فصل 7

CHAPTER 7

THE DOCTORS’ PLOT AND BEYOND

Sometime between the Andreyeva affair and the start of the Nineteenth Party Conference in June 1988, the anti-Semitic incidents began. In a suburb of Moscow where Jewish intellectuals often rented dachas for the summer, vandals burned one house to the ground and broke into a few others, smashing windows, knocking over furniture, and spray-painting swastikas on the walls. Members of Pamyat and other hate groups toppled Jewish headstones and tacked up handbills signed “Russia for Russians: The Organization of Death to Yids.” Judith Lurye, a longtime refusenik, called me one night and said that she and her friends were terrified. That night they had gone to a hall they’d rented at the Yauza Club for a meeting of their new Jewish cultural organization. When they arrived, the door was padlocked and a pair of KGB officers were on guard. A leaflet was nailed to the door.

“How long can we tolerate the dirty Jews?” it said. “Scoundrel Jews are penetrating our society, especially in places where there are profits to be gotten. Think about it. How can we allow these dirty ones to make a rubbish heap out of our beautiful country? Why do we—the great, intelligent, beautiful Slavs—consider it a normal phenomenon to live with Yids among us? How can these dirty stinking Jews call themselves by such a proud and heroic name as ‘Russians’?” Many of the same Jews who were calling to warn me were also publishing their literary or scientific work for the first time and getting visas to travel abroad. Some were getting permission to emigrate. They had high hopes for perestroika, but they could not let down their psychological guard. A historic dislocation had begun. The economy was in serious decline. If things got much worse, the Jews understood, they would be among the first ones blamed. Far-right intellectuals writing for Nash Sovremenik (“Our Contemporary”) and Molodaya Gvardiya (“Young Guard”) were already shaping a fanatic Russian nationalist ideology that made all Jews devils, and all enemies Jews. If they came to despise a Russian, they then wrote that the person in question had obviously changed his name from Goldshtein or Rabinovich.

Igor Shafarevich, a world-renowned mathematician who joined both Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn in the seventies in a number of dissident causes, turned out to be one of the most dangerous of the intellectual anti-Semites. His long essay “Russophobia” proposed that “the Little People”—mainly Jewish writers and émigrés—had ruined the self-respect of “the Big People”—native Russians—by describing them as a nation of slaves who worship power and intolerance. Jews, he wrote, had managed to create an image of themselves as reasonable, cultivated, and European and of Russians as barbaric.

I visited Shafarevich one evening at his apartment on Leninsky Prospekt. He eyed me suspiciously and denied he was an anti-Semite. His enormous hound circled the floor of the study, never stopping. Such accusations, he said, were the result of Jewish “persecution mania.” “There is only one nation whose needs we hear about almost every day,” Shafarevich had written in Nash Sovremenik. “Jewish national emotions are the fever of the whole country and the whole world. They are a negative influence on disarmament, trade agreements, and international relations of scientists. They provoke demonstrations and strikes and emerge in almost every conversation. The Jewish issue has acquired an incomprehensible power over people’s minds and has overshadowed problems of Ukrainians, Estonians, and Crimean Tatars. And as for the Russian issue, that is evidently not to be acknowledged at all.” When I read this passage back to Shafarevich, he nodded in agreement, enthusiastically, as if hearing it for the first time. Then he said, “The term ‘anti-Semitism’ is like an atom bomb in our heads. Against the background of violence against Armenians or Russians, it is impossible even to speak of anti-Semitism. I haven’t heard about a single quarrel or of people being beaten in the face because of anti-Semitism. It is absolutely incompatible with the real problems present now. I am just amazed to hear such things.” Shafarevich was not alone. While many leading Russian writers spoke out against anti-Semitism, the Russian Writers’ Union leadership promoted a nationalist ideology steeped in hatred of Jews. In an open letter signed by seventy-two of its leading members and published in the house organ, Literaturnaya Rossiya, the union declared: “It is precisely Zionism that is responsible for many things, including Jewish pogroms, for cutting off dry branches of their own people in Auschwitz and Dachau.” For months, Jewish friends called saying they were convinced that there would soon be pogroms. Not more abuse, not the occasional attack, but pogroms, a word that evoked the memory of massacres of Jews a century ago in Kishinev, Odessa, and Kiev, a word that implied the tacit participation of the state. The Kremlin did nothing to help the situation. The official Tass news agency ran an item saying that Natan Shcharansky, who had spent eight years in the camps on trumped-up charges before he was allowed to leave the Soviet Union for Israel, was now “scrambling back into the news” as an army conscript. “As he was issued his brand-new Israeli uniform, Shcharansky declared pompously that he had finally found his place in life,” Tass reported. “Walking on Palestinian corpses is indeed a logical and natural campaign in the life of that sham advocate of human rights.” It was hard to judge what all this amounted to. One of the older leaders of the Jewish community in Moscow told me he had not seen such threatening signs of anti-Semitism in Moscow since Stalin’s time.

