Doctors' Plot - Speculation About A Planned Deportation of Jews

Speculation About A Planned Deportation of Jews

In his Secret Speech at the Communist Party's Twentieth Congress, Nikita Khrushchev asserted that Stalin intended to use the doctors' trial to launch a massive party purge.

According to one source, Nikolay Nikolevitch Poliakov, Stalin purportedly created a special "Deportation Commission" to plan the deportation of Jews to these camps. Poliakov, the purported secretary of the Commission, stated years later that, according to Stalin's initial plan, the deportation was to begin in the middle of February 1953, but the monumental tasks of compiling lists of Jews had not yet been completed. "Pure blooded" Jews were to be deported first, followed by "half breeds" (polukrovki). Before his death in March 1953, Stalin allegedly had planned the execution of "Doctors Plot" defendants already on trial in Red Square in March 1953, and then he would cast himself as the savior of Soviet Jews by sending them to camps away from the purportedly enraged Russian populace. Further purported statements from others describe some aspects of such a planned deportation. Others argue that any charge of an alleged mass deportation lacks specific documentary evidence and that attempts to move the then geographically assimilated Jewish population would not have comported with Stalin's other postwar methods.

Yakov Etinger (son of one of the doctors) said that he spoke with Bulganin, who told him about plans to deport Jews. Etinger's credibility was questioned, however, when he claimed to have published a previously unpublished letter to Pravda, signed by many Jewish celebrities and calling for Jewish deportation. The alleged original two versions of the letter have been published in Istochnik and other publications. Not only did they lack any hint of a plan to deport Jews to Siberia, in fact they called for the creation of a Jewish newspaper. The alleged text of the famous letter serves as an argument against the existence of the deportation plans. Etinger was asked to publish the notes taken during his alleged meetings with Bulganin, but they are still unpublished.

Four large camps were built shortly before Stalin's death in 1953 in southern and western Russia, with rumors swirling that they were purportedly for Jews, but no directive exists that the camps were to be used for any such effort.

Veniamin Kaverin claimed that he had been asked to sign the letter about the deportation.

Ilya Ehrenburg's memoirs hint about his letter to Stalin, which was published along with the "Jewish Letter," but don't talk about the purported plans for deportation.

Sakharov, Yakovlev and Tarle do not specify the sources of their claims and don't claim to be eyewitnesses. Anastas Mikoyan's edited and published version of the memoir contains one sentence about the planned deportation of the Jews from Moscow, but it is not known whether the original text contains this sentence.

One million copies of a pamphlet titled "Why Jews Must Be Resettled from the Industrial Regions of the Country" may have been published; no copy has been found.

Based on these and other asserted facts, a researcher of Stalin's anti-Semitism, Gennady Kostyrchenko, concluded that there is no credible evidence for the alleged deportation plans, and there is much evidence against their existence. Some other researchers disagree, asserting that the question is still open.

The prevailing opinion of many scholars outside the Soviet Union, in agreement with what Khrushchev said, is that Joseph Stalin intended to use the resulting doctors' trial to launch a massive party purge.