Svetlana denied that her father had ever pulled her onto the dance floor by the hair, but this birthday party would turn out to be her last encounter with him. Stalin was certainly drunk. Perhaps he was gloating. He was in the midst of engineering his last and most terrifying ideological campaign, the “Doctors’ Plot.”
On January 13, 1953, the TASS news agency published a government statement officially announcing the plot.
From the latest news.
Arrest of a group of subversive doctors.
Some time ago, the bodies of State Security uncovered a group of terrorist doctors who set themselves the task of cutting short the lives of prominent public figures in the Soviet Union by administering harmful treatments.41
The editorial in Pravda that day was titled “Evil Spies and Murderers Masked as Medical Professors.” The “killer doctors” were called “murderers in white coats.” Nine doctors, six of them Jewish, were identified by name.
Dr. Yakov Rapoport, a distinguished Soviet pathologist, was arrested on February 3. In a memoir, he described the atmosphere of the time:
We were aware of a marked thickening of the political and social atmosphere, a thickening oppression that was near the point of suffocation. The feeling of alarm, the premonition of dire and inevitable disaster, achieved a nightmare intensity at times, supported, moreover, by actual facts.42
The public, whipped into a frenzy by news reports, cursed the bloody killers and thirsted for revenge. People refused to be treated by Jewish doctors.
Dr. Rapoport was arrested as a murderer and a member of an anti-Soviet terrorist organization. Like all the doctors, he was submitted to a “secret lifting,” the MGB* term for a sudden disappearance. The MGB men came for the targets in the middle of the night, searched all their belongings, and confiscated savings passbooks, bonds, and any money. This was a strategy to impoverish the families in order to see which fellow conspirators would come to their aid. Encountering the wife or children of an arrested person on the street, people averted their eyes. The prisoners were carted off to Lubyanka or Lefortovo prisons. Having no clue as to what was going on, the remaining family members waited in terror for the secret police to return.
Dr. Rapoport remembered that “initially the Doctors’ Plot had no nationalistic coloring; both Russian and Jewish doctors were implicated. But before long it was given an anti-Semitic slant.”43 Jews could be found in all strata of Soviet society, and Russia’s long history of anti-Semitism could be counted on to induce people to believe any slanders against them. All Stalin needed was the doctors’ confessions. The well-tried strategy was simple: “If they confess, it must be true.”
It is also virtually certain that a “Writers’ Plot” would have come next. A report from a source at the Writers Union, sent to the Central Committee’s Department of Propaganda, claimed that the Literary Gazette “pandered to Jews and was dominated by Jews.” Its editor, the well-known writer and war hero Konstantin Simonov, was purportedly Simonovich, born to a Jewish family and the son of a publican on the estate of Countess Obolenskaya. In fact, Simonov was not Jewish. He was the son of Princess, not Countess, Obolenskaya and his father was Mikhail Simonov, a colonel in the tsar’s army. Simonov laughed when he heard this slander, but he would soon grow very concerned to discover that he was identified as head of a group of people in Moscow’s literary world connected to the cosmopolitan conspiracy. His editor warned him: “There are some bastards out to get you who want to dig your grave, come what may. And just remember, absurd though it is, it was all said with such seriousness that I couldn’t believe my ears.”44 This was how one became a target.
Svetlana recalled the atmosphere of that last year. “During the winter of 1952–1953 the darkness thickened beyond all endurance.”45 It was “terribly trying for me, as for everyone. The whole country was gasping for air. Things were unbearable for everyone.”46 So many relatives, friends, and acquaintances were in jail or camps: her aunts and cousin for “babbling” too much, Polina Molotov for Zionist plotting, and Lena Stern as a member of the Jewish anti-Fascist Committee. She had consulted Stern for advice on the treatment of tubercular meningitis for the child of a close friend.47
Svetlana listened as Valechka, her father’s faithful housekeeper, told her that Stalin was “exceedingly distressed at the turn events took.” Valechka had heard him say that “he didn’t believe the doctors were ‘dishonest’ and that the only evidence against them was the ‘reports.’”48 But even Svetlana must have known by now that this was pro forma for her father. Stalin, the consummate actor, pretended to sit back as others brought reports to him of enemies, whom he could not refuse to punish, while of course he was the puppet master manipulating the strings behind the scenery.
At the time, Svetlana heard rumors that a third world war with the West was imminent. A friend of her brother, an artillery colonel, told her, “Now it’s the time to begin, to fight and to conquer, while your father is still alive. At present we can win.”49 Was this war plot truly afoot? Vasili’s friends were hotheads and unreliable, but George Kennan, the American ambassador to the USSR, was expelled after only four months. Still, it is unlikely that Stalin was planning outright war. Some historians believe he was in the process of organizing a major deportation of Jews, though this is based only on hearsay. Whatever was going on, the doctors’ fates hung in the balance. And the pressure was unbearable. Everyone was afraid to speak. Everyone was silent, “very still as before a storm.”50
And then Stalin died.
Svetlana at her father’s funeral in March 1953.
(Svetlana Alliluyeva private collection; courtesy of Chrese Evans)
On March 2, Svetlana was summoned from her French class at the Academy of Social Sciences and told that a car was waiting outside to take her to Kuntsevo. She felt a sudden vertigo. No one but her father ever phoned her from Kuntsevo. Something was wrong—she hadn’t been able to reach him in days. When she’d phoned, the guards told her not to come, it was not a suitable time, and to stop phoning.1
On the evening of the first, she’d felt so uneasy that she’d driven to the dacha of her friend Lucia Shvernik. They’d watched a silent movie called The Station Master, based on a story by Pushkin in which an old man dies at the roadside searching for his long-lost daughter. When the daughter finally returns to her village, she finds only her father’s grave. “I wept over that movie,” Svetlana recalled. “It absolutely hit me. [My father] was calling me. It was a silent call. I was probably the only person in the world he would have called for.”2 The comment is poignant but hardly true. As he lay dying on the evening of March 1, it is unlikely that Stalin was sending a silent call for help to Svetlana, however much she may have longed for him to do so. It is heartwrenching that she imagined he was.
Everything to do with Stalin involves some mystery or intrigue. His slow death is no exception. What actually happened in his last days? The broad outline is as follows.
On the night of February 27, Stalin went to the Bolshoi Theater to attend a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. The next day was Svetlana’s twenty-seventh birthday, but her father did not invite her to accompany him.
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