Masha Slepak, attending her final year at the Second Moscow Medical Institute and, as part of her studies, working in Moscow City Hospital Number 4 as an intern, knew many of the arrested doctors. On an evening in November, after a day at the hospital, she returned to the apartment in a state of great agitation. She took Volodya aside and spoke to him. Then they went into the room of his parents.

Fanya Slepak was out. Solomon Slepak sat alone, reading.

“I just came from a meeting in my hospital,” Masha said.

Solomon looked up from his newspaper.

“It was terrible,” Masha said.

Solomon asked what had happened.

Masha said, “It was a meeting of the staff. Almost every day the authorities of the hospital organize such a meeting. All the students and doctors and professors must attend. Each time a party activist comes to the stage, and right after his speech they put on a Jewish doctor, who talks against Jewish traitors and the Jewish conspiracy and Jewish professors who are poisoners.”

Solomon said calmly, “It’s true that among Jews, and especially Jewish doctors, there are traitors.”

Masha said, “But many of the professors who were arrested are my teachers. I know them. They’re honest people.”

“Perhaps they are,” said Solomon.

“They can’t be traitors or spies.”

“Perhaps they are entirely innocent.”

“Then how can they be arrested?” asked Masha.

Solomon explained patiently. “The class struggle is now in its fiercest and most dangerous stage. Look at us, we are surrounded by capitalist enemies. Isn’t it better to arrest and prosecute a hundred innocent people and catch among them one spy than to let the spy go free?”

“I can’t accept that,” Volodya suddenly said.

“‘Whenever you cut down trees, chips will fly in all directions.’

“Solomon Slepak quoted the old Russian proverb.

“I will never accept such a philosophy,” said Volodya.

“You understand very little,” said Solomon, his voice rising. “I understand enough.”

“What do you understand?”

“I understand enough to know that I will never join your party!”

For Solomon Slepak, the Communist Party possessed the power of a church, the authority of an order, the force of a communion of faith. It had given him self-respect, a dream to strive for, a strong and revered leader. One imagines his raging thoughts: your party! Such disrespect and ingratitude! And what dangerous talk. Your party! His face flushed, Solomon shouted at his son, “You understand nothing!”

“I understand plenty,” said Volodya.

“I risked my life fighting for your future, and you are talking to me this way!”

“I understand there is too much blood on your hands,” replied Volodya. “That I understand!”

Volodya and Masha left the room. Minutes later Volodya saw his father enter the kitchen and pour some of his cardiac medicine into a glass and with trembling hands raise it to his lips and drink it down.

In July of that year, 1952, twenty-five distinguished Jewish writers and public figures had been put on trial, and in August many were summarily executed, among them David Bergelson, Binyamin Zuskin, Peretz Markish. Also shot was the poet Itzik Fefer, Stalin’s passionate admirer. All charged with being spies, Zionists, traitors.

Then, according to many sources, a young radiologist named Lidia Timashuk, who was an informer for the secret police, wrote to Stalin accusing certain doctors of plotting to assassinate him and others through poison and improper medical treatment. No one seems to know why she wrote that letter, if indeed there ever was a letter; it may have been concocted by the secret police from an earlier report she had sent concerning her suspicions about the doctors who treated party leader Andrei Zhdanov when he suffered a serious and subsequently fatal heart attack in August 1948. In any event, that November a number of leading Kremlin doctors were abruptly arrested, directed to confess, beaten when they refused, ordered to name other conspirators in the plot.

On January 13, 1953, a portentous article appeared in Pravda, announcing the arrest of nine doctors-six of them with obviously Jewish names, and purportedly connected with the Joint Distribution Committee, the philanthropic organization founded during the First World War to aid Russian Jews and, according to Pravda, a known arm of American intelligence. The three remaining doctors were said to be British agents. All the Soviet people, proclaimed Pravda, now condemned those nine doctors, who had confessed to having poisoned Andrei Zhdanov in 1948 and before him Alexander Shcherbakov, a secretary of the Central Committee; condemned, too, were their foreign masters and “the well-known Jewish bourgeois nationalist, Mikhoels.” Western agents were everywhere, the paper warned, even inside the heart of the Soviet Union. It was necessary to be vigilant against sabotage and to be wary of Jews, whose links with Western powers enabled them to take on the work of imperialist spies and collaborators; it was necessary to crush such “loathsome vermin,” destroy the “enemies of the people.”

For bravely exposing the insidious doctors and helping alert the country to the Jewish “enemy within,” Lidia Timashuk was awarded the coveted Order of Lenin.

Rumors proliferated: Jews were putting poison into medicines, infiltrating vacation areas and homes of the aged to carry out nefarious schemes, establishing nests of Zionist spies in the government and in universities. On buses and in classrooms people shouted at Jews, “You poisoners! You poisoned all our great leaders!” Russians stopped going to their Jewish doctors. In many regions of the country, demonstrations took place against Jews. Mid-twentieth-century industrial Russia had resurrected the medieval image of the Jew as demonic poisoner.

As in the past, it was not only the Jews who were the targets of Stalin’s denunciatory campaign. Old Mensheviks, Trotskyites, various Soviet minorities, writers, and artists influenced by the West, Russian intellectuals from economists to physicians, anyone suspected of even marginal contact with foreigners-the people were urged to denounce them all.

By and large, workers remained untouched; they were the audience for the denunciations, not the target. For all others there was in the air the terrifying probability of yet another mass purge of the party. The final act of an old and ailing despot, who saw enemies everywhere, found delight in the subservience and humiliation of others, preferred loyalty out of fear rather than conviction, and raged at the advancing years that were slowly sapping his strength, reducing his powers of concentration, inexorably forcing him to loosen his hold on the vast apparatus of government. One more cleansing of the party, decisive and shattering. But first, he had to solve once and for all time his problem with the overbearing, cerebral, stubborn Soviet Jews.

Masha read with deep apprehension the newspaper reports of the arrested doctors-surgeons, internists, neurologists, pediatricians-all accused of having murdered patients during surgery or prescribing poison as medication. Because she knew many of the doctors personally or by reputation, she was able to persuade Volodya that those named were innocent. They began to sense the start of a vast organized campaign against Soviet Jewry. What better way to direct the anger of all the Soviet people against the Jews than to reveal them as agents of an international conspiracy to murder the country’s leaders? But to what end? What lay behind the anti-Semitic campaign? What did Stalin have planned for the Jews?

On a number of occasions they tried to discuss the matter with Solomon Slepak, but the talk would inevitably degenerate into loud arguments. At times, in the midst of a heated flurry of words, Solomon would abruptly glance at his wristwatch, announce that he had to meet someone, and rush from the apartment. Masha and Volodya ceased talking to him about the doctors.