I had been complacent about all this until the first night of Passover the previous spring. After all, hadn’t vandals desecrated Jewish cemeteries at home? Why was this more of a threat? Esther and I went to evening services at the Choral Synagogue, itself a depressing sight. Outside on the steps, KGB goons kept a careful watch on who went in the building. In a way both cloying and threatening, the agent of the evening (dressed in the easily recognizable black plastic topcoat and red-and-brown plaid scarf) asked questions as if he were taking a poll: “Do you believe in almighty God? Have you ever been to Israel?” Usually, a couple of his buddies waited in a car across the street. Inside, on the main floor of pews, where the men prayed, there were only a few dozen ancients gossiping in Yiddish and some curious tourists from New York and Buenos Aires. The young had long since written off the synagogue as an impossible place to meet or pray. The few observant Jews who had not already gone to Israel or the West prayed in their homes. Even those who didn’t care much about the KGB presence outside felt the rabbi had been too compromised over the years.

Upstairs, sitting with the women, Esther got into a discussion about Passover rituals and discovered that they knew next to nothing.

“My grandfather used to do all this,” one old woman said, casting back her memories to the last century, “but I forget: how many cups of wine must we drink?” Esther, who was raised in an Orthodox home and knew the language and rituals as second nature, was astonished. She explained as well she could, but it broke her heart to see how desperate they were to know. “Can you really not eat bread on Passover?” another woman said.

We left the services early to get back and prepare the seder at home for a half-dozen Soviet friends. But when we got to the car I noticed that someone had written on the grimy door a huge Y with a circle around it. Y for Yid. If the leaflets and vandalism had not focused my attention, the writing in the dust certainly did.

As it turned out, there would be no pogroms. But the anxiety was real. As the state structures began to disintegrate, so too did the old facade of a “friendship of peoples.” The glasnost that had begun to encourage genuine historical debate also, inevitably, revealed the depths of historical resentments and hatred in Stalin’s empire. In Tallinn, I heard Estonians describe Russians as cretins and brutes, and Russians describe Estonians as Nazi collaborators. In Yerevan, Armenians were sure that Azerbaijanis had deliberately “set off” the earthquake that killed at least 25,000 people with an underground nuclear test and were about to carry out an Islamic crusade against them more bloody than the Turkish massacre of Armenians in 1915. In Baku, Azerbaijanis knew with absolute certainty that the Yerevan government was preparing to grab all its territory and assert an Armenian kingdom with the help of émigré millionaires in Los Angeles.

For Jews in cities like Leningrad, Moscow, and Novosibirsk, the new street-level face of hatred was the group known as Pamyat, “Memory.” Pamyat began in the early 1980s as a group attached to the Aviation Ministry and was organized by a few cultural activists to help preserve Russian monuments and buildings. But after years of expansion, infighting, and splits, the most vocal group still calling itself Pamyat turned out to be a band of anti-Semitic fanatics, a motley bunch of Russian factory workers, Party members, teachers, career military officers, and street thugs. Their feeling for imagery was impeccable and historically resonant. They wore black T-shirts, a symbol that linked them to the Black Hundreds, the anti-Semitic mob that carried off dozens of pogroms under the last czars.

While he was still in the Politburo, Boris Yeltsin met with representatives from Pamyat on the grounds that as Moscow Party secretary he should get to know a broad range of public groups. He went away from the session disgusted. “Pamyat began as something interesting and then turned out evil,” he said. He never had anything to do with it again.

