Slánský confessed to a conspiracy that ran the gamut of the obligatory obsessions of the day: with Titoists, Zionists, Free Masons, and American intelligence officers who recruited only Jews. Among his supposed crimes was the medical murder of Gottwald. Rudolf Margolius, another of the defendants, had to denounce his parents, both of whom had died at Auschwitz. As during the Great Terror, the various plots turned out to be coordinated by a “center,” in this case an “Anti-State Conspiratorial Center.” All fourteen defendants asked for the death penalty, and eleven of them got it. As the noose was placed around Slánský’s neck on 3 December 1952, he thanked the hangman and said: “I am getting what I deserve.” The bodies of the eleven executed defendants were cremated; their ashes were later used to fill the ruts of a road.44
At such a moment, it could hardly have seemed unlikely that a public trial of Soviet Jews would follow. Thirteen Soviet citizens had been executed in Moscow in August 1952 on charges of espionage for the United States, on the basis of allegations of cosmopolitanism and Zionism rather than reliable information. These had been people incriminated as Jewish nationalists and American spies by evidence generated from torture, and then tried in secret. Eleven Czechoslovak citizens had been executed in Prague in December 1952, on much the same basis, but after a public trial that recalled the Great Terror. Now even the Polish regime began to arrest people as Israeli spies.45
In autumn 1952 several more Soviet doctors were under investigation. None of them had anything to do with Zhdanov or Shcherbakov, but they had treated other Soviet and foreign communist dignitaries before their deaths. One of them was Stalin’s personal doctor, who had advised him to retire in early 1952. At Stalin’s express and repeated orders, these people were beaten terribly, and some of them then produced the right kind of scripted confessions. Miron Vovsi, who happened to be a cousin of Solomon Mikhoels, confessed in the robotic language of Stalinism: “Thinking it all over, I came to the conclusion that despite the rottenness of my crimes, I must disclose the terrible truth to the investigation of my villainous work conducted with the aim of destroying the health and shortening the life of specific, leading state workers of the Soviet Union.”46
Once these confessions were in hand, the time must have seemed right to an aging man. Stalin usually planned well before he struck his blow, but he now seemed to be in a hurry. On 4 December 1952, the day after the execution of Slánský, the Soviet central committee took cognizance of a “doctors’ plot,” in which a leading role was played by “Jewish nationals.” One of the plotters was supposedly Stalin’s doctor, who was Russian; those who were of Jewish origin were listed as such. Stalin had now contrived to condemn his physician, the man who had advised him to end his political career. Stalin showed other signs that his political worries were linked to his personal fears. He clung, literally, to his daughter Svetlana, dancing with her at his seventy-third birthday party on 21 December 1952.47
It was as if, that December, Stalin wanted to purge his own death. A communist cannot believe in the immortal soul, but he must believe in History: as revealed in changes in the modes of production, as reflected by the rise of the proletariat, as represented by the communist party, as distilled by Stalin, and thus in fact as made by Stalin’s will. If life was nothing but a social construction, then perhaps death was too, and all could be reversed by the exercise of courageous and willful dialectics. Doctors caused it rather than delayed it; the man who warned of forthcoming death was a murderer rather than a counselor. What was needed was the right performance. Solomon Mikhoels was at his best in the role of King Lear, a ruler who foolishly conceded power too soon, and to the wrong successors. Now Mikhoels had been banished, like a specter of impotence. No doubt his Jewish people, and all they stood for, the risk of the defilement of the Soviet Union, the risk of another history of the Second World War, the risk of the wrong future, could be banished as well.48
Stalin, a sick man of seventy-three, listening to no counsel but his own, pushed forward. In December 1952 he said that “every Jew is a nationalist and an agent of American intelligence,” a paranoid formulation even by his standards. The Jews, he said that same month, “believed that their nation had been saved by the United States.” Here was a legend that had not yet even arisen; but Stalin was not entirely wrong. With characteristic perspicacity, Stalin correctly forecast one of the major myths of the Cold War, and even of the decades that followed its end. None of the Allies did very much to rescue Jews; the Americans never even saw the major killing sites.49
On 13 January 1953, the party newspaper Pravda revealed an American plot to murder the Soviet leadership by medical means. The doctors, it was understood, were Jews. The news agency TASS characterized the “terrorist group of doctors” as “monsters in human form.” Yet despite the vitriolic language, so redolent of the Great Terror, all was not quite ready. The people named in the article had not yet all admitted to their supposed crimes, which was a precondition to any show trial. Those accused must confess in private before they can be expected to do so in public: this was the minimum condition of the scenography of Stalinism. The accused could not be expected to follow a show trial in a public courtroom if they had not already agreed to it in the confines of an interrogation chamber.50
