Stalin's Last Crime: The Plot Against the Jewish Doctors, 1948-1953

As someone familiar with Russian history, I enjoyed this book. Among others, it debunks the myth that Stalin was weak and out of touch at the time of his death. The fact is he was clearly in control up until the time he died. Reading this book also raises more questions than it seems to answer. For example, how does this plot fuse with his foreign policy? The military? Was this strictly an internal affair or actually a prelude to Nuclear War with the United States? Although beyond the scope of this book, the reader was left wondering how Khruschev, Beria, Malenkov, et al worked out power arrangements after Stalin's death. We know, of course, that Beria was shot in December 1953; but what formed the BASIS for each person's power in what was clearly a lawless state?

When the Second World War was over in 1945, First Secretary of the Communist Party, Joseph Stalin seemed to be at a personal peak of power. Despite monumental losses of dead Russian soldiers and civilians, Stalin had led Russia to a victory over Hitler and National Socialism that left him in control not only in Russia but of all of Eastern Europe as well. Further, because of his earlier purges in the late 30's, there was no one left to challenge him either within the Communist party or outside it. Yet, in STALIN'S LAST CRIME, Jonathan Brent and Vladimir Naumov picture a Stalin who, by the time of his death in 1953, was far from the omnipotent ruler that most Russians assumed he was. Brent and Naumov present Stalin as a man who could not change to match changing times. When the war in Europe was over, Russia was not the insular country it had been just ten years earlier. An increasing number of Russians had an equally increasing contact with Western, and hence, democratic ideas and values. The horrors of the war reaffirmed in the collected minds of Russians of the need for a legitimate government that followed its rule of law. The once all consuming fear of Stalin had diluted to the point where some of his less visionary peers would dare to contemplate in the pages of PRAVDA no less of who would follow Stalin once he was dead. Finally, there was Stalin's health, which by the late 1940's had regressed to the point that his Politburo comrades might legitimately wonder about the line of succession. Stalin took note of all this and was determined to turn back the clock to 1937 when he could purge millions of his countrymen merely by snapping his fingers. But by 1949, he could not do so. He needed more, and the so-called plot of the Jewish doctors allowed him to crank up the old machinery that would spin out huge nets to catch anyone whom Stalin suspected needed killing.Much of the first half of STALIN'S LAST CRIME is a minute examination of the death of a party comrade, A. A. Zhdanov, who unexpectedly suffered a heart attack and was ordered to recuperate at Valdai, a health resort for members of the Soviet political elite. Zhdanov died there, and Stalin saw in his death the first filmy web of a plot that he knew would ultimately ensnare at least as many as he purged in the 1930's. Brent and Naumov progress from Zhdanov's death to blaming that death on a cabal of Jewish doctors. From there, they detail how Stalin began laying traps for nearly the entire leadership of the Soviet Secret Police, the MGB. Hundreds of high-ranking MGB officers were purged. Thousands of Jews were rounded up and shot or sent to a gulag. Clearly, Brent and Naumov portray a Russia that was only in the first stage of Stalinist immolation. Yet, when Stalin died, the entire apparatus of destruction came to a thankful halt. Russian society returned to a business as usual routine. The gloomy concluding chapters of STALIN'S LAST CRIME suggest that the monstrous v