I met leaders of Pamyat at various apartments and rallies in Moscow, Leningrad, and Siberia, and they were uniformly, and not surprisingly, supreme dolts. Dmitri Vasiliyev, a former photographer and bit player in the movies, boasted of having only an eighth-grade education, a claim that did not stretch credulity. At one small rally, this doughy little man barked into a megaphone for a couple of hours, berating Zionists and “those who would humiliate the Russian people.” He said that Russian children were being turned into alcoholics because “sinister forces” were slipping alcohol into the yogurt supply. Jewish editors were guilty of subliminal conspiracy because they used six-pointed stars in their papers. Jewish architects “by no coincidence” designed Pushkin Square so that Pushkin’s back was to the movie theater, the Rossiya. It was unclear whether Vasiliyev was the most dangerous of the Pamyat leaders. His rival Valery Yemelyanov, after all, spent a few years in a mental institution after murdering his wife. He left the institution just in time to enjoy the fruits of the new glasnost.

The clearest and most comprehensive representation of Pamyat’s “ideas” I saw was contained in a twenty-four-page manifesto that had been passed along to me. The document was written in a less hysterical tone than Vasiliyev’s rants, but, all the same, it attacked the “satanic” cultural influence of the West and a “genocide of the Russian people.” Jews and Zionists were responsible for the ills of Russia. Jews, homosexuals, and Masons were responsible for rock music, drug addiction, AIDS, and the dissolution of Russian families. Brodsky’s poems, Chagall’s paintings, and Pasternak’s “antipatriotic” novel Doctor Zhivago were all worthless, a blot on “true Russian culture.” The Russians, the manifesto said, “saved” the Jews in World War II, but the Jewish media only mocked and degraded Russians and their suffering: “It’s as if the mass media told us that only Jews were killed on the front during the war.” Pamyat members circulated copies of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and won support from Literaturnaya Rossiya, Molodaya Gvardiya, and other right-wing magazines. In Leningrad, one of the most active centers for Pamyat, the group denounced Isaak Zaltsman, a Jew who headed the production of Soviet tanks during World War II, for organizing “a chorus of sixteen-year-old Russian virgins” and then seducing them. Elsewhere, Pamyat blamed Jews for food shortages, sex on television, and the nuclear accident at Chernobyl.

Compared to what was going on elsewhere in the empire, the real threat to Jewish life was relatively slight. Yet the rise of glasnost, the loosening restrictions on emigration, and the atmosphere of tension and fear of an uncertain future all helped to produce the moment that Jews around the world had awaited for many years. An exodus had begun. Soviet Jews who wanted to leave now for Israel, for the most part, could. In 1989, 100,000 Soviet Jews left for Israel and the West. Hundreds of thousands more were waiting for visas, invitations, and tickets. A people that had once seemed destined for oblivion were getting visas for a new life.

There would be no second “Doctors’ Plot.” In fact, the only living survivor of that ugly affair, Yakov Rapoport, declared he would not join the new wave out. “My time is past,” he told me. “I’m ninety-one years old. It’s too late for me. I’ll be buried here.” And yet his story, and his family, seemed an emblem of the history and the future of the Jews of Russia.

