Stalin's Doctors' Plot and the Fate of Soviet Jewry

Instructor: Jonathan Brent

3 sessions, Wednesdays

Tuition: $250
YIVO members: $175

In these three classes, we will discuss the origins and development of Stalin's last great criminal enterprise: the culmination of his so-called postwar Anti-Cosmopolitan/Anti-Semitic Campaign in The Doctors' Plot of 1953, which ended only with his death on March 5 of that year. We will examine Stalin's anti-Semitism, the conditions of Soviet leadership in the wake of WW II and victory over Germany, his declining health, the role of the onset of the Cold War and the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. The course will address many myths and clichés that grew up around The Doctors' Plot. We examine top secret KGB (MGB) documents and others from the Central Committee and Stalin's archive, including the medical report on his death which in the eyes of reliable medical specialists in the U.S. suggests he may have been poisoned.

Books to purchase: 

Stalin's Last Crime, Jonathan Brent & Vladimir Naumov, HarperCollins
Stalin's Secret Pogrom, Joshua Rubinstein & Vladimir Naumov, Yale University Press

Learn more about the Doctor’s Plot in the YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe.

Jonathan Brent is the Executive Director of The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City. From 1991 to 2009 he was Editorial Director and Associate Director of Yale Press. He is the founder of the world acclaimed Annals of Communism series, which he established at Yale Press in 1991. Brent is the co-author of Stalin’s Last Crime: The Plot Against the Jewish Doctors, 1948-1953 (Harper-Collins, 2003) and Inside the Stalin Archives (Atlas Books, 2008). He is now working on a biography of the Soviet-Jewish writer Isaac Babel. Brent teaches history and literature at Bard College.