On January 13, 1953, the official press agency Tass announced the arrest of a group of "killer doctors" who were systematically doing away with prominent public figures in the Soviet Union. Nine doctors, six of them Jews, were cited, and in the next few weeks many more were carted off to the dread prisons of Lubyanka and Lefortovo. Among them was Yakov Lvovich Rapoport, a distinguished pathologist; this book is a firsthand memoir of his imprisonment, revealing not only the suffering caused by a fabricated "plot" but also the devastating climate of antisemitism and the appalling disarray of medicine and science in the Stalinist era.
Rapoport outlines the background of the infamous incident: arrests of prominent physicians had begun in 1952 and created hysteria throughout the country. Clinics were empty, patients refused professional medical advice, rumors abounded of poisoned medicines in pharmacies and murdered infants in maternity wards. Public opinion was primed to accept the Doctors' Plot, and to this day no one knows how many hundreds or thousands of doctors, prominent and ordinary, were victimized. Rapoport himself was arrested in early February, and he recalls in meticulous detail the psychological and physical pain he endured, all the while steadfastly denying that there was any conspiracy. He was saved from certain execution only by the death of Stalin.
The Doctors' Plot of 1953 is the gripping story of a brave man that gives a dismal picture of what life―especially for intellectuals and for Jews―was like in the Soviet Union under the paranoid Stalin. There is much information on the distortion of biology by Lysenko, the demagogic elevation of such charlatans as Olga Lepeshinskaya, the fictitious murder of Gorky and the quite likely murder of Frunze, and other mind-boggling examples of the surrealistic politics of Soviet science.
In early 1953, Rapoport was one of a group of physicians arrested and accused of plotting to kill prominent Soviet citizens. Upon the death of Stalin, all were released and fully rehabilitated. The incident has often been interpreted as an initial stage in a series of purges that would have improved Stalin's control. Rapoport's personal account affords testimony to the anti-Jewish character of the intrigue, to the suspicion and paranoia it engendered within Soviet medical research and practice during this era, and to the author's own strength and courage. It provides added background and detail to the final chapter of Stalin's rule. For scholars and larger research collections.
- Rena Fowler, Northern Michigan Univ. Lib., Marquette
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