Yakov Rapoport, like many Jews of his generation, well understood that the purges of the 1930s were not an aberration of the moment. Cruelty had preceded 1937 and cruelty was sure to follow. Stalin was indulging his hatred of the Jews. In 1948, Stalin ordered the execution of Solomon Mikhoels, the legendary director of the Jewish State Theater and the leader of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee as a presumed enemy of the state. After the murder of Mikhoels—called a car accident by the authorities—the KGB arrested the leading members of the Anti-Fascist Committee, citing a “postwar return to normalcy.” Almost as a warm-up to the Doctors’ Plot and the coming purge, the KGB killed twenty-three Jewish intellectuals in 1952 on trumped-up charges of spying and treason. Then, in the first weeks of 1953, Stalin ordered the arrest of a group of nine prominent doctors, six of them Jewish; the Party papers claimed the doctors were poisoning the Kremlin leaders and covering up the conspiracy. Stalin’s murderous paranoia appeared ready to soar once more. Most historians now agree that Stalin’s order to arrest the doctors was similar to the Kremlin-ordered assassination of the Leningrad Party chief Sergei Kirov in 1934—a prelude to a wave of mass terror. Khrushchev said as much in his speech at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956: “Stalin personally issued advice on the conduct of the investigation and the method of interrogation of the arrested persons. He said that Academician Vinogradov should be put in chains, another one should be beaten. Present at this Congress is the former minister of state security, Comrade Ignatiev. Stalin told him curtly, ‘If you do not obtain confessions from the doctors, we will shorten you by a head.’ “Stalin personally called the investigating judge, gave him instructions, advised him on which investigative methods should be used. These methods were simple—beat, beat, and, once again, beat. Shortly after the doctors were arrested, we members of the Politburo received protocols containing the doctors’ confessions of guilt. After distributing these protocols, Stalin told us, ‘You are blind like young kittens; what will happen without me? The country will perish because you do not know how to recognize enemies.’ ” Of the nine doctors arrested, only Yakov Rapoport lived to see the advent of glasnost. I got to know him, his daughter Natasha, and his granddaughter Vika and visited them several times at Natasha’s apartment. The old man was long retired, but his memory was good, his voice as clear as that of a man half his age. “I thought I was finished, a dead man,” he said, remembering his despair in prison. “Then one day they let me out of jail—for no reason at all, it seemed. I didn’t understand what had happened until I came home and my wife told me that Stalin was dead. It was just dumb luck, for me—and probably for hundreds of thousands of other Jews.” The furious anti-Semitism of the Stalin era and the Doctors’ Plot itself were merely two of countless “blank spots” in official versions of Soviet history. The first official publications on the period were Yakov Rapoport’s memoir in the magazine Druzhba Narodov (“Friendship of Peoples”) and Natasha Rapoport’s memoir in Yunost (“Youth”)—both in April 1988. Both father and daughter began writing years before the rise of Gorbachev. But it was only in 1987 that either one thought it might soon be possible to tell the story of the Doctors’ Plot. Natasha visited her friends Irina and Yuli Daniel in the country and read them her manuscript. She could not have chosen a better audience. Yuli Daniel, along with Andrei Sinyavsky, had been jailed for seven years in the sixties in one of the very first dissident cases. Daniel’s father was Mark Meyerovich, a celebrated Yiddish writer. When Natasha finished reading, Daniel told her it was time to publish.

At Daniel’s suggestion, Natasha took her manuscript to Yunost, a monthly famous for publishing young talents during Khrushchev’s thaw. The new, relatively liberal editors were impressed, but she was told there were “too many Jewish names” in the story, too much explicit discussion of anti-Semitism. Natasha laughed and said, “I told them it reminded me of the joke about the boy who asks his grandfather, ‘Is it true Christ was a Jew?’ And the grandfather says, ‘Yes, it’s true. At the time, everyone was a Jew. Such were the times.’ Well, during the Doctors’ Plot, such were the times.” The editors said they would try to publish, but they didn’t want to “irritate” the audience. They asked Natasha if she could remember any “good Russian people who had helped” her. The meetings ended vaguely, with no promises, no rejection. The editors had not yet gotten the necessary signal from above, and so they waited.

“Then came November and Gorbachev gave the history speech,” Natasha said. “He even mentioned the Doctors’ Plot. Two days later there was a telephone call from Yunost congratulating me. They had decided to publish. And then they said, ‘Only don’t think that it is in any way connected to Gorbachev’s speech.’ Well, no, of course not! They got Yevtushenko to write the preface. He wrote rather a lot about anti-Semitism, but they cut that, insisting, after all, that Russians, too, had been arrested. There was also a sentence saying that there were rumors of pogroms in 1953, that concentration or labor camps were being prepared to accept Jews after the doctors were executed on Red Square. We fought over that, but what could I do? They cut that, too.” Despite the cuts, the appearance of both Rapoports’ memoirs marked the first attack in the press on anti-Semitism. “We took a walk in the forbidden zone,” Natasha said.

The generations of Rapoports were tied to one another in an easy, undramatic way. Their stories, even their sentences, elided into a single line of thought and memory. Their family narrative was nothing less than the Jewish experience in the Soviet Union in this century. “There is a whole age behind these eyes,” Yakov said, “from Nicholas II to Gorbachev.” Natasha smiled and put her hand over her father’s knobby wrist.

There was great love between them, but tension as well. “I’ve wanted to emigrate since the sixties, but my parents refused to go,” Natasha said. “They were afraid, and I couldn’t persuade them. They decided it was too late for them and that they should die here. My mother is gone now. I cherish her memory and I love my father very much. But still, I cannot forgive them this.” As he listened to this, no doubt for the thousandth time, Yakov Rapoport’s left hand trembled slightly. He said nothing, just stared at the teapot and let it pass. He feigned a kind of nonchalance that his hands betrayed. When Natasha began talking about her fears that a worsening economy would provide “openings” for groups like Pamyat, he said bravely, “I’ve seen this before. I’m not afraid,” but his hands shook once more.

