Doctors' Dilemma

What the non-Communist world had never thought to hear admitted, the leaders of world Communism last week openly confessed. The Kremlin itself published proof positive that Soviet "justice" is based on torture, that Soviet "truth" can err. Of all the recent curious shifts of wind over Moscow's vast Red Square, this was the strangest yet.

Only three months ago, before Stalin died, nine Soviet doctors, at least five of them Jews, were arrested and found guilty of a terrorist plot ". . . to cut short the lives of Soviet leaders." They were said to have confessed to the murder of two Politburocrats--Andrei Zhdanov (died 1948) and Alexander Shcherbakov (died 1945) --and to "fiendish plans" to kill the top-ranking officers of the Red army. "These fiends in human shape," said Radio Moscow, "were hired foreign intelligence agents" financed by the U.S. Government and by "international Jews."

Last week the nine "fiends"--and six others whose names had not been mentioned before--were taken from their cells, not for execution but for release as free men. "It has been established," said a communique from Deputy Premier Lavrenty Beria, "that the accused . . . were arrested . . . without any lawful cause whatsoever . . . The accusations made against [them] are false . . . [Their confessions were elicited by the investigators] using impermissible means . . . which are strictly forbidden under Soviet law." On the recommendation of Beria's Ministry of Internal Affairs, "the arrested . . . have been completely rehabilitated . . . and freed from custody."

Switch from Stalin. Published in Soviet newspapers and beamed by Radio Moscow to the U.S. and Europe, the announcement of the doctors' release was a spectacular repudiation of the anti-Zionist campaign launched with Stalin's approval in the last months of his life. It was the Kremlin's first open admission that its secret police can err, the first time that the Soviet people had heard from their rulers' lips that torture has been used as a method of police interrogation. Whatever dire necessity, of intrigue or revenge, had moved the Malenkov government to risk such admissions must plainly be of vast and vital import.

Malenkov, Beria, Molotov--the men who rule Russia today--were all at Stalin's side on the night the "plot" was disclosed. Why had they now reversed themselves ?

Two of the three have reason not to want a further airing of murder in the Kremlin. Malenkov, whose reputation suffers from the widespread belief that it was he who arranged Zhdanov's death (for he had most to gain), may also feel the need to clear his name by proving that his rival's death was due to natural causes.

Police Chief Beria has a similar selfish motive. When Stalin's Kremlin first unmasked the "doctor assassins" three months ago, the "organs of state security" (i.e., the secret police) were condemned for "laxity." Beria, at the time, was not formally in charge of the secret police, but the charges did seem to reflect on his competence. Now that he has emerged as a Deputy Premier, with absolute control over both internal affairs and secret police, Beria may be determined to destroy those who slurred him.

It was Beria, not Malenkov, who announced that the accused doctors were innocent victims of false persecution. It was he who deposed and then arrested the former Deputy Minister of State Security --a man named Ryumin--as "a secret enemy of our state" who had attempted to kindle in the Soviet people "feelings of national hostility" (i.e., anti-Semitism). But the principal fall guy is Semyon D. Ignatiev, Stalin's last Minister of State Security, and a bureaucrat who was elevated shortly after Stalin's death to one of the five secretariat seats on the party's powerful Central Committee. "How could it happen," demanded Pravda, "that in the depths of the Ministry of State Security ... there could be fabricated provocational matter, the victims of which . . . [were] a series of outstanding leaders of Soviet medicine?" The answer: Ignatiev was guilty of "political blindness and gullibility." He had failed to detect the "shameless lies" of "criminal adventurers" like Ryumin; as a result, the Minister of State Security had "broken away from the people and the party," and therefore has been fired from his new job. The Soviet government, Pravda added, as if speaking in Beria's name, "punishes without regard for person or rank those who permit arbitrary action."

Bull-necked Lavrenty Beria has had previous experience in purging purgers: in 1938, when Police Chief Yezhov was destroying his predecessors for staging "medical murders," Beria moved in, destroyed Yezhov's apparatus and became in his stead the killer of killers.

Slansky Stays Hanged. Did the new reversal also undo the Kremlin's anti-Zionist campaign? Hard-pressed Israel hoped it did, and expressed its readiness to resume diplomatic relations with Moscow. The Kremlin had broken with Israel as one of the repercussions of the "fiendish" plot that was now proclaimed a phony. (Another alleged plot of the Zionists, the one in Czechoslovakia, could not be undone so easily: Communist Rudolf Slansky and ten of his pals had already been garroted for it.)

A disclaimer of anti-Semitism is one essential step to be taken if Russia is to act out its new peace-loving role, and therefore the new action fitted in with all other cold war relaxations. But more than foreign policy was now involved, just as more than foreign policy was involved in the original arrests.

The new leaders of Russia were, in effect, carrying away the pile of faggots which Stalin had prepared for victims still to be found, in a purge that would have a long time to run. At the proper time, the new leaders would have burnings of their own, but they preferred to choose their own method and timing.

Meanwhile, a small pyre must be built for those who had helped prepare the plot against the doctors. They, said Beria's communique, "have already been arrested and brought to criminal responsibility." Besides Ryumin and Ignatiev, there was another victim: Lidiya F. Timashuk, a grandmother and a physician. Lidiya Timashuk was decorated last January with the Order of Lenin,the Soviet Union's top order, "for exposing the doctor assassins." "She fought," said Pravda, "as one fights with enemies of the homeland--a life and death struggle." Last week Dr. Timashuk was stripped of her decoration because the information she gave had not accorded with "the actual state of affairs."

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