and other leaders of the Soviet Union . The "exposure" led to numerous arrests and executions . At the beginning of de-Stalinization after Stalin's death in March 1953, the new Soviet leaders admitted that the “conspiracy” was a targeted disinformation campaign . The affair was both an expression of power struggles within the Soviet nomenklatura and of the anti-Semitism that was widespread at the time of Soviet communism .

background

Immediately after the Second World War , at the beginning of the Cold War , the situation of Jews in the Soviet Union initially seemed to improve. Rumors were spread that a "Jewish Republic" for Holocaust survivors would be established on the Crimean peninsula . But from 1948, in the run-up to the declaration of independence of the State of Israel , the climate changed suddenly. In January 1948, Solomon Michoels , the chairman of the Jewish Antifascist Committee (JAK), died under mysterious circumstances in a car accident in Minsk . At the same time, all Jewish cultural institutions in the Soviet Union were dissolved. In November 1949 the JAK was dissolved and its members arrested. Soviet newspapers waged an aggressive campaign against " rootless cosmopolitans, " by which, as a rule, were meant Jews. 25 leading members of the anti-fascist committee were charged with collaborating with Zionism and US imperialism , portraying the “Crimean Project” as an “imperialist conspiracy” to secede Crimea from the USSR.

In 1951, the Deputy Minister for State Security, Mikhail Ryumin, denounced his superior Viktor Abakumov for allegedly suppressing the results of tests against the Jewish doctor Yakov Gilyarievich Etinger . He was also blamed for Abakumov's lack of determination in the fight against the JAK. The background, however, was not a real threat to state security, but a power struggle between Abakumov and Georgi Malenkow .

In a public conference in November 1952 on the Slansky Trial in Prague, Klement Gottwald - the President of Czechoslovakia  - announced: “During the investigation we discovered how treason and espionage infiltrated the ranks of the Communist Party . Its goal is Zionism ”. Slansky "took active steps" to shorten Gottwald's life with the help of "hand-picked doctors from the enemy camp". On December 3, 13 former communist leaders of Czechoslovakia, 11 of them Jews , were executed .

At about the same time, according to Vyacheslav Malyshev , Stalin declared at a meeting of the Politburo on December 1, 1952 :

“Every Jewish nationalist is an agent of the American secret service . The Jewish nationalists believe their nation was saved by the United States (you can get rich, bourgeois , etc. there). They believe they owe the Americans a debt. There are many Jewish nationalists among the doctors. "

An item on the agenda of the meeting of the Presidium of the CPSU on December 4th concerned “the situation in the Ministry of State Security and the sabotage in the ranks of the medical workers”. It was put forward by Stalin and the Deputy Minister for State Security, Sergei Goglidze . "You are as blind as kittens, what will happen without me - the country will go under if you do not know how to spot the enemy," Stalin told the Presidium. At this meeting it was decided to unite all intelligence and counter-espionage services under the umbrella of the Russian military intelligence service GRU . Sergei Ogolzow , who was later to be charged with having commissioned the murder of Solomon Michoels in 1948, was entrusted with the management . The discreet purge and restructuring of the Soviet security apparatus that Stalin planned formed the backdrop for the public campaign against the alleged medical conspiracy that began in early 1952.

An article in Pravda

On January 13, 1953, some of the most respected and well-known doctors in the USSR were accused of being involved in a huge conspiracy aimed at poisoning the top Soviet political and military leadership. The Pravda , the central organ of the Communist Party, reported on the allegations under the headline Malignant spies and assassins under the guise of academic physicians :

“The majority of the members of this terrorist group […] were bought by American intelligence services. They were recruited by a branch of the American Secret Service, an international Jewish bourgeois nationalist organization called the Joint . The filthy face of this Zionist espionage organization, which hid its malevolent actions behind the mask of benevolence, is now fully exposed. [...] The unmasking of a gang of poison-administering doctors represents a severe blow to the international Jewish-Zionist organization. "

Among other famous names mentioned were Solomon Michoels, actor and director of the Moscow State Jewish Theater and chairman of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, killed on Stalin's orders in January 1948 and described as a "well-known Jewish bourgeois nationalist" Boris Schimeljowitsch , a former supreme surgeon of the Red Army and director of the Botkin Hospital, Miron Wowsi , Stalin's personal physician and a brother of Michoels, Jakow Etinger, a world-famous cardiologist, A. Feldman , ENT doctor, A. Grinschtein , neuropathologist, Boris Kogan , Therapist, Mikhail Kogan , I. Yegorov and Vladimir Vinogradov . All but two of them were Jews.

The list of alleged victims of the conspiracy includes high-ranking officials such as Andrei Zhdanov , Alexander Shcherbakov , Marshals of the Soviet Union Alexander Vasilevsky , Leonid Govorov and Ivan Konev , General Shtemenko , Admiral Levchenko and others. In the narrative it unfolded, they were all murdered by Jewish doctors as opponents of Jewish machinations, and the Soviet security apparatus scandalously covered these acts.

Arrests

There were 37 arrests initially, but that number quickly grew into the hundreds. Jews were released in rows, arrested, sent to camps, or executed. This was accompanied by show trials and anti-Semitic propaganda in the state mass media. The Pravda published an esteemed by many people in the Soviet Union (and Jews) signed letter with violent convictions of conspiracy. Some of the arrests may have been made to mask the anti-Jewish character of the campaign.

