Vadim Birstein - The Perversion of Knowledge

Lina Stern was lucky: She received three and a half years’ imprisonment and five years of exile to the town of Jambul in Central Asia (Kazakhstan), from which she returned after Stalin’s death. 253It was quite unusual that she had not been expelled from the academy, and because of that, soon she was appointed head of a laboratory at the Academy Institute of Biophysics.

The relatives of the executed were arrested and exiled to Kazakhstan. They were not told that their loved ones were already dead. 254On the whole, about 110 people were arrested and persecuted in 1948–1952 in connection with the JAC case. 255During all these years, there was a massive propaganda campaign in the Soviet press against “Cosmopolitans without a Motherland” (as the Jews were called). Step by step, professionals of Jewish origin were cleansed from their jobs. 256

However, the JAC case sealed the career of Minister Abakumov. As I have already mentioned, on July 12, 1951, Abakumov was arrested. He was accused of “treason against the Motherland committed by a military person” (Article 58-1b of the Russian Criminal Code). 257Also arrested were the main creators of the JAC case and many other political cases of the late 1940s: head of the OVD Department, Major General Aleksandr Leonov and his deputies, Komarov, Likhachev, and Schwartzman, as well as the head of Abakumov’s secretariat, Ivan Chernov and his deputy Broverman. The list of accusations against Abakumov was prepared by the new head of the OVD Department, Mikhail Ryumin (see Chapter 2). Ryumin’s main accusation was that Abakumov prohibited him, Ryumin, from interrogating the arrested professor Yakov Etinger about an alleged plot to murder a candidate of the Politburo, Aleksei Shcherbakov, and the intentional placement of Etinger in severe conditions in Lefortovo Prison, where Etinger died without revealing information about the “Jewish plot” of medical doctors.

Dr. Yakov Etinger (1887–1951), professor of the Second Moscow Medical Institute, was arrested on November 18, 1950. He had been singled out before that by MGB investigators. Etinger regularly visited the JAC, where he had read international Jewish periodicals. During an interrogation in 1949, he had been mentioned as one of the leaders of Jewish nationalists in Soviet medicine by the arrested JAC secretary, a Jewish poet named Isaak Fefer: “His [Etinger’s] nationalistic views were entirely shared by the Academician B. I. Zbarsky, Professor of the Second Moscow Medical Institute A. B. Topchan, Director of the Clinic of Remedial Nutrition M. I. Pevzner, senior general practitioner of the Soviet Army M. S. Vovsi…” 258In fact, Abram Topchan had numerous positions: chief doctor of the Moscow Gradskaya (City) Hospital, director of the Clinic of Urology, and from 1937, rector of the Second Moscow Medical Institute. 259As for the last person, Miron Vovsi (1897–1960), he was not only a member of the Medical Academy, chief therapist of the Soviet army, a consultant-therapist of the Kremlin Medical Directorate, and the editor in chief of the journal Klinicheskaya Meditsina (Clinical Medicine) but also a cousin of Solomon Mikhoels, who had already been assassinated. 260

This was the first list of individuals later considered by Ryumin as members of the “Doctors’ Plot.” Also, the MGB taped “anti-Soviet” conversations of Dr. Etinger with his son and Professor Zbarsky. During interrogations, Etinger was incriminated with “slanderous inventions” about Shcherbakov and a Politburo member, Malenkov. Etinger’s wife, Rebekka Viktorova, who was also a doctor (arrested on June 16, 1951), and his stepson (arrested on October 17, 1950) were forced to testify against him. However, Etinger denied all accusations and refused to “confess.” On January 5, 1951, he was transferred to Lefortovo Prison, where he was put in a wet cell where cold air was pumped in. After four months of such “treatment,” on March 2, 1951, Etinger died. As usual, the prison’s death certificate stated that death was caused by a “heart attack.” 261

On March 1, 1952, Rebekka Viktorova was sentenced by the OSO to ten years’ imprisonment for “anti-Soviet propaganda” (Article 58-10, pt. I). 262At first she was put in MVD Prison No. 3 in Novocherkassk, whence she was transferred to Vladimir Prison on February 14, 1953.

