The Doctors Plot was an anti-Semitic incident that took place in the USSR during the last two years of Joseph Stalin's life. As the Soviet dictator was aging, he became increasingly paranoid of an assassination. While Stalin is famous for his mistrust of Jews, he was also known to be skeptical of doctors. Many doctors in the Soviet Union were Jews and they would become Stalin's direct target.
The fear of Jewish doctors poisoning their patients is a myth that goes back to the medieval times. In the seventeenth century, The University of Vienna's medical faculty officially stated that Jewish law required doctors to kill one out of ten of their Christian patients.
In 1952, nine doctors, six of them Jews, were accused of plotting to murder the Soviet leadership through poisoning. The doctors were arrested and brutally tortured in order to obtain confessions.
Immediately, many Jews were stripped of the jobs, while some were sent to Soviet labor camps. The government-run newspaper, Pravda, was quick to condemn what it called the plot of "corrupt Jewish bourgeois nationalists."
The Soviet administration wrote a public letter begging Stalin to resettle the Jews into Siberia and coerced prominent Soviet Jews into signing their support on the document. At the same time, a pamphlet titled "Why Jews Must Be Resettled from the Industrial Regions of the Country" began to be printed and circulated.
Stalin's plan to purge the Soviet Jews did not succeed, as he died just a few days before the trial of the doctors.
A month after Stalin's death, the Soviet leadership acquitted the doctors of the charges and admitted that the accusations were fabricated.
This was not the first of Stalin's anti-Semitic policies. However, it would have possibly been the most devastating, as only his death stopped the probable deportation of Soviet Jews to Siberia.
