Bloodlands

“conveyer method,” after doctors had told him that this would endanger the man’s life.³⁹

Yet Riumin had hit upon a connection that he believed would appeal to Stalin: terrorist Jewish doctors killing prominent (Russian) communists. Henceforth the direction of the investigation would be clear: purge the MGB of Jews and their lackeys, and find more Jewish killer doctors. Abakumov was duly arrested on 4 July 1951 and replaced by Riumin, who began an anti-Jewish purge of the MGB. The central committee then ordered further investigation of the “terrorist activities of Etinger” on 11 July. Five days later the MGB arrested the electrocardiogram specialist Sofia Karpai. She was extremely important to the entire investigation: she was the only Jewish doctor still alive who could be linked in any way to the death of a Soviet leader. She had indeed taken and interpreted two readings of Zhdanov’s heart. Yet under arrest she declined to endorse the story of medical murder, and refused to implicate anyone else.⁴⁰

The case was weak. But further evidence of Jewish plots could be generated elsewhere.

* * *

Another Soviet satellite, communist Czechoslovakia, would provide the anti-Semitic show trial that Poland did not. A week after Sofia Karpai’s arrest, on 23 July 1951, Stalin signaled to Klement Gottwald, the communist president of Czechoslovakia, that he should rid himself of his close associate Rudolf Slansky, who ostensibly represented “Jewish bourgeois nationalism.” On 6 September, Slansky was removed from his position as general secretary.⁴¹

Moscow’s evident disfavor provoked a real espionage plot, or at least a botched attempt at one. Czechs working for American intelligence noticed that Moscow had sent no congratulations to Slansky on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday (on 31 July 1951). They moved ahead to encourage Slansky to defect from Czechoslovakia. In early November they sent him a letter in which they offered refuge in the West. The courier who was to deliver the message was in fact a double agent, working for the communist Czechoslovak security services. He gave the letter to his superiors, who showed it to the Soviets. On 11 November 1951 Stalin sent a personal envoy to Gottwald to demand Slansky’s immediate arrest. Although neither Slansky nor Gottwald had seen the letter at this point, Gottwald now seemed to believe that he had no choice. Slansky was arrested on 24 November and interrogated for a year.⁴²

The final result of the Slansky case was spectacular: a Czechoslovak Stalinist show trial on the Soviet model of 1936, with an overlay of unabashed antiSemitism. Although some of the most prominent victims of the Moscow show trials of 1936 had been Jewish, they were not tried for their Jewishness. In Prague eleven out of the fourteen defendants were of Jewish origin, and were identified cosmopolitan was used as if it were a term of legal art whose meaning was known to all. On 20 November 1952, Slansky set the tone of the political seance, summoning forth the spirits of communists who had gone before him to their deaths: “I acknowledge fully my guilt and wish honestly and truthfully to describe everything that I have done and the crimes that I have committed.” He was obviously following a rehearsed script. At one point in the trial, he answered a question that the prosecutor had forgotten to ask.⁴³

Slansky 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 Slansky’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 Slansky, 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