It must have seemed to him that little had changed. Weekend mornings sometimes, Yakov Rapoport looked out his apartment window and saw the Pamyat boys in their black T-shirts carrying placards around All Saints Church. “Yids Out!” “Down with the Judeo-Masonic Conspiracy!” “I have seen this before, too,” Yakov said.

Rapoport grew up in the Crimea. His first memory was of a pogrom in 1905. “I was six years old. My father was teaching Russian and mathematics where I went to school. We were having a science lesson when the Cossacks rushed in. The school was destroyed. I remember the globes were smashed, there was broken glass everywhere, and my father was badly injured. The police brought the bodies to the morgue, and my father along with them because they thought he was dead. One of our friends saw my father there, only by chance, and they could hear him moaning. He was unconscious, covered with blood. His fingers and hands had been broken by the truncheons. He had tried to guard his face, so they just broke the arms. It took months for him to heal.

“This friend of ours tried to drag my father through a gate to a cab. The school principal was there, and he was shouting, ‘Go away, you Jew!’ When my father finally returned to the school weeks later, the other teachers shunned him. They would not speak to him, and he finally had to leave the school. This is what was first imprinted on my memory as a child.” As a boy, Rapoport was also caught up in reports of the Beilis case in Kiev. For the Jews under the czars, the case had an impact equal to that of the Dreyfus affair in France. In 1911, police in Kiev found the corpse of a thirteen-year-old Russian boy. His mother, a poor prostitute, accused “the Jews”—that scheming mass—of murdering her son to use his blood to make Passover matzoh. The “Blood Accusation” was rooted in anti-Semitic folklore in Ukraine—and was, of course, preposterous. Nevertheless, the czarist police arrested a Jewish factory worker, Mendel Beilis, and thought they were sure to win a conviction. With the world press watching, the prosecution brought in witnesses to testify that such ritual murders were widespread. “It was an accusation against all Jews, not just Beilis,” Rapoport said. “In our school, about half the class believed the accusations, and half did not.” But the jury, made up mostly of illiterate Ukrainian peasants, rejected the Blood Libel and set Beilis free.

“It was a great miracle,” Rapoport said. “One of the jurors was asked why he had voted for acquittal, and he answered, simply, ‘My conscience.’ I found out later that those peasants in the jury were seen praying before they brought in the verdict. So religion, at least in this case, was a carrier of conscience.” From one year to the next in Rapoport’s life, there were attacks on the Jews in schools and in the courts. There were always pogroms and the threat of pogroms. Discrimination, life-threatening and petty, touched every facet of ordinary life. Jewish students like Rapoport even paid extra fees to study in the state schools. “My family was never religious, but my whole life in the czarist times let me know who I was,” Rapoport said.

A keen student of natural sciences, Rapoport set off to study medicine in Petrograd, the city of the czars that would soon be the city of revolution and renamed Leningrad. Petrograd was outside the Pale of Settlement, the only region where Jews were allowed to live, but for some reason the university officials let Rapoport study there. “All in all,” he said, “I think the czars were somehow more liberal than the Bolsheviks were.” Rapoport arrived in 1915 and rented the corner of someone’s room.

Those years were for him a mix of laboratory study and street revolt. After mornings in class and autopsy rooms, he sat in the gallery of the Duma, the Russian legislature, listening to the charges of repression and incompetence gather against the czar. Later he stood on the street and watched Lenin preach workers’ revolution from the apartment balcony of the city’s richest ballerina. Soon there were food riots and student protests. “When the first—the February—Revolution took place and the czar fell, I was there,” Rapoport said. “I was armed with a rifle and a pistol. Together with the workers I helped arrest the czarist ministers. It was a real bourgeois revolution.… We thought we would have a constitutional state, as in France and other parts of Western Europe. I don’t think that was a naive hope.

“At first, I was taken by the ideas of the revolution, but then I became much more realistic. I had no admiration for the Bolshevik Revolution. I saw it as a terrific threat because of the mass of illiterates inside it who hated intellectuals. That spelled the elimination of the intellectuals. I thought there would be chaos, and I turned out to be right.

“Lenin was surrounded by both Russians and Jews. There was not such a differentiation then. They were just members of the Party, and this ethnic question was not raised there. But there is an interesting detail which quite often evades many people. I remember reading in the complete works of Stalin, where Stalin describes the Third Party Congress, where there was a split between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. At the Third Congress, Stalin wrote, the majority of the Mensheviks were Jews and the majority of Bolsheviks were Russians. Malinovsky, a friend of Lenin’s, said there should have been a Party pogrom. For Stalin that was no joke. Stalin understood that suggestion as guidance for action.

