Doctors' plot: Encyclopedia II - Doctors' plot - Arrests

Doctors' plot - Arrests

Initially, thirty-seven were arrested, but the number quickly grew into hundreds. Scores of Soviet Jews were promptly dismissed from their jobs, arrested, sent to gulags or executed. This was accompanied by show trials and by anti-Semitic propaganda in state-run mass media. Pravda published a letter signed by many Soviet notables (including Jews) containing incitive condemnations of the "plot".

On February 9, 1953, there was an explosion in the territory of the Soviet mission in Israel, and on February 11 the USSR broke off diplomatic relations with the Jewish state (restored in July). The next day Maria Weizmann, a Moscow doctor and a sister of the first President of Israel Chaim Weizmann (who had died in 1952), was arrested.

Outside of Moscow, similar accusations quickly appeared. For example, Ukraine discovered a local "doctors' plot" allegedly headed by famous endocrinologist Victor Kogan-Yasny (the first in the USSR who treated diabetes with insulin and saved thousands). Thirty-six "plotters" were arrested there.

Newly opened KGB archives provide evidence that Stalin forwarded the collected interrogation materials to Georgi Malenkov, Nikita Khrushchev and other "potential victims of doctors' plot" (reported by Izvestia, 1989, p.155; also Istochnik, 1997, p.140–141).

Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill and other world dignitaries sent condemning telegrams to the Soviet ministry of Foreign Affairs and demanded an investigation.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Arrests", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki