Murder in the Kremlin

Early one morning last week, Radio Moscow announced that the Kremlin had a "chronicle" to read to the world, a word reserved by Radio Moscow for important official documents. There followed one of the most important items of news to flow out of the barricaded citadel of Communism since World War II.

". . . Soviet security organs," said the voice, "uncovered a terrorist group of physicians who, by prescribing harmful treatment, sought to cut short the lives of Soviet leaders." Nine doctors, the cream of the Soviet medical profession, had "confessed" to murdering two Politburo members and to trying to murder top officers of the Soviet army and navy.

Heads to Fall? "It has been established that all these doctor-assassins, these fiends in human shape . . . were hired for eign intelligence agents," said the communique. The plotters deliberately cut short the life of Alexander Sergeevich Shcherbakov, the Kremlin's astute politi cal organizer of the Red army in World War II and one of the youngest (43) members of the Politburo when he died in 1945. They also "took advantage of the illness" of Strongman Andrei Zhdanov, creator of the postwar Cominform and the rumored heir to Stalin, who died in mysterious circumstances in 1948 at the age of 52. "The criminals . . . incorrectly established the diagnosis of his ailment, concealing that he suffered from myocardial infarction, prescribed a regime that was contraindicated in the case of so serious an illness, and thereby brought about the death of Comrade Zhdanov.

"The criminals sought first and foremost to undermine the health of Soviet military leaders, to put them out of commission and weaken the country's defenses . . . But their arrest upset their fiendish plans." Among other intended victims, according to Moscow: Marshal Alexander Vasilevsky, Minister of War; Marshal Ivan Konev, commander of Soviet army ground forces; Admiral Gordei Levchenko, Deputy Minister of the Navy; and General Sergei Shtemenko, chief of army staff.

The doctors had also been treating ailing Communist bigwigs from abroad--Bulgaria's Georgi Dimitrov, who died suddenly in 1949 after being linked with Marshal Tito; Marshal Choibalsan. Premier of the Sovietized Outer Mongolian People's Republic, who died last year; and France's Communist Boss Maurice ("Dear Maurice") Thorez, who has been wasting away in a Soviet sanatorium since November 1950 while his comrades back home announce periodically that Soviet medicine has done wonders in treating him.

Six of the nine accused doctors are Jews who, the Kremlin said, had conspired with "international Jews" and the U.S. Government in a huge plot to undermine Communist governments. Their link to U.S. espionage was said to be "the international Jewish bourgeois-nationalist organization known as 'Joint' " (the European nickname for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, which has poured millions into Europe since the war to rehabilitate and relocate distressed Jews).

The Pointing Finger. The accusations plainly involved more than antiSemitism. For one thing, the top three purged doctors are not Jewish: P. I. Yegorov, chief of the Kremlin doctors, V. E. Vinogradov, one of the leaders of the Soviet Academy of Medical Sciences, and G. I. Mayorov. These doctors, said the Kremlin, "proved to be agents of long standing of the British Intelligence."

For another, the purge was not going to stop at the doctors. Official newspapers pointed the accusing finger at "the organs of state security" and the bosses of the Ministry of Health for "gullibility and carelessness," for failing to detect the "plot" in time. Many Western observers leaped to the conclusion that the criticism hinted at trouble for Politburocrat Lavrenty Beria, longtime boss of the secret police system; but this is premature. On the very night the "plot" was disclosed, Stalin appeared at Moscow's Bolshoi Theater. With him, in we-hang-to-gether fashion, were Malenkov, Molotov, Voroshilov, Khrushchev--and Beria.

The outside world could safely surmise that an important, perhaps historic contortion was under way at the seat of the power which rules one half the world and threatens the other half. For the first time in 15 years, the Kremlin deliberately announced to the world the existence of a plot within the high Communist circle. "As far as the inspirers of these hireling killers are concerned," vowed Pravda, "they can be assured that Nemesis will not forget them."

Sifting the Ashes. When Alexander Sergeevich Shcherbakov died in 1945, officially of a "heart attack," he held at least seven important posts, and had presumably a great future. As they sifted Shcherbakov's political ashes last week, however, Russian specialists in the outside world noted one striking fact: he was involved during the war with a clique of Communists which included Rumania's Ana Pauker, Czechoslovakia's Rudolf Slansky, France's Charles Tillon, two of them recently cast into disfavor and one of them--Slansky--executed.

Andrei Zhdanov, burly and bullnecked, presided over Leningrad during its grim wartime siege, emerged from the war as the engineer of the Kremlin's ideological and cultural "purges," and chief proponent of the policy of all-out hostility towards non-Communist Europe. His tough policy was an important element in provoking Tito's defection, and may be largely responsible for the great decline in Communist voting strength in Western Europe. Zhdanov's funeral, at which Premier Stalin played a tear-stained role as pallbearer, was one of the most elaborate since Lenin's in 1924. His death certificate was signed by three of the doctors caught up in last week's purge.

Murder by Medicine. The Kremlin itself now insisted--seven years after one death, four after the other--that both Shcherbakov and Zhdanov were murdered. Russian history is speckled with incidents of murder by medicine, like the recurring poison theme in Oriental history and Renaissance Italy. It has a more recent parallel in the great Soviet purges of 1936-38, a reign of terror so vast that its full extent is still not clear. In the late '20s and early '30s, under Viacheslav Menzhinsky, the OGPU did Stalin's dirty work; suddenly Menzhinsky was dead and Genrikh Yagoda, his deputy, took over, to push the purge through the first of the three great "show trials." Yagoda's turn came next; he was replaced by Nikolai I. Yezhov, one of the 20th century's leading madmen, and Yagoda stood in the dock himself in March of 1938 as the alleged ringleader of the original Case of the Doctors (he was shot later in 1938 after the third show trial). When it was all over, Yezhov in turn disappeared, and his entire staff with him.

No Poisonous Substances. Accused with Yagoda were three prominent Soviet doctors who were charged, like their counterparts of last week, with conspiring to murder secret police chief Viacheslav Menzhinsky, famed Soviet Author Maxim Gorky and his son, and Politburo Member V. V. Kuibyshev. One by one the doctors stood before relentless Prosecutor Andrei Vishinsky and confessed to "shortening the lives" of their distinguished patients.They said they had murdered Gorky, who had suffered from TB for years, by encouraging him to visit a place "where children had grippe," by ordering him to take long walks, by sending him to a house where there had been a case of influenza. "Not wishing to apply potent poisonous substances," said Dr. Levin, "we worked by means of wrong treatment."

As the trial neared its end, Prosecutor Vishinsky turned to two doctors who sat in the court as expert witnesses to support the government's case, and asked them: "Have the expert witnesses any questions . . .?" ". . . No questions to ask," replied the experts. "Everything is quite clear." One of these two experts was Dr. V. E. Vinogradov--the Dr. Vinogradov who was arrested last week.

Manufactured plots and imagined guilt grew like snowballs in the Great Purges of the 1930s. The OGPU and the death penalty cut like a scythe through every level of Soviet life, from the highest councils of the Kremlin down to obscure switchmen's shacks and the plowsheds of distant farms. When it lurched to a halt, the chistka had involved millions--some guess as many as 7,000,000 Russians--uncounted numbers of whom disappeared into Siberian slave camps or before firing squads. Out of the purges came a stronger, more solidly entrenched tyranny--and an inheritance of fear and vengefulness.

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