In January 1953, an article was published in Pravda entitled “Assassins in White Coats.” The prose was a straightforward attack on Jewish doctors and, by extension, all Soviet Jews. It was written in Stalin’s own style, recognizable because every grammatical or spelling mistake was left uncorrected by the fearful editors. (According to his interpreter, Valentin Berezhkov, for each one of Stalin’s errors, an impression was formed that “perhaps now we should write this word in this way.”)13 The latest propaganda onslaught was filled with diatribes against the “disease of contamination” of the
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