Stalins Last Crime or Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher

Stalin's Last Crime: The Plot Against the Jewish Doctors, 1948-1953

Author: Jonathan Brent

A new investigation, based on previously unseen KGB documents, reveals the startling truth behind Stalin's last great conspiracy.

On January 13, 1953, a stunned world learned that a vast conspiracy had been unmasked among Jewish doctors in the USSR to murder Kremlin leaders. Mass arrests quickly followed. The Doctors' Plot, as this alleged scheme came to be called, was Stalin's last crime.

In the fifty years since Stalin's death many myths have grown up about the Doctors' Plot. Did Stalin himself invent the conspiracy against the Jewish doctors or was it engineered by subordinates who wished to eliminate Kremlin rivals? Did Stalin intend a purge of all Jews from Moscow, Leningrad, and other major cities, which might lead to a Soviet Holocaust? How was this plot related to the cold war then dividing Europe, and the hot war in Korea? Finally, was the Doctors' Plot connected with Stalin's fortuitous death?

Brent and Naumov have explored an astounding arra of previously unknown, top-secret documents from the KGB, the presidential archives, and other state and party archives in order to probe the mechanism of on of Stalin's greatest intrigues -- and to tell for the first time the incredible full story of the Doctors' Plot.

Publishers Weekly

Though the Great Terror of the late 1930s is widely viewed as the height of Stalin's purges, the number of arrests actually peaked in the early 1950s, and Stalin was planning hundreds of thousands more on the eve of his death in 1953. These arrests were spurred by the "doctors' plot," a supposed conspiracy among Jewish doctors to kill members of the government and destroy the U.S.S.R. at the behest of the Americans. Brent, the editorial director of Yale University Press, and Naumov, executive secretary of Russia's Presidential Commission for the Rehabilitation of Repressed Persons, trace how Stalin himself put together false evidence of the "doctors' plot," which was far more than a simple exercise in anti-Semitism and paranoid senility. According to the authors, Stalin intended to use the "doctors' plot" to accomplish several goals: to purge his Ministry of Security and upper ranks of government; to defuse the potential threat posed by Soviet Jews, many of whom had ties to the U.S. and the new state of Israel; and to provide fuel for an armed conflict with the U.S. Brent and Naumov provide a riveting view of Stalin's modus operandi: over the course of several years, he patiently and meticulously gathered forced confessions that would weave together unrelated events-the death of a top Party official here, the arrest of a Zionist doctor there-into a story of massive conspiracy. One of the reasons for his great care, the book contends, is that the popular mood had subtly shifted in the postwar era; revolutionary fervor had died down, there was a desire for legal legitimacy and, in contrast to their 1930s counterparts, top bureaucrats were loath to convict without evidence. One wishes that the authors had elaborated on fascinating points like these. Their narrative is a complicated one, full of minor characters and bureaucratic missives, and, by necessity, most of this narrowly focused book is taken up with close readings of documents. (Apr.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

These two publications deal with similar topics but have different areas of focus. In Stalin's Last Crime, Brent, editorial director of Yale University Press, which publishes the distinguished "Annals of Communism" series, and Naumov, executive secretary of the Presidential Commission for the Rehabilitation of Repressed Persons in Moscow, have researched materials previously buried in KGB archives to make the startling but long-suspected assertion that Stalin was poisoned by Politburo members and allowed to die. Their focus is the "doctors' plot" that Stalin concocted to implicate Jewish doctors in the deaths of two top Kremlin leaders in 1945 and 1948. These incidents were tangled together with his paranoid suspicions that the Jews and the Americans were planning to invade Russia (and nuke Moscow), which he used as a cover to purge the MGB (precursor to the KGB). As Stalin fabricated the plot, he had concentration camps built to hold the Jews of Moscow and then all of Russia, and he planned to detain or deport the entire Jewish population. In contrast, Lustiger's Stalin and the Jews begins with the repression of the Jews from the time of Catherine II (the Great) through the tsars of the 19th century to the known anti-Semitism of Nicholas II as background for its own account of the "doctors plot "and the plight of the Jews in Soviet Russia. The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAFC) was established in 1942 to muster Jewish support for the war against Hitler's Germany. But its remarkable success was not enough to convince Stalin, who saw demons in the organization's leaders and, with forced confessions, false evidence, and compliant underlings, had the JAFC leadership murdered after a secret mock trial. Both books are well researched and complement each other. But while Brent and Naumov do a great deal of guessing, asserting what Stalin probably did, Lustiger-a survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald and an independent publisher and writer-is less interpretive. Both books are recommended for all libraries with Russian history collections.-Harry Willems, Southeast Kansas Lib. Syst., Iola Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A worthy, attention-getting study revealing Stalin's plans to revive state terror after WWII, this time with Soviet Jews as the target and perhaps a war with the US on the horizon. The pretext for the new pogrom, write Yale University Press editor Brent and Russian historian Naumov, was the 1948 death of Communist Party apparatchik A.A. Zhdanov, to all appearances the victim of a bad heart and a bad lifestyle. The Stalin government alleged, however, that Zhdanov was the victim of a widespread conspiracy on the part of Jewish doctors to destroy the Kremlin leadership one party boss at a time. "Fantastic stories circulated," write Brent and Naumov, "that Jewish doctors were poisoning Russian children, injecting them with diphtheria, and killing newborn infants in maternity hospitals." Stalin himself charged that the "Jewish doctors" were part of a larger plot organized by the capitalist powers to invade the Soviet Union, and he apparently planned a retaliatory war that in at least one scenario would have brought Soviet troops to America's West Coast. Over the next few years, hundreds of doctors were arrested and imprisoned, most of the members of Jewish organizations such as the wartime Jewish Antifascist Committee were executed, and plans were laid to create a special gulag for Jews. When Stalin died in 1953--among the most headline-making elements here is the suggestion that he was slowly poisoned by his lieutenant, Beria--the notion of a Jewish plot against the state was quietly dismissed and the doctors freed. That Stalin was using the affair as an excuse to reinstate terror as a political instrument is made clear, the authors suggest, by the fact that not only Jews were specifictargets, but also elements of the Kremlin leadership, members of the state security apparatus, and indeed anyone who looked sideways at the Great Man in his last days. More evidence for the essential evil of the Stalin regime, joining such recent studies as Stйphane Courtois's Black Book of Communism (1999) and Anne Applebaum's Gulag (p. 196).