Sofia Karpai, the cardiologist who was the key defendant, had not confessed to anything at all. She was Jewish and a woman; perhaps the interrogators assumed that she would be the first to break. In the end, she was the only one of all of the accused with the strength to stand by her story and defend her innocence. At what turned out to be her last interrogation, on 18 February 1953, she held firm, explicitly denying the charges against her. Like Stalin, she was ill and dying; unlike him, she must have understood this to be the case. She seemed to believe that it mattered to speak the truth. By doing so, she slowed the investigation. She outlived Stalin, if only by a matter of days; she perhaps ensured that other people outlived Stalin as well.51
In February 1953, the Soviet leadership was drafting and redrafting a collective Jewish self-denunciation, including phrases that might have come straight from Nazi propaganda. It was to be signed by prominent Soviet Jews and published in Pravda. Vasily Grossman was among those intimidated into signing the letter. In vicious press attacks, it suddenly emerged that his recently published novel of the war, For a Just Cause, was not patriotic enough. For a Just Cause was a vast novel of the Battle of Stalingrad, mostly within Stalinist conventions. (Now Grossman’s perspective changed. In its sequel, his masterpiece Life and Fate, Grossman would have a Nazi interrogator contemplate the future: “Today you’re appalled by our hatred of the Jews. Tomorrow you may make use of our experience yourselves.”) In the latest known draft of the letter, of 20 February 1953, the signatories were to affirm that there were “two camps,” progressive and reactionary, among Jews. Israel was in the reactionary camp: its leaders were “Jewish millionaires connected with American monopolists.” Soviet Jews were also to acknowledge that “the nations of the Soviet Union and above all the great Russian nation” had saved humanity and the Jews.52
The letter condemned imperialism generally and the Jews of the doctors’ plot by name. In Stalinist terms, it could be read as a justification, or even an invitation, to a large-scale purge of Soviet Jews who were not sufficiently anti-imperialist. The Soviet citizens who were to sign the letter would have had to identify themselves as Jews (not all of them were seen as such, or saw themselves as such), and as leaders of a community that was clearly in danger. Ilya Ehrenburg, like Grossman a Soviet writer of Jewish origin, had allowed Stalin to sign his name over polemical articles about Israel. Now, however, he hesitated to endorse such a document. He wrote a disingenuous letter to Stalin, asking him what to do. He mounted the same sort of defense as had Berman and the Polish-Jewish communists a few years earlier: since Jews are not a nation, and we personally are loyal communists, how can we take part in a campaign against ourselves as representatives of some collective national entity known as Jewry?53
Stalin never replied. He was found in a coma on 1 March 1953 and died four days later. What Stalin had wanted can only be guessed; he might not have been entirely sure himself; he might have been awaiting the response of Soviet society to the first probes. Plagued by mortality and doubts about the succession, worried by the influence of Jews in the Soviet system, and fighting a Cold War against a powerful enemy that he understood only dimly, he turned to the traditional means of self-defense: trials and purges. Judging by the rumors circulating at the time, Soviet citizens had no trouble imagining the possible outcomes: doctors would have been show-tried with Soviet leaders who were their supposed allies; remaining Jews would have been purged from the state police and the armed forces; the thirty-five thousand Soviet Jewish doctors (and perhaps scientists as well) might have been deported to camps; and perhaps even the Jewish people as such would have been subject to forced removal or even mass shootings.54
Such an action, had it taken place, would have been one more in a series of national operations and ethnic deportations, which had begun in 1930 with the Poles and then continued through the Great Terror and during and after the Second World War. All of this would have been in line with Stalin’s previous practice, and would have fit a traditional logic. The national minorities to be feared and punished were those with apparent connections to the non-Soviet world. Though it had brought death to 5.7 million Jews, the war had also contributed to the establishment of a Jewish national homeland, beyond the reach of Stalin. Like the enemy nations of the 1930s, the Jews now had reasons for grievance inside the Soviet Union (four years of purges and official antiSemitism), an external protector outside the Soviet Union (Israel), and a role to play in an international struggle (led by the United States). The precedents were clear and the logic was known. But Stalinism was coming to an end.
Taking into account all the trials in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe, and all the people who died in police custody, Stalin killed no more than a few dozen Jews in these last years of his life. If he did indeed want one final national terror operation, which is far from clear, he was unable to see it to completion. It is tempting to imagine that only his death prevented this outcome, that the Soviet Union was hurtling toward another national purge on the scale of the 1930s, but the evidence is very mixed. Stalin’s own actions were surprisingly hesitant, and the reactions of his organs of power slow.
