In 1952, believing his doctor planned to kill him, Josef Stalin generalized this out to a Jewish "Doctors' Plot," believing there was a general conspiracy of Jewish doctors throughout the USSR scheming to kill him, and that other Jews were behind this plot. Through his final year of life, Stalin meticulously planned out a purge likely to lead to the deaths of tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews, who were spared only by his death (maybe he should've listened to his doctors after all). This is very highly documented, with no less than the post-Stalinist government of Nikita Khrushchev himself putting forward evidence of this.
Let us also recall the "affair of the doctor-plotters."
(Animation in the hall.)
Actually there was no "affair" outside of the declaration of the woman doctor [Lidiya] Timashuk, who was probably influenced or ordered by someone (after all, she was an unofficial collaborator of the organs of state security) to write Stalin a letter in which she declared that doctors were applying supposedly improper methods of medical treatment. (66)
Such a letter was sufficient for Stalin to reach an immediate conclusion that there are doctor-plotters in the Soviet Union. He issued orders to arrest a group of eminent Soviet medical specialists. He personally issued advice on the conduct of the investigation and the method of interrogation of the arrested persons. He said that academician [V. N. ] Vinogradov should be put in chains, and that another one [of the alleged plotters] should be beaten. The former Minister of State Security, comrade [Semyen] Ignatiev, is present at this Congress as a delegate. Stalin told him curtly, "If you do not obtain confessions from the doctors we will shorten you by a head." (67)
(Tumult in the hall.)
Stalin personally called the investigative judge, gave him instructions, and advised him on which investigative methods should be used. These methods were simple -- beat, beat and, beat again.
Shortly after the doctors were arrested, we members of the Politbiuro received protocols with the doctors' confessions of guilt. After distributing these protocols, Stalin told us, "You are blind like young kittens. What will happen without me? The country will perish because you do not know how to recognize enemies." (68)
The case was presented so that no one could verify the facts on which the investigation was based. There was no possibility of trying to verify facts by contacting those who had made the confessions of guilt.
We felt, however, that the case of the arrested doctors was questionable. We knew some of these people personally because they had once treated us. When we examined this "case" after Stalin's death, we found it to have been fabricated from beginning to end.
This ignominious "case" was set up by Stalin. He did not, however, have the time in which to bring it to an end (as he conceived that end), and for this reason the doctors are still alive. All of them have been rehabilitated. They are working in the same places they were working before. They are treating top individuals, not excluding members of the Government. They have our full confidence; and they execute their duties honestly, as they did before.
https://web.archive.org/web/20051107221432/http://www.uwm.edu/Course/448-343/index12.htmlAnyone who thinks that left-wingers are somehow immune from anti-Semitism clearly has no background or understanding of Soviet History. Stalin, the leader of the "Workers' State" that was the vanguard of international revolutionary left wing ideology, spent his dying breaths plotting the deaths of tens or hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews based on his own racist delusional paranoia.