Go to: The Machiavellian Moment or War and Peace in the Middle East

Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: A Political Marriage

Author: Nicholas Wapshott

New details of the remarkable relationship between two leaders who teamed up to change history.

It's well known that Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were close allies and kindred political spirits. During their eight overlapping years as U.S. president and UK prime minister, they stood united for free markets, low taxes, and a strong defense against communism. But just how close they really were will surprise you.

Nicholas Wapshott finds that the Reagan-Thatcher relationship was much deeper than an alliance of mutual interests. Drawing on extensive interviews and hundreds of recently declassified private letters and telephone calls, he depicts a more complex, intimate, and occasionally combative relationship than has previously been revealed.

Publishers Weekly

White House press secretary James Brady once declared "[i]t took a crowbar" to separate President Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher. Biographer Wapshott (Thatcher) assesses the nature of that sometimes testy but always close freindship. As Reagan put it, they were "soul mates when it came to reducing government and expanding economic freedom." Not content with biography, Wapshott also provides a political history of the post-WWII period and the 1980s. Elected under similar circumstances, the two faced many of the same trials: assassination attempts, striking workers and tensions with the Soviet Union. Wapshott's attention to Reagan and Thatcher's compatibility sometimes comes at the expense of a deeper analysis of the ideas that united them. On their economic conservatism, Wapshott is insightful and exhaustive; on the ideas driving their foreign policy, he is less thorough, and more detailed comparison of Thatcher's cold Methodism and Reagan's sense of God's purpose after his attempted assassination would have been welcome. Throughout, Wapshott favors the nitty-gritty, painting a portrait of the friendship that shaped the 1980s and the alliance that won the Cold War. (Nov.)

Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information

National Review

I can recommend a rattling good read with lots of new material on their previously private meetings and correspondence.

New York Sun

Briskly written, perceptive, and, ultimately, moving.

Bob Nardini - Library Journal

When Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher met for the first time in 1975 in London, writes veteran biographer Wapshott (Peter O'Toole), the moment was nearly as significant as the first meeting between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill in 1941. Thatcher was then the newly elected Conservative Party leader, while Reagan, just done with his second and final term as governor of California, had set a course for the White House. This dual biography centers on the personal friendship and political partnership between Thatcher and Reagan, who, as prime minister and president, were of course to alter the politics of Britain and the United States as leaders of the West in the final years of the Cold War. Wapshott wrote an earlier biography of Thatcher, although most of his books have been on actors and entertainers. Here he writes just well enough to intermittently engage a popular readership, his primary audience. He relies mainly on secondary sources, his research is too thin, and his thesis too overreaching for academic readers. Optional for public libraries.

What People Are Saying

Tina Brown
Nicholas Wapshott, with access to their unpublished correspondence, gives us a nuanced—and immensely readable— portrait of how Reagan and Thatcher resolved their differences in leading the world out of incipient chaos. This is a shrewd and affecting portrait. (Tina Brown, author of The Diana Chronicles)

Table of Contents:

Introduction     ix
Above the Shop     1
The World of Work     22
A Taste of Power     46
The Road to the Top     70
Success at the Polls     101
The Honeymooners     126
A Lovers' Tiff     142
Outcast of the Islands     160
Cold Warriors     186
Strikebusters     209
From Russia with Love     226
The Victors     251
The Merry Widow     272
Epilogue     289
Acknowledgments     295
Notes     297
Select Bibliography     315
Index     321