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Title: Stalin's Last Crime : The Plot Against the Jewish Doctors, 1948-1953 by Jonathan Brent, Vladimir Naumov ISBN: 0-06-019524-X Publisher: HarperCollins Pub. Date: 01 April, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $26.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.43 (7 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: Paper trail to nowhere
Comment: For all its admirably meticulous documentation, this book does not pierce the mystery of the Doctors Plot. For all the correspondence, interrogation transcripts and memos excavated from the Soviet archives, one archive remains forever closed: Stalin's implacably bloody mind.
Brent and Naumov chillingly recreate the omni-paranoiac climate among the Soviet leadership in the late Stalin era. These people had survived wildly irrational purges in the Thirties, but they best of all knew on what shaky ground they stood. Any hint of independence, any perceived threat to Stalin's dominance, could land them in the execution cellars.
The trouble is, Stalin rarely confided his plans to paper, so there is no smoking gun to be found. This sheaf of documentation fleshes out what the people involved said, certainly, and when they said it. But as the authors admit, they are not really much closer to learning the purpose of the whole grim charade. We don't even get as much detail in some instances, such as the Stalin-ordered murder of the prominent Soviet theater director Solomon Mikhoels, as was available in some Soviet-era books.
The elusiveness of the authors' task is illustrated by their use of sources. In addition to the archival material, they draw material from the memoirs of Molotov, Khrushchev, and retired NKVD assassin Pavel Sudoplatov. The authors are perfectly above board about the general unreliability of these memorists, so it says something that, even with the availability of the archives, they are reduced to consulting those books.
This admirable but ultimately unsuccessful book demonstrates the enduring mystery of the evil of Stalin.
Rating: 2
Summary: Stalin's Last Crime
Comment: Fascinating well researched subject matter but somewhat ruminative and tedious. I found that could skip through many pages and find that the same events were being described yet again.
Rating: 4
Summary: Interesting and Detailed Examination of Stalinist Terror
Comment: This is a fine-grained look at Stalinist terror. Based on original archival research by the authors and additional new information published primarily by Russian scholars, this book is a careful examination of the so-called Doctor's Plot, the last gasp of Stalin's systematic terrorization of Soviet society. The Doctor's Plot was a conspiracy fabricated by Soviet security organizations purporting to show an organized effort to undermine the Soviet State by destroying its leadership via negligent or murderous medical care. The Plot was viewed previously as an irrational and relatively (compared to the great purges, executions, and deportations of the 20s and 30s) minor aspect of Stalinist state terror. The authors argue that the Doctors' Plot was actually the likely prelude to a planned major convulsion that would reproduce many features of the great purges of the 30s. This is impossible to prove definitively but the authors make a good case that the Doctors' Plot was developed carefully by Stalin to eventually start a series of purges and trials that would result in a large scale terrorization of Soviet society. The authors also place the Plot in the context of other important Stalinist campaigns of the period, notably the anti-Semitic actions that preceded and are to some extent coincident with the events of the Doctors' Plot. In this case, the attack would expand to involve a wholesale assault on Jewish citizens of the Soviet Union. The authors conclude that Stalin pursued this end as a means of maintaining his absolute power and that only his death in 1953 prevented terrible atrocities on a scale with the crimes of the 20s and 30s. The result probably would have been something similar to the Cultural Revolution in China.
A surprising aspect of the book is the apparent demonstration of how relatively difficult it was for Stalin to piece together the Plot. The book contains fascinating details such as Stalin's dissatisfaction with coerced confessions because they were too inconsistent to be used for credible public show trials. There are also remarkable episodes of some figures in the Soviet securiry organizations criticizing documentation of these purported crimes. As the Soviet State matured, it appears that there were expectations that Soviet justice, claimed by Stalin to be essentially perfect, had to meet some realistic and rational expectations. This type of relative resistance probably only increased Stalin's desire to unleash a major purge.
Some prior reviewers comment that this book is not smoothly written. This is a fair comment as the authors use quotations from original documents and much of the text is a very careful analysis of the signficance of the original documents. In my opinion, however, this approach enhances the value of the book. The extensive quotations give readers a very good sense of the Kafkaesque and bizarrely bureaucratic nature of Soviet repression in a way that a more conventional approach cannot accomplish.
The book includes also a discussion of Stalin's death. Following the suggestion of the American scholar Amy Wright, the authors argue that Stalin may have been poisoned by Lavrenti Beria, the out of favor former head of the security services, with the anti-coagulant warfarin. This suggestion based on the fact that Stalin died from a cerebral hemorrhage and had a gastrointestinal hemorrhage during his final illness. This is plausible but his final illness is typical of individuals dying from major hemorrhagic strokes and gastric erosions (so-called stress ulcers) are fairly common in acutely and severely ill individuals and may cause significant gastrointestinal bleeding. It is more likely that Stalin died as a consequence of years of untreated hypertension.
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Title: Gulag : A History by Anne Applebaum ISBN: 0767900561 Publisher: Doubleday Pub. Date: 29 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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Title: Khrushchev: The Man and His Era by William Taubman ISBN: 0393051447 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: March, 2003 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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Title: Stalin's Loyal Executioner: People's Commissar Nikolai Ezhov, 1895-1940 by Marc Jansen, Nikita Petrov ISBN: 0817929029 Publisher: Hoover Inst Pr Pub. Date: 05 April, 2002 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: Beria by Amy Knight ISBN: 0691010935 Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr Pub. Date: 11 December, 1995 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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Title: In Denial: Historians, Communism, & Espionage by John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr ISBN: 1893554724 Publisher: Encounter Books Pub. Date: September, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
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