Doctors' plot

The "doctors' plot" affair was a Soviet state-sponsored antisemitic campaign and conspiracy theory that alleged a cabal of prominent medical specialists (predominately of Jewish ethnicity) intended to murder leading government and party officials. It was also known as the case of saboteur doctors or killer doctors. In 1951–1953, a group of predominantly Jewish doctors from Moscow were accused of a conspiracy to assassinate Soviet leaders. This was later accompanied by publications of antisemitic character in the media, which talked about the threats of Zionism and condemned people with Jewish surnames. Following this, many doctors, both Jews and non-Jews, were dismissed from their jobs, arrested, and tortured to produce admissions. A few weeks after the death of Stalin in 1953, the new Soviet leadership said there was a lack of evidence regarding the doctors' plot and the case was dropped. Soon after, the case was declared to have been a fabrication. A number of theories attempt to explain the origins of the doctors' plot case. Historians typically relate it to the earlier case of Stalin's destruction of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and the campaign against the so-called Jewish rootless cosmopolitans in the second half of the 1940s, as well as to the power struggle within the Soviet leadership during that time. The campaign against the doctors was presumably set in motion by Stalin as a pretext to launch a massive purge of the Communist Party, and, according to Edvard Radzinsky, even to consolidate the country for a future World War III. In 1948, an allegation was made by a Soviet veteran medical worker, Lydia Timashuk, who stated that "intentional distortions in medical conclusions [were] made by major medical experts who served as consultants in the hospital". Timashuk "exposed their criminal designs" and as such the security bodies of the Soviet Union were made aware of the existence of the alleged conspiracy against Stalin. Stalin had strong doubts about Timashuk's allegations.