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 communiqué. 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).