[Sharing Lights]

Around that time, Abakumov was replaced by Semyon Ignatiev, who further intensified the anti-semitic campaign.

On January 13, 1953, the widest anti-semitic affair in the Soviet Union—that later came to be known as Doctors' plot—was initiated with an article in Pravda. A number of the country's prominent Jewish doctors were accused of poisoning top Soviet leaders and arrested. Concurrently, hysterical anti-semitic propaganda campaign sprang in the mass-media. Altogether, 37 doctors (most of them non-Jewish, 17 of them were Jewish) were arrested, and MGB, on Stalin's orders, started to prepare for deportation of the entire Jewish population to Russia's far east.

Had Stalin lived, the whole, Jewish population of the Soviet Union would have been sentenced to the, almost, concentration camp mode of living in the regions of Sibir.

Stalin feared that Jews were too smart for him and would have dethroned him.

He decided to finish what Hitler didn't finish.

Just before the plan was implemented, Stalin died suddenly.

There was no evidence of the violent death or foul play.
It is s believed that there was a Higher Forces' interference, as Stalin contemplated the destruction of the whole nation of one People in his domain.

Certain prophesies came to life.

Amazingly, as ruthless Beria was, himself, days after Stalin's death, Beria freed all the arrested doctors, announced that the entire matter was fabricated, as it was, completely, fabricated, and indeed arrested the MGB functionaries directly involved.

After Stalin
Stalin died on March 5 1953, four days after collapsing during the night following a dinner with Beria and other Soviet leaders. The political memoirs of Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov, published in 1993, claim that Beria boasted to Molotov that he had poisoned Stalin, although no hard evidence has ever been produced to support this assertion. There is evidence, however, that for many hours after Stalin was found unconscious, he was denied medical help. It is possible that all the Soviet leaders agreed to allow Stalin, whom they all feared, to die.

After Stalin's death Beria was appointed First Deputy Prime Minister and reappointed head of the MVD, which he merged with the MGB. His close ally Malenkov was the new Prime Minister and initially the most powerful man in the post-Stalin leadership. Beria was the second most powerful leader and, given Malenkov's lack of real leadership qualities, was in a position to become the power behind the throne and ultimately leader himself. Khrushchev became Party Secretary, which was seen as a less important post than the Prime Ministership.

Beria was at the forefront of liberalization after Stalin's death. Beria publicly denounced the Doctors' plot as a "fraud," investigated and solved the murder of Solomon Mikhoels, and released over a million political prisoners from labour camps. In April he signed a decree banning the use of torture in Soviet prisons. He also signaled a more liberal policy toward the non-Russian nationalities in the Soviet Union. He persuaded the Presidium (as the Politburo had been renamed) and the Council of Ministers to urge the Communist regime in East Germany to allow liberal economic and political reforms. Beria maneuvered to marginalize the role of the party apparatus in the decision-making process in policy and economic matters.

Some writers have held that Beria's liberal policies after Stalin's death were a tactic to maneuver himself into power. Even if he was sincere, they argue, Beria's past made it impossible for him to lead a liberalizing regime in the Soviet Union, a role which later fell to Khrushchev. The essential task of Soviet reformers was to bring the secret police under party control, and Beria could not do this since the police were the basis of his own power.

Others have argued that he had represented a truly reformist agenda, and that his eventual removal from power delayed a radical political and economic reform in the Soviet Union by almost forty years.


"Beria: Enemy of the people". TIME magazine cover, July 20 1953.

Given his record, it is not surprising that the other party leaders were suspicious of Beria's motives in all this. The alliance between Beria and Malenkov was opposed by Khrushchev, but he was initially unable to challenge the Beria-Malenkov axis. His opportunity came in June 1953 when demonstrations against the Communist regime in East Germany broke out in East Berlin (see Workers Uprising of 1953 in East Germany). There was a suspicion that the practical Beria was willing to trade the reunification of Germany and end the cold war, for massive aid from the United States such as had been received in World War II. The East German demonstrations convinced Molotov, Malenkov and Nikolai Bulganin that Beria's policies were dangerous and destabilizing to Soviet power. Days after the events in Germany, Khrushchev persuaded the other leaders to support a party coup against Beria, whose principal ally Malenkov quickly decided to abandon him.