“In the Crimea after the Revolution, I saw terrible things happening to the White officers. Zemlyachka and Bela Kun came to the Crimea and started to gather lists of people who had taken part in the White movement. They promised not to kill them, just to register them. And then they killed everybody, many young men among them. Those who did register were shot. Those who did not survived. I realized what was going on by then, and who was who.” Rapoport quickly became a prominent pathologist in Moscow. He tried to avoid politics as much as possible. But the better known he became in his field, the harder it became to stand apart. With Stalin in power, Rapoport was constantly being asked to join the Communist Party. Over and over again he refused. He got into trouble in the late 1930s when, as the head of the admissions committee at a medical institute in Moscow, he would not discriminate against children of the “enemies of the state”—those who had been arrested or shot for no reason by Stalin’s secret police. Rapoport guessed that the only reason he himself had avoided arrest and execution in the camps was that the country could ill afford to wipe out all its best doctors. “But the truth is I really don’t know why I got through the purges,” he said. “Good luck, maybe?” During the Battle of Stalingrad in 1943, the pivotal point in the war for the Soviet Union, Rapoport finally gave in and joined the Party—“for patriotic, not political reasons. At that time the Party was the only force that held the country together. What I will always remember is the interview I had at Party headquarters. The first thing they asked me was ‘What is Zionism? What do you think of it?’ I was angry with this, but I answered: ‘Zionism is the national liberation movement of Jews aimed at the organization of their own territorial state.’ They were stunned.” Natasha Rapoport was fourteen when the doorbell rang. It was the night of February 2, 1953. One of the family’s closest friends, Dr. Myron Vovsi, had already been arrested, and the newspapers and radio had begun a crude propaganda campaign against the “murderers in white smocks,” the Jewish doctors.

“There were rumors that, for the sake of ‘protecting’ the others—the ‘innocent’ Jews—from the mass hatred, camps were being set up for them in Siberia. All of them would be sent there soon,” Natasha said. “The question of how to execute the criminals was widely discussed. Informed circles in my class contended that they would be hanged in Red Square. Many were worried whether the execution would be open to the public or only to those with special permission. Someone consoled the disappointed: ‘Don’t worry. Surely they will film it.’ I had nightmares about Vovsi on the gallows.” Now, with the doorbell ringing incessantly, the secret police had come for her father. The agents rifled through every drawer and book, noting a few volumes of Freud as further evidence for the court protocols against Yakov Rapoport. During the search, one of the agents happened to cut his finger. Terrified that Natasha’s mother would poison him with contaminated iodine, he refused treatment. “They phoned somewhere for a car,” Natasha said, “and the suffering one was taken away—most likely to a special clinic where his scratch would be treated by a trusted, dependable Russian surgeon.” The arrest was, for Natasha, what the 1905 pogrom in the Crimea had been for her father—the pivotal memory of what it means to be a Jew in a hostile place. “Stalin is a bastard and a criminal,” Natasha’s mother told her, “but never say this to anyone. Do you understand?” Natasha’s friends scorned her, stared at her in class. The children in the courtyard mocked her, telling her that her father had taken pus from cancerous corpses and rubbed it into the skin of healthy people. They hurled rotten tomatoes, stones, and dead mice at her. The police confiscated all the family’s money, bonds, and bank passbooks. Natasha’s mother sold the family’s copies of Tolstoy, Pushkin, and Hugo to buy bread and milk. Natasha lay awake nights wondering when the police would come for her mother, too.

An anti-Semitic hysteria engulfed Moscow. Party committees met in every school, institute, and factory to denounce the doctors and instruct “the workers” to be “on the lookout” for other Jewish plotters. At Moscow State University, Mikhail Gorbachev sat through a painful session of his Komsomol organization and heard a colonel, a decorated veteran of the war, denounce Gorbachev’s close friend Vladimir Lieberman. Many years later, at a class reunion, Lieberman told a reporter, “Some comrades sniffed the wind, tried to criticize me. I was the only Jew at the law faculty’s Communist Party meeting. Gorbachev had entered the Party right before this event, but it was he who tried to prevent the attack on me and did so very sharply, using some unparliamentary words. He called one of our old and respected veterans a ‘spineless animal.’ That just stopped them.” But very few rebelled, and few did not believe the Doctors’ Plot was a prelude to something more ominous. Within a few weeks of the arrest, the Rapoports were convinced that Yakov was dead. The prison officials said it was no longer “necessary” to deliver food parcels to the jail. Hundreds of thousands of families during the purges recognized this as a sign that their loved ones were already dead.

