War and the last years
1952–53
The Doctors’ Plot, and the death of Stalin
The last campaign Stalin set in motion was an antisemitic purge, cut short because he died.
In January 1953 Pravda announced that Kremlin doctors, most of them Jewish, had murdered Zhdanov and were murdering the leadership on behalf of foreign intelligence and a Jewish organization. A wider purge of Jews in culture and medicine was underway. Historians generally believe a large public trial, and possibly deportations, were being prepared.
Stalin died of a cerebral hemorrhage on 5 March 1953. The doctors were released. The plot was admitted to have been a fabrication. It is the right ending for this ledger: the system had already eaten Old Bolsheviks of every ethnicity, including Jewish ones, and it was still capable of turning “Jewish” into a police category when the dictator wanted one. His successors kept the one-party state, opened some camps, and shot Beria. They did not publish the Penza telegram in a schoolbook.
Where to check it · Pravda, January 1953; Jonathan Brent and Vladimir Naumov, Stalin’s Last Crime; Khrushchev’s 1956 speech.