Stalin was not the master of his country in the 1950s as he was in the 1930s, and it was no longer the same country. He had become more a cult than a personality. He visited no factories, farms, or government offices after the Second World War, and made only three public speeches between 1946 and 1953. By 1950 Stalin no longer led the Soviet Union as a lone tyrant, as he had for most of the previous fifteen years. In the 1950s the key members of the politburo met regularly during his long absences from Moscow, and had their own networks of clients in the Soviet bureaucracies. Like the Great Terror of 1937-1938, a mass death purge of Jews would have created possibilities for upward mobility in Soviet society generally. But it was not at all clear that Soviet citizens, antiSemitic though many of them certainly were, would have wanted such an opportunity at such a price.55
What was most striking was the fussiness of it all. During the Great Terror, Stalin’s suggestions were transformed into orders, the orders into quotas, the quotas into corpses, the corpses into numbers. Nothing of the kind happened in the Jewish case. Though Stalin spent much of the last five years of his life preoccupied with Soviet Jews, he was unable to find the security chief who could make the right kind of case. In the old days, Stalin rid himself of security chiefs after they had completed some sort of mass action, and then blamed them for its excesses. Now officers of the MGB, perhaps understandably, seemed hesitant to commit the excesses in the first place. First Stalin had Abakumov work the case, although Lavrenty Beria was in overall charge of state security. Then he let Abakumov be denounced by Riumin, who in his turn fell in November 1952. Riumin’s successor had a heart attack on his first day on the job. Finally the investigation was taken up by S. A. Goglidze, a client of Beria.56
Stalin had lost his once total power to draw people into his fictitious world. He found himself threatening security chiefs, rather than instructing them. His subordinates understood that Stalin wanted confessions and coincidences that could be presented as proof. But they were constantly hindered by a certain attention to bureaucratic propriety and even, in some measure, to law. The judge who sentenced the members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee advised the defendants of their right to appeal. In the persecutions of Soviet Jews, security chiefs sometimes had trouble making their subordinates—and, perhaps most important, the defendants—understand what was expected of them. Interrogations, though brutal, did not always produce the kind of evidence that was needed. Torture, though it took place, was a last resort, and one upon which Stalin had personally to insist.57
Stalin was right to be concerned about the influence of the war and of the West, and about the continuation of the Soviet system as he had formed it. In the years after the Second World War, far from all Soviet citizens were eager to accept that the 1940s had justified the 1930s, that the victory over Germany had retrospectively justified the repressions of Soviet citizens. That, of course, had been the logic of the Great Terror at the time: that a war was coming, and so dangerous elements had to be removed. In Stalin’s mind, a coming war with the Americans likely justified another round of preemptive repressions in the 1950s. It is not at all clear that Soviet citizens were willing to take that step. Although many went along with the anti-Semitic hysteria of the early 1950s, refusing for example to see Jewish doctors or to take medicine from Jewish pharmacists, this was not an endorsement of a return to mass terror.
The Soviet Union lasted almost four decades after Stalin’s death, but its security organs never again organized a famine or a mass shooting. Stalin’s successors, brutal though they were, abandoned the practice of mass terror in the Stalinist sense. Nikita Khrushchev, who eventually triumphed in the struggle for Stalin’s succession, released most of the Ukrainian prisoners he had sent to the Gulag a decade before. It was not that Khrushchev was personally incapable of mass killing: he had been bloodthirsty during the Terror of 1937-1938 and the reconquest of western Ukraine after the Second World War. It was rather that he believed that the Soviet Union could no longer be run in the same fashion. He even revealed some of Stalin’s crimes in a speech to a party congress in February 1956, although he emphasized the suffering of communist party elites rather than the groups who had suffered in far larger numbers: peasants, workers, and the members of the national minorities.
East European states remained satellites of the Soviet Union, but none of them moved beyond show trials (the prelude to the Great Terror of the late 1930s) to mass killing. Most of them (Poland was an exception) collectivized agriculture, but never denied peasants the right to private plots. There was no starvation in the satellite states, as there had been in the Soviet Union. Under Khrushchev, the Soviet Union would invade its communist satellite Hungary in 1956. Although the civil war that followed killed thousands of people and the intervention forced a change of leadership, no mass blood purges followed. Relatively few people were purposefully killed in communist eastern Europe after 1953. The numbers were orders of magnitude less than during the eras of mass killing (1933-1945) and ethnic cleansing (1945-1947).
Stalinist anti-Semitism haunted eastern Europe long after the death of Stalin. It was rarely a major tool of governance, but it was always available in moments of political stress. Anti-Semitism allowed leaders to revise the history of wartime suffering (recalled as the suffering only of Slavs) and also the history of Stalinism itself (which was portrayed as the deformed, Jewish version of communism).
In Poland in 1968, fifteen years after Stalin’s death, the Holocaust was revisited for the purposes of communist nationalism. By this time Władysław Gomulka had returned to power. In February 1956, when Khr
ushchev criticized some aspects of Stalin’s rule; he undermined the position of east European communist leaders associated with Stalinism, and strengthened the hand of those who could call themselves reformers. This was the end for the triumvirate of Berman, Bierut, and Minc. Gomułka was released from prison, rehabilitated, and allowed to take power that October. He represented the hope of some Poles for a reform communism, of others for a more national communism. Poland had already gained what it could from postwar reconstruction and rapid industrialization; attempts to improve the economic system proved either counterproductive or politically risky. After all attempts to improve the economic system failed, nationalism remained.58
In Poland in 1968, Gomułka’s regime enacted an anti-Zionist purge that recalled the rhetoric of Stalin’s last years. Twenty years after his own fall from grace in 1948, Gomułka took revenge on Polish-Jewish communists, or rather upon some of their children. As in the Soviet Union in 1952 and 1953, so in Poland in 1967 and 1968 the question of succession loomed. Gomułka had been in power for a long time. Like Stalin, he was willing to discredit rivals by way of their association with the Jewish question, and in particular by their softness on the supposed Zionist threat.
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