Etinger’s case allowed Ryumin to finalize a list of sixteen high-ranking doctors of Jewish origin who were allegedly “Jewish nationalists who expressed their discontent with Soviet power and slandered the national policy of the Communist (Bolshevik) Party and the Soviet State.” Of course, the list included the above-mentioned Zbarsky, Topchan, Pevzner, Vovsi, and many others. These doctors were doomed, and Ryumin got his chance to play against his superior, Minister Abakumov.

At the same time, based on the false testimony of one of Abakumov’s men, Lev Schwartzman (he was arrested on July 13, 1951), the investigation of the “Jewish plot within the MGB” started. Before his arrest, Schwartzman usually worked with Komarov writing falsified transcripts of the interrogated prisoner, whom Komarov forced to sign under torture. 263As I will describe in Chapter 2, beginning in September 1951, practically all MGB colonels and generals of Jewish extraction were arrested, and officers of the lower ranks were expelled from the MGB. A real MGB doctor-killer, Grigory Mairanovsky, and one of his supervisors, Naum Eitingon, were among the arrested, and a case against “the Jewish Doctor-poisoner” Mairanovsky was under investigation.

During that same September in 1951, Etinger’s son was brought back from a Far Eastern labor camp to Lefortovo Prison in Moscow and forced to testify about the existence of the “Doctors’ Plot.” 264The rest was a technical problem for Ryumin. The development of events was under Stalin’s personal control. In January 1952, he threatened the new MGB minister, Ignatiev, that if he did not “uncover the terrorists, the American agents among the doctors, he would follow Abakumov.” 265Stalin also ordered the arrest of Dr. R. Ryzhikov, deputy director of the Barvikha Governmental Sanatorium, to uncover the “criminal plans” of Dr. Vladimir Vinogradov, senior general practitioner of the Kremlin Medical Directorate. Further, during the interrogations, Likhachev, a former deputy head of the OVD Department, gave testimony in support of Ryumin’s version that Abakumov had patronized the plot of Kremlin’s Jewish doctors. In September 1952, Minister Ignatiev showed Stalin a statement written by Ryumin stating that investigation materials showed that with a great degree of certainty, Jewish doctors had killed Shcherbakov and Zhdanov. After this, the MGB received Stalin’s sanction for arrests of doctors. 266

From October through December 1952, high-ranking medical professors (many from the Kremlin Hospital) were arrested. On January 13, 1953, fifteen of them were accused in the press of conspiracy. Members of this “Doctors’ Plot” supposedly prescribed harmful treatments that had caused the death of such Party leaders as Politburo member Andrei Zhdanov and many generals. Ten of the accused were Jews. The government statement said:

It has been established that all these killer-doctors, these monsters in human form, tramping the holy banner of science and desecrating the honor of the man of science, were hired agents of foreign intelligence services. Most of the participants in the terrorist group (M. S. Vovsi, B. B. Kogan, A. I. Feldman, A. M. Grinstein, Ya. G. Etinger, and others) had ties with the international Jewish bourgeois nationalist organization Joint, established by American intelligence services for the alleged purpose of providing material aid to Jews in other countries. The true purpose of this organization is to conduct extensive terrorist and other subversive activities in many countries, including the Soviet Union, under the guidance of American intelligence services. The arrested Vovsi told investigators that he had received instructions “to exterminate the leading cadres of the USSR” from the USA through the Joint organization, via Dr. Shimeliovich [i.e., through the JAC]… Other participants in the terrorist group (V. N. Vinogradov, M. B. Kogan, P. I. Yegorov) proved to be longtime agents of the British intelligence service. The investigation will be completed in the near future. 267