Tag #142579 - Interview #91884 (Leonid Aptekar)

In January 1953 the ‘doctors’ Plot’ [38] began. Stalin’s doctors were convicted of an intention to poison Stalin. Almost all of those doctors were Jews. This resulted in another wave of anti-Semitism. At first people just refused to see Jewish doctors, but then Jews were accused of many other crimes. I don’t know what it might have resulted in, if Stalin had not died on 5 March 1953. There were rumors that Stalin intended to deport all Jews to Siberia. It was impossible to ignore this rumor: everybody understood how the Crimean Tatars and Chechen people had been deported [Forced deportation to Siberia] [39]. In one night people were forced into the trains taking them to the virgin lands in Siberia and Kazakhstan. This might have happened to Jew, but God saved them. Stalin died on Purim and people were saying that God rescued Jews from extermination.