“The Doctors’ Case” was remembered at the Gulag Museum – Kommersant
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On April 4, the exhibition “The Case of Doctors” opened at the State Museum of Gulag History with the support of the Russian Jewish Congress (REC). “The Doctors’ Case” is one of the political trials in the USSR associated with the criminal prosecution in 1952–1953 of a number of medical workers of the Kremlin Medical and Sanatorium Administration. Kremlin doctors were accused of “sabotage treatment,” in particular, the Secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, Andrei Zhdanov. The doctors involved in the case were declared terrorists and American agents. By February 1953, the total number of people arrested in the “doctors’ case” was 37 people (28 doctors and 9 members of their families). After Stalin’s death on March 5, 1953, by decision of the Presidium of the CPSU Central Committee, the doctors’ case was closed; on April 3, all those arrested were released, reinstated and completely rehabilitated.
The exhibition presents photographs and archival documents, personal belongings and transcripts of interrogations of those involved in the “Doctors’ Case,” as well as media publications and letters from Soviet citizens, illustrating the reaction and sentiment that gripped the public after the accusation, and then after the complete rehabilitation of the doctors. “The Doctors’ Plot was supposed to be a prologue to a new wave of Stalinist repressions – this time on a national basis, against Jews,” RJC official representative Mikhail Savin told Kommersant. “But, as has happened more than once in Jewish history, a happy coincidence helped to avoid this.” Mr. Savin believes that for decades, right up to perestroika, Jews in the USSR continued to feel the stigmatizing consequences of the “Doctors’ Plot.” “Our task is to remember the lessons of the “doctors’ case.” The exhibition is one of the winners of the IV competition of museum and exhibition grants of the Russian Jewish Congress, it was created with the support of the RJC.”
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