cover image Stalin's War Against the Jews: The Doctors' Plot and the Soviet Solution

Stalin's War Against the Jews: The Doctors' Plot and the Soviet Solution

Louis Rapoport. First Glance Books, $22.95 (318pp) ISBN 978-0-02-925821-7

The notorious ``Doctors' Plot'' was launched in January 1953 when Pravda announced that nine Kremlin doctors, most of them Jewish, had medically murdered two of Stalin's top aides and were part of a Zionist-imperialist conspiracy to assassinate Russia's leaders. A total fabrication by Stalin himself, the Doctors' Plot, as Jerusalem Post reporter Rapoport here reveals, was the first step in Stalin's plan for the mass deportation of Russia's two million Jews to gulag concentration camps; only the dictator's death in the early spring of 1953 prevented this genocide from occurring. A remarkable feat of historical excavation, this important, vividly gripping, exhaustively researched account also links the Doctors' Plot to Stalin's plans for a vast purge of the Communist Party and, quite possibly, to his apocalyptic preparations for a third world war. Rapoport illuminates Stalin's Hitler-like fixation on the Jews and sets the Doctors' Plot against a backdrop of mass terror, show trials, pogroms, decimation of nationalities and Soviet prewar cooperation with Hitler in exterminating Jews. (Sept.)