From 1951 to 1953, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin launched an antisemitic campaign known as the Doctors’ Plot, which falsely claimed that a cabal of physicians in Moscow — most of them Jews — were conspiring to kill the country’s leaders. (We covered it in a previous edition of AntisemitismExposed.org.) Less well-known is the Night of the Murdered Poets, which took place on Aug. 12, 1952. In this horrific event, 13 Soviet Jewish poets were executed on Stalin’s orders — again, on trumped-up charges and without any semblance of a fair trial.
Quote: “The incident is now widely seen by historians as part of Stalin’s increasingly antisemitic policies that followed the end of World War II. The trial itself also coincided with Stalin’s campaign against doctors in Moscow, who were largely Jewish, of a conspiracy. This plot was followed by antisemitic publications condemning those with Jewish last names and, according to many historians based on memoirs and secondary evidence, the planned deportation of all Jews in the USSR to Gulags, though the latter part is a subject of considerable debate.”
Sources: Wikipedia (introduction), The Jerusalem Post (quotation)
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