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).262 At 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.263 As 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.”264 The 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.”265 Stalin 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
Of these doctors, Boris Kogan (1896–1967) was a professor at the First Moscow Medical Institute and a consultant at the Barvikha Sanatorium of the Central Committee. Dr. Feldman (1880–1960) was a professor-otolaryngologist who headed a department at the Moscow Regional Scientific Research Clinical Institute. From 1936–1952, he was also a consultant at the Kremlin Medical Directorate.268 Professor-therapist P. Yegorov (1899–?) headed the Kremlin Medical Directorate. All those mentioned in this text, except Vinogradov and Yegorov, were Jews.
Ryumin’s team included even Stalin in the list of the supposed future victims of doctor-killers. During new interrogations, Vovsi and Kogan were forced to sign “testimonies” that in July 1952, they agreed to direct killings of Stalin, Beria, and Malenkov.269 As documents in the former KGB archives demonstrate, the handcuffed and beaten Dr. Vovsi, after the threats by Ryumin and his team that “[w]e’ll quarter you, hang you, impale you,” “confessed” that he received orders from the “bosses overseas,” that is, American Zionists.270 After the same treatment and Ryumin’s threat to torture him with two torches at the same time, Professor Yegorov admitted that he had “disabled” the secretary of the French Communist Party, Maurice Thorez, and had “killed” Georgi Dimitrov, the leader of the Bulgarian Communists, as well as Andrei Zhdanov and Aleksei Shcherbakov, and had damaged the health of many other Soviet and foreign Communist leaders.271 The minutes of all interrogations were sent directly to Stalin.
In January–February 1953, a new wave of arrests followed. On the whole, thirty-seven were arrested between the end of 1952 and the beginning of 1953 in connection with the Doctors’ Plot case.272 Of those, twenty-eight were doctors, and the others were members of their families. Natalia Rapoport, the daughter of Yakov Rapoport, one of the arrested doctors, recently recalled: “As I found out later, every night [my parents] were waiting for being arrested and visited their rare friends [who had not been arrested yet]. They gave them some money and warm clothes for me. In case of my mother’s arrest someone [of these friends] would send me to her to a labor camp…”273
In early 1953, my family lived in a big apartment building in the downtown area of Moscow. Like most Soviet families, we had a room in a “communal apartment.” My grandmother and uncle lived in the next room. Five other families occupied the remaining five rooms of the apartment. At the end of 1952, my grandmother, who was a doctor and a Jew, lost her job. Many other high-ranking doctors lived in our huge apartment building. During that spring, almost each night somebody was arrested. Each night my parents waited for the MGB’s knock at our door. The MGB could arrest my father, a biologist and an anti-Lysenkoist, or my grandmother, a doctor. My parents discussed in whispers something that I could not understand at the time: what to do in case of possible deportation.