On February 9, 1953, an explosion occurred on the premises of the Soviet embassy in Tel Aviv , and on February 11, the USSR severed diplomatic relations with the Jewish state. On February 12, the Moscow doctor Maria Weizmann , sister of the first Israeli President Chaim Weizmann , who had died in 1952, was arrested.

Similar accusations were quickly made outside of Moscow. In Ukraine, for example, a medical conspiracy allegedly led by endocrinologist Viktor Kogan-Jasny , the first in the USSR to treat diabetes mellitus with insulin and thus save thousands of lives, was exposed. 36 conspirators were arrested there.

The documents in the KGB archives, which have now been opened, show that Stalin passed on the results of the investigations to Georgi Malenkov, Nikita Khrushchev and other possible victims of the medical conspiracy.

Albert Einstein , Winston Churchill and other prominent figures abroad sent condemning telegrams to the Soviet Foreign Ministry demanding an investigation into the incidents.

On March 1, 1953, Josef Stalin asked personally about the status of the preparations for the medical trial. However, he was unable to speed up the process because he suffered a stroke that evening , which was followed by another stroke on March 2nd. Stalin died as a result of the strokes on the evening of March 5, 1953 at 9:30 p.m. in Kunzewo .

Stalin's death and the consequences

Shortly after Stalin's death on March 5, 1953, the new leadership declared that the allegations had been fabricated entirely by Stalin and his clans. The case was put down on March 31 by the head of the NKVD and Minister of the Interior Lavrenti Beria . On April 3, the presidium of the CPSU officially acquitted the arrested persons. Mikhail Ryumin was charged with inventing the conspiracy and was subsequently arrested and executed . In July 1953, the Soviet Union resumed diplomatic relations with Israel.

Some researchers such as Benjamin Pinkus , Edward Radsinski or Timothy Snyder believe it is possible that the campaign for the doctors' conspiracy aimed at the deportation of the entire Jews of the Soviet Union to Siberia . This was then prevented by Stalin's death. In the Soviet archives there is no evidence of such a plan by Stalin. The historian Matthias Vetter calls this a myth , but believes it is likely that if the dictator had survived, a new wave of Stalinist purges would have broken out against Jews and non-Jews in the Soviet Union.

literature

Web links

Commons : Doctors' plot  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Matthias Vetter: Conspiracy of the Kremlin doctors . In: Wolfgang Benz (Ed.) Handbook of Antisemitism , Vol. 4: Events, Decrees, Controversies . de Gruyter Saur, Berlin / New York 2011, ISBN 978-3-598-24076-8 , p. 416 (accessed via De Gruyter Online).
  2. ↑ Pravda , November 21, 1952.
  3. ^ From the diary of the Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR Vyacheslav Malyshev, according to Gennadji Kostirtschenko: Gosudarstvennyj antisemitizm v SSSR: ot načala do kul'minacii 1938–1953 . Meždunarodnyj Fond “Demokratieija”, Moscow 2005, ISBN 5-85646-114-2 , pp. 461–462.
  4. ↑ Quoted from: Speech of the First Secretary of the CK of the KPSS, NS Chruščev on the XX. Party congress of the KPSS [“Secret Speech”] and the decision of the party congress “On the cult of personality and its consequences” , February 25, 1956 ; Translation by L. Antipov. Retrieved January 13, 2013.
  5. ^ Matthias Vetter: Conspiracy of the Kremlin doctors . In: Wolfgang Benz (Ed.) Handbook of Antisemitism, Vol. 4: Events, Decrees, Controversies . de Gruyter Saur, Berlin / New York 2011, ISBN 978-3-598-24076-8 , p. 417; David R. Shearer and Vladimir Khaustov: Stalin and the Lubianka. A Documentary History of the Political Police and Security Organs in the Soviet Union, 1922–1953. Yale University Press, New Haven / London 2014, ISBN 978-0-300-21071-2 , p. 307 (both accessed via De Gruyter Online).
  6. ^ Vicious Spies and Killers under the Mask of Academic Physicians . Translated article in Pravda of January 13, 1953
  7. ↑ Moskovsky Komsomolets, September 6, 2005: Как убивали Михоэлса ( Memento of November 13, 2005 in the Internet Archive ) (Russian)
  8. ↑ Timothy Snyder : Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin . CH Beck, Munich 2011, p. 365 f.
  9. ^ "All friends and relatives have given up on me," Kommersant, November 1, 2017
  10. ↑ Report of Izvestia , 1989, p. 155. Also Istochnik , 1997, pp. 140–141.
  11. ^ Edvard Radzinsky: Stalin. The First In-depth Biography Based on Explosive New Documents from Russia's Secret Archives . Doubleday, New York 1996, p. 560 with further references; Timothy Snyder: Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin . CH Beck, Munich 2011, p. 370.
  12. ^ David R. Shearer and Vladimir Khaustov: Stalin and the Lubianka. A Documentary History of the Political Police and Security Organs in the Soviet Union, 1922–1953. Yale University Press, New Haven / London 2014, ISBN 978-0-300-21071-2 , p. 307 (accessed from De Gruyter Online).
  13. ^ Matthias Vetter: Conspiracy of the Kremlin doctors . In: Wolfgang Benz (Ed.) Handbook of Antisemitism, Vol. 4: Events, Decrees, Controversies . de Gruyter Saur, Berlin / New York 2011, ISBN 978-3-598-24076-8 , p. 417 f. (accessed via De Gruyter Online).