The Foreign Service Journal, December 2003

prisoners. Most survived, but millions did not. Inside the gulag (an acronym of the Russian for “main camp adminis- tration”), life assumed a terrifying new unreality. Work was relentless, exhaustion constant; prisoners too tired to eat or shower were dragged to do both, compounding psycholog- ical torture with sleep deprivation. Even the most mundane details of living assumed a nightmarish quality: vermin-infested clothes and bread- mush were prized, sex was reduced to an animal level, children were sep- arated from their mothers at weaning and often died of sheer loneliness in prison orphanages. The living dead — pitiful, zombie-like inmates in the last, irreversible stages of starvation — were the ghosts of the new world, ignored by the less unfortunate. There were no fortunate ones; even those discharged feared return. Many modern Russians prefer not to remember the gulags, Applebaum writes, and they routinely rebuffed her requests for details. Neverthe- less, her recitation of survivors’ horri- fying memories will shock even the most cynical reader. Terrible as the great purges of the 1920s and 1930s, ruthless rural col- lectivization, and mass starvations under Stalin’s rule all were, the gulag system still perhaps best symbolizes the extravagant inhumanity of a sys- tem that valued no one’s life except the dictator’s. Stalin’s death in 1953, attributed to a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 73, ended the gulag era (although the last, vestigial deten- tion camps were disbanded only by Gorbachev). His demise also for- tuitously ended another bizarre episode, the so-called “Doctors’ Plot,” explored in exhaustive detail by Jonathan Brent and Vladimir Naumov in their book, Stalin’s Last Crime: The Plot Against the Jewish Doctors, 1948-1953. Beginning about five years before his death, Stalin began to plan a gigantic purge of the Soviet Jewish population, whom he painted as stooges of the Soviet Union’s Cold War enemy, the United States. In his twisted version of history, Jewish doctors had been killing off Soviet leaders for decades, including A.A. Zhdanov, a disgraced former ally sent to a clinic outside Moscow after a heart attack. Simply put, Zionism threatened Soviet stability. So the Jews had to be stopped. Did a nervous cabal of aides mur- der Stalin instead, to head off the purge? The complicated tale is wor- thy of a Robert Ludlum thriller, but lacks sufficiently clear plot develop- ment and generates little suspense. This much, at least, is known: after a Friday night dinner at Stalin’s dacha in March 1953, with Lavrenti Beria, Nikita Khrushchev, Nikolai Bulganin and Georgi Malenkov in attendance, the dictator became ill, and was found unconscious on the floor. Four days later, attended by no fewer than 10 doctors, he died. The authors speculate — though they stop short of asserting — that Lavrenti Beria, head of the KGB, may have administered a large dose of warfarin, a tasteless, colorless poi- son used in small doses to thin blood in heart patients, to Stalin. It is true that warfarin could induce a brain hemorrhage in an elderly man plagued by arteriosclerosis, but the authors offer no proof that it did, much less that Beria was the perpe- trator. In fact, Brent and Naumov’s whole case is circumstantial, at best. To save the nation from Stalin’s supremely devious plans to cleanse and destroy it, Stalin had to die. Beria, the likely suspect, was himself conveniently executed; incriminat- ing documents were destroyed or hidden. Too many inconsistencies exist for there not to have been a cover-up. A cover-up proves a plot. A plot means there very likely was a murder. Yet it is equally possible that Stalin was simply allowed to die by the doctors who might have saved him. Soviet doctors had been forced for years to withhold proper medical care from, or administer improper care to, those who displeased Stalin. Perhaps the Doctors’ Plot, in which innocent physicians (few of whom were actually Jewish, by the way) were to be accused of murder, came full circle? Still, despite repetitiveness and the jerkiness of the authors’ conflict- ing writing styles, the book’s thor- ough documentation of the plot’s five-year history makes the book worth reading and its conclusions worth considering. ■ Benjamin R. Justesen, a former Foreign Service officer, is the author of George Henry White: An Even Chance in the Race of Life (Louisiana State Press, 2001). 76 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 3 B O O K S Many modern Russians prefer not to remember the horrors of the gulags, Applebaum writes, and they rebuffed her requests for details.