The Russian Jewish Congress celebrated the 70th anniversary of the termination of the “doctors’ cause”

The Russian Jewish Congress (RJC), together with the State Museum of the History of the Gulag, held a memorial evening dedicated to the 70th anniversary of the termination of the “doctors’ cause”. On April 3, 1953, less than a month after the death of Joseph Stalin, all the defendants in the case were released, and the next day it was officially announced that the confessions of the accused were obtained using “inadmissible methods of investigation”, in fact – under torture.

From 1948 to 1953, a campaign against cosmopolitanism took place in the USSR, which acquired anti-Semitic outlines. Against its background, the case of “pesticians” arose. The reason for it was the letters written in 1948 by the head of the electrocardiography room of the Kremlin hospital, Lidia Timashuk, to the USSR Ministry of State Security and the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, in which she accused the leadership of the Kremlin’s medical and sanitary department of the deliberate murder of Andrei Zhdanov, secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks. Lydia Timashuk told law enforcement agencies that she diagnosed comrade Zhdanov with a myocardial infarction based on an electrocardiogram, and the leadership of the Kremlin hospital forced her to write a different diagnosis and prescribed treatment for the patient, which led to his death on August 31, 1948. Four years of Lydia Timashuk’s letters went unheeded, but in August 1952 she was unexpectedly summoned to the MGB and asked to tell in detail what happened at Andrei Zhdanov’s dacha shortly before his death. After that, a criminal case was initiated against a group of prominent Soviet medical workers who were accused of conspiracy and murder of a number of Soviet political figures. Most of the accused were Jews. The doctors involved in the case were called terrorists and American agents. After the case was closed, all those arrested were released, reinstated and fully rehabilitated.

Psychologist Alexander Asmolov, co-chairman of the Holocaust Research and Education Center Alla Gerber, historian Lev Simkin, TV presenter Vladislav Flyarkovsky, executive director of REK Anna Bokshitskaya, Plenipotentiary Minister of the Israeli Embassy in the Russian Federation Ronen Kraus, playwright Alexander Gelman came to remember the tragic history of the “doctors’ case”. The evening was hosted by journalist Leonid Mlechin. The participants of the evening were approached by historians and descendants of those involved in the “doctors’ case”, including Viktor Valentinovich Kogan-Yasny, Candidate of Chemical Sciences, the grandson of Viktor Moiseevich Kogan-Yasny, a scientist and creator of domestic insulin. Part of the materials of the “doctors’ case” was presented by the actors of the Dmitry Brusnikin Workshop. Historian Gennady Kostyrchenko recalled that the “doctors’ case” was preceded by the murder in 1948 of the chairman of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, theater director Solomon Mikhoels. “The “doctors’ case” is a sad page in the history of Soviet Jews, so the date when it was safely turned over is important for all of us,” Mikhail Savin, an official representative of the REC, told Kommersant. “Our task is to preserve the memory of the tragedies that any manifestations of anti-Semitism.

Pavel Korobov