This is a fine-grained look at Stalinist terror. Based on original archival research by the authors and additional new information published primarily by Russian scholars, this book is a careful examination of the so-called Doctor's Plot, the last gasp of Stalin's systematic terrorization of Soviet society. The Doctor's Plot was a conspiracy fabricated by Soviet security organizations purporting to show an organized effort to undermine the Soviet State by destroying its leadership via negligent or murderous medical care. The Plot was viewed previously as an irrational and relatively (compared to the great purges, executions, and deportations of the 20s and 30s) minor aspect of Stalinist state terror. The authors argue that the Doctors' Plot was actually the likely prelude to a planned major convulsion that would reproduce many features of the great purges of the 30s. This is impossible to prove definitively but the authors make a good case that the Doctors' Plot was developed carefully by Stalin to eventually start a series of purges and trials that would result in a large scale terrorization of Soviet society. The authors also place the Plot in the context of other important Stalinist campaigns of the period, notably the anti-Semitic actions that preceded and are to some extent coincident with the events of the Doctors' Plot. In this case, the attack would expand to involve a wholesale assault on Jewish citizens of the Soviet Union. The authors conclude that Stalin pursued this end as a means of maintaining his absolute power and that only his death in 1953 prevented terrible atrocities on a scale with the crimes of the 20s and 30s. The result probably would have been something similar to the Cultural Revolution in China. A surprising aspect of the book is the apparent demonstration of how relatively difficult it was for Stalin to piece together the Plot. The book contains fascinating details such as Stalin's dissatisfaction with coerced confessions because they were too inconsistent to be used for credible public show trials. There are also remarkable episodes of some figures in the Soviet securiry organizations criticizing documentation of these purported crimes. As the Soviet State matured, it appears that there were expectations that Soviet justice, claimed by Stalin to be essentially perfect, had to meet some realistic and rational expectations. This type of relative resistance probably only increased Stalin's desire to unleash a major purge.Some prior reviewers comment that this book is not smoothly written. This is a fair comment as the authors use quotations from original documents and much of the text is a very careful analysis of the signficance of the original documents. In my opinion, however, this approach enhances the value of the book. The extensive quotations give readers a very good sense of the Kafkaesque and bizarrely bureaucratic nature of Soviet repression in a way that a more conventional approach cannot acc

Some very interesting books are emerging concerning the former Soviet Union now that their archives are open for scholarly investigation. This book is certainly one of them, a well-written and carefully documented investigation of one of the darkest aspects of the Stalin era. No one, with the possible exception of Adolph Hitler's Nazi Germany, was directly responsible for the deaths of more human beings during the 20th century than was Joseph Stalin, the Soviet Union's first comrade, a brilliant psychopath so deluded in his paranoid fantasies that he suspected everyone, always, of continuous conspiracy and perfidy against him. His resulting excesses included the campaign of terror, first instituted in the 1930s, and the systematic purges that became an integral aspect of the terror campaign. During the 1930s alone, he is estimated to have worked millions to death in enforced labor camps, creating what is now described as a "Gulag" in recent books such as Anne Applebaum's recent book of the same name.Yet although the Gulag and the terror campaign that supplied the bodies for its proliferation was most pronounced both before and during the Second World War, it was after the war that the extent of his murder and mayhem reached it horrific peak. Indeed, on the eve of his death in 1953, Stalin was actively planning to execute a bizarre and insane plan to kill hundreds of thousands of additional Russian citizens in what Jonathan Brent and Vladimir Naumov describe in their book, "Stalin's Last Crime: The Plot Against The Jewish Doctors, 1948-1953" as constituting what they refer to as the "Doctor's Plot". The authors trace the evidence linking Stalin and the development by his staff produced false documentation of such a plot by doctors within the Soviet Union of intending to purge the Soviet Ministry of Security as well as the elite elements of government in a bizarre alleged conspiracy between Jewish M.D.s living in Russia and the American government to foist a coup d'etat of the Soviet regime. Stalin had concocted the idea based on the fact that he knew the lingering anti-Semitism within the Soviet Union would help convince the people that such a plot was both feasible and logical, which of course, it was not. What it really was a clever Machiavellian ruse to give Stalin the excuse he needed to purge the very institutions he was about to accuse the Jewish doctors of attempting to damage. In their stirring narration of the events and their consequences, the authors offer both provocative and damaging evidence of the standard Stalin course of action; by first obtaining a series of forced confessions, he would develop asset of anecdotal information files that he would then twist into a substantial set of circumstantial evidence supporting his theory. One of the more interesting of the findings was he evidence that late in life he seemed to develop a more cautious and deliberate approach to his domestic terror program, as though he sensed the overall m

This book will change the way that anyone thinks about the doctors plot. It has new evidence to the poisoning of Stalin (probably by Beria) and also opens up documents lost in KGB archives since the death of Stalin. It is very well written and is worth the making of a movie for because of all the newly unveiled plot sequences. For example- General Vlasik was questioned by KGB because they thought all the people with lines next to their names in his address book were spies. It turns out that he changed all of his many lovers names to their masculine form (which is very easy in Russian) so that his wife wouldn't know and he put lines next to their names so that he'd know which ones they were. Come on people that's great! But that's far from the best here. This has all of the correspondense between Timashuk and KGB higher-upers, all the interrogation files of the Jewish doctors, everything you could possibly want to know about the Doctor's Plot and don't get any of the other books on it. Trust me, they're all lies. This is the real deal.