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Event

Doctors’ Plot

Soviet case announced on 13 January 1953 against doctors accused of murdering Soviet leaders; the charges were withdrawn on 3 April 1953.

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Dates
13 Jan 1953 – 3 Apr 1953
Also known as
Doctors Plot
Wikidata
Q256664

Connections 3

involved

  • Soviet government announced the charges and, on 3 April, that the doctors were not guilty Scholarship & press 12
  • Joseph Stalin ruled the Soviet Union until his death on 5 March 1953 According to Encyclopaedia Judaica Scholarship & press 1

    The Encyclopaedia Judaica calls the Plot the most dramatic anti-Jewish episode in the Soviet Union under Stalin, and says it was apparently part of his plan for a new purge of the top leadership; in 1956 Khrushchev blamed it on Stalin.

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Timeline 1 date
  1. 13 Jan 1953 – 3 Apr 1953 Doctors’ Plot
Proof 3 sources
  1. Doctors’ Plot (Encyclopaedia Judaica), Encyclopaedia Judaica, via Encyclopedia.com. Scholarship & press
    On January 13, 1953, Pravda and Radio Moscow announced that nine eminent doctors were under arrest and had confessed to murdering two Soviet leaders of the past, A.S. Shcherbakov and A.A. Zhdanov
    Stalin died on March 5, and on April 3 Pravda announced that the doctors were not guilty and had been freed, and those responsible for using "impermissible means of investigation" had been arrested.
    "Most of the participants in the terrorist group," read the statement, "were connected with the international Jewish bourgeois nationalist organization, the 'Joint' (American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee) established by American Intelligence
    the Plot proved to be the last of those macabre "conspiracies" that were manufactured during Stalin
    the most dramatic anti-Jewish episode in the Soviet Union during Stalin's regime
    The Plot was apparently part of Stalin's plan for a new purge of the top Soviet leadership.
  2. From Silence to Spiel: Representing Stalin’s Alleged Jewish Deportation Plan (doctoral dissertation, UCLA), University of California, Los Angeles (eScholarship); by Oleg Ivanov, 2021. Scholarship & press
    Yakov Gilyarievich Etinger, one of the doctors implicated in the Doctors’ Plot, died under torture while being interrogated about his role in the alleged plot.
  3. Reflections on the anticipated mass deportation of Soviet Jews (abstract), Post-Soviet Affairs 31(6), Post-Soviet Affairs (Taylor & Francis), 2015. Scholarship & press
    This paper investigates questions surrounding a purported plan (believed to have been interrupted and not resumed after Stalin’s death in March 1953) for the mass deportation of 2 million Soviet Jews from the European part of the country to desolate areas of Siberia, Kazakhstan
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