Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire

by David Remnick

Yakov Rapoport, like many Jews of his generation, well understood that the purges of the 1930s were not an aberration of the moment. Cruelty had preceded 1937 and cruelty was sure to follow. Stalin was indulging his hatred of the Jews. In 1948, Stalin ordered the execution of Solomon Mikhoels, the legendary director of the Jewish State Theater and the leader of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee as a presumed enemy of the state. After the murder of Mikhoels—called a car accident by the authorities—the KGB arrested the leading members of the Anti-Fascist Committee, citing a “postwar return to normalcy.” Almost as a warm-up to the Doctors’ Plot and the coming purge, the KGB killed twenty-three Jewish intellectuals in 1952 on trumped-up charges of spying and treason. Then, in the first weeks of 1953, Stalin ordered the arrest of a group of nine prominent doctors, six of them Jewish; the Party papers claimed the doctors were poisoning the Kremlin leaders and covering up the conspiracy.