Stalin's Last Crime: The Plot Against the Jewish Doctors, 1948-1953 Book

I agree with the readers who cite serious flaws in this book: "tedious", "ruminative", "repetitive". However, I consider STALIN'S LAST CRIME well worth reading, because the authors have produced an analysis with a high degree of granularity that illuminates the actual mechanics of Stalin's use of terror.

The weaknesses in the book are the obverse of its great strengths: teasing out the many subtle filaments that Stalin wove into his hideous plots requires sustained intellectual concentration, for example. The intense focus on seemingly minor details--which is the only way to detect the subtle discrepancies that are the only clue to the presence of something monstrous--can be tedious, and also tends to distract from the panoramic perspective required to get the structure right.

So it is only on pages 66 - 67, for example, that we learn what Stalin's motive for inventing the Doctor's Plot was. It would have been handy to have the scene set right up front before taking the reader into the bewildering labyrinth of accidental screw-ups, lies, denunciations, misunderstandings, and confessions extracted under torture that were the building blocks of the Doctor's Plot. Stalin's motive was his need to retain total control of the Soviet Union after World War II, when the victory over Nazi Germany, and the experiences of many Soviet soldiers and other Soviet citizens with countries where much higher standards of living prevailed, reduced the atmosphere of crisis and ignorance that had produced the abject national obedience to Stalin that he had enjoyed in the first part of his reign.

This theme is then fully illuminated only on page 105, when the authors quote the letter that the doomed Bukharin wrote in prison to his colleague and former friend Stalin in 1937, shortly before Stalin had him shot in the Great Terror: "There is something great and bold about the political idea of a general purge . . . . people inescapably talk about each other and in doing so arouse an everlasting distrust in each other . . . In this way, the leadership is bringing about a full guarantee for itself."

Only a deeply cynical man--or a total fanatic--like Bukharin could admire the logic of Stalin's decision to poison an entire society with distrust and fear in order to provide a "full guarantee" for himself and his comrades at the top of the Soviet pyramid. But this was still a possible reaction in the Great Terror of the 1930s; it was no longer so easy to traumatise an entire society again by using systematic deception to invent an artificial crisis.

And this is what Stalin was up to--he needed to create instability again throughout the Soviet Union in order to confirm his personal position on top, and to do so he began to weave together the most obscure threads into the elaborate image of a widespread conspiracy that had a false political meaning he could exploit to persuade the Soviet masses of his indispensability.

What makes this book so interesting is that it was much more difficult for Stalin to pull this off in the early 1950s, despite the comparative ease with which he had done so in the mid- to late-1930s. Spare a thought for his dilemma when he tried to kick off a new conspiracy by putting the members of the Jewish Anti-fascist Committee (mainly a bunch of poets, theatre producers, and other cultural types) on trial for their lives in 1950: "despite the painstaking collection and falsification of evidence, the merciless interrogations, physical torture, and threats of death, the government could not extract the necessary confessions from the defendents (Pages 173)."

Of course, the defendents were all found guilty and shot, but unlike the Great Terror of the 1930s, when senior Communists had publicly confessed to fantastic crimes that they could never possibly have committed, the JAC members refused to do so in 1950, so the trial had to be kept secret to avoid embarrassing public recantations of confessions extracted under torture.

Stalin had to work much harder to spin his web in the 1950s, and this is what makes this book so interesting. Of course, all the usual ironies, tragedy, and almost over-whelming examples of absurdity and futility that one has become accustomed to in the best books about the Soviet Union abound in this one.

But what makes this book special is that the authors seem to have successfully reverse-engineered Stalin's development of the Doctor's Plot, and as a result, this book is truly a step-by-step master class in the techniques of manipulation and terror.

Why is this important? Why does it make this book worth reading despite its flaws? Because much of the manipulation and gratuitous deception portrayed in this book, minus the Lubyanka torture chambers and firing squads, is a recognisable feature of the corporate and institutional world in the 21st century. And all indications appear to suggest that this atmosphere is only going to get worse with globalisation. The cant, the hypocrisy, the jealousy, the perversion of language, and the Schadenfreude that was keyed up to a murderous degree in Stalin's system is recognisable everywhere in large organisations today, from the corporate to the government sectors to the transnationals and the NGOs.

If for no other reason than as self-protection against the ambitious mediocrities who always seem to thrive in large organisations (and Trotsky doomed himself by calling Stalin the "outstanding mediocrity of the Revolution"), read this book.