STALIN'S WAR AGAINST THE JEWS: The Doctors' Plot and the Soviet Solution

by Louis Rapoport ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 24, 1990

A comprehensive, well-documented, and accessible study of Stalin's deadly obsession with the Jews. Rapoport, a writer for the Jerusalem Post, provides the necessary facts and perspectives, allowing the reader to indulge in psychoanalytical projection. We learn of the ethnic minority background of Stalin (nÉ Dzhugashvili), with Jewish doctors, key Jewish Bolsheviks, and many Jewish Mensheviks met along the way to the top. From his alcoholic father to his Russian Orthodox seminary teachers, young Stalin was raised with the concepts and principal writers of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In a land where even church leaders and the tsar had elaborate spy networks prior to the KGB, Stalin combined personal and theological antipathies for the rapidly assimilating and overachieving Jews with a paranoid fear of traitors. Leon Trotsky is shown to be a major Judas figure in Stalin's stormy sensibility, and a million Trotskys would die through both active purges and passive deals with the Nazis. With the Doctor's Plot, Stalin (not the security forces) updated medieval charges of well-poisoning to Jewish physicians killing their patients, with Stalin tortured by all the members of this tiny minority who were married to his own children and to the families of Khrushchev and Brezhnev. While mass executions collapsed with Stalin at a Purim meeting convened to expel the Jews, the USSR kept the teaching of Hebrew a crime until recently. Rapoport makes clear that, despite Gorbachev's reforms, Russia's Jewish problem is as enduring as national and personal discontent; and so he provides a wide and deep backdrop for the contemporary Jewish exodus from the Soviet Union.

Pub Date: Sept. 24, 1990

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Free Press/Macmillan

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1990

Categories: NONFICTION