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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.