• DOI:10.1353/kri.2005.0001
• Corpus ID: 143696427

Stalin's Last Crime? Recent Scholarship on Postwar Soviet Antisemitism and the Doctor's Plot

@article{Brandenberger2005StalinsLC,
  title={Stalin's Last Crime? Recent Scholarship on Postwar Soviet Antisemitism and the Doctor's Plot},
  author={David Brandenberger},
  journal={Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History},
  year={2005},
  volume={6},
  pages={187 - 204}
}

• D. Brandenberger
• Published 3 March 2005
• History
• Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History

Debates over the nature of official antisemitism during the last decade of Stalin’s life have long occupied a prominent place in scholarship concerning 20th-century Russian history. Particularly controversial have been rumors of a plan for the deportation of Soviet Jews that is said to have been abandoned in early March 1953, on the eve of its implementation, when Stalin suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage. In March 2003, The New York Times commemorated the 50th anniversary of the dictator’s death with a sensational article heralding the appearance of a new book that reveals “for the first time the incredible full story of the Doctors’ Plot” on the basis of new, heretofore unavailable documentation from the former Soviet archives. Stalin’s Last Crime: The Plot against the Jewish Doctors, by Jonathan Brent and Vladimir P. Naumov, details a vast scheme to implicate Jewish medical specialists in a conspiracy against the Soviet leadership. The exposure of this treasonous plot, a modern-day Dreyfus Affair, was apparently designed to trigger outrage and pogroms across the USSR and to justify the exiling of the Soviet Jews to the wastelands of Siberia. According to Brent and Naumov, this campaign ultimately proved to be too extreme even for Stalin’s most trusted comradesin-arms, who poisoned the dictator to prevent the realization of his terrifying scheme. Based on an array of still-classified archival documents, Stalin’s Last Crime has much to offer. It provides evidence of factional infighting and renegades