On March 5, the director of Natasha’s school gathered all the students in a huge recreation hall. Comrade Stalin was no more, she told them. For forty-five minutes, Natasha looked around her and saw everyone crying, her teachers, the students. She could not cry but tried not to seem too obvious. “Finally they let us go home,” Natasha recalled. “My friend and I were walking home and we started to discuss some absolutely other problems and we started to laugh. We had forgotten completely that Stalin had died and we should be mourning with all the others. As we laughed, the people around us on the street were furious, they were shocked. We had to run home because we were afraid we’d be beaten right there on the street.” Three days after Stalin’s death in March, there was a phone call, a stark male voice: “I am calling at the request of the professor. The professor asked me to tell you that he is healthy, feels fine, and is concerned about his family. What should I tell him?” He was alive! Yakov Rapoport came home on April 4. Before coming up to the apartment he called from a phone downstairs: “I didn’t want them to have a heart attack at the sight of me,” he said. Every year thereafter, the survivors of the Doctors’ Plot gathered for a party on that day as an anniversary of freedom. Around thirty people—the doctors who had been arrested and a short list of other “suspects”—celebrated their own survival and the survival of the Jews in Russia.

“Now there is only me,” Yakov Rapoport said. “My family and I, we celebrate alone.” Yakov Rapoport came home a grateful man. Even now it was hard for him to find much fault with Nikita Khrushchev—“not after he freed hundreds of thousands of people and gave them back their good name.” But for Natasha, the Doctors’ Plot was a great divide between childhood and adulthood, innocence and alienation. The end of the plot meant freedom for her father, but a different quality of mind and trust for the daughter: “I began to see all the lies around me. I began to have a double life, one outside of my circle when I had to be careful what I did and said, and one inside my circle of family and friends, when I could have my own thoughts, my real life, the times when I could be myself.

“My attitude toward people had changed. There were so many who had betrayed us, people I never would have suspected. I stopped trusting people. And I began to understand—really understand—that I was Jewish. I understood that to be Jewish was to be persecuted. Years passed until I understood that, and maybe I don’t have a full understanding even now. After all, I am deprived of Jewish history, Jewish culture, Jewish language.

“For all of us, this is the saddest thing. We know nothing of ourselves. We have had in here in our building a Jewish boy, with a Jewish face and appearance. A funny little boy. Another boy came from Central Asia. And there was a fight between the two boys. One mother asked the Jewish boy why he was fighting the Central Asian. The little Jewish boy said, “Because he is not Russian!” The poor child didn’t even understand that he was not Russian either. The first time he’ll understand it is when a Russian comes after him, with a leaflet, or a club.” State anti-Semitism followed Natasha Rapoport throughout her life and career as a chemist. After graduation she and the rest of her Jewish classmates were sent off to work in factories while others got far better work at academic institutes. Eventually she won a spot at a prestigious institute, but she was told she could not advance very far. “I don’t have anything against you or your abilities, Natalya Yakovlevna, but there are just too many Jews in your department,” said one of the institute chiefs. “The regional Communist Party committee is already angry with your lab boss for hiring too many Jews. Do you want him to have more problems?” In 1978, she watched with astonishment as a less deadly version of the Doctors’ Plot was played out at her father’s institute. Local authorities received an anonymous “tip” that Russian patients were dying while Jewish patients were being cured. The letters charged the Jewish doctors at the institute with carrying out Nazi-style experiments on the Russians and that the crimes were being covered up. “Instead of throwing the accusations in the garbage, the authorities made a thorough investigation,” Natasha said as her father smiled weakly at the absurdity of it all. “Can you imagine? Ancient history all over again. And guess what? It turns out that there had been no experiments after all.

“There is something special in Homo sovieticus, in this special nation of people, and the scale of anti-Semitism here is unique,” Natasha said. “Here, anti-Semitism is political, it is a weight on the political balance. Our government will sell Jews or not sell Jews, will let them go or not, depending on what it gets in return. Jews are a card in the political game. And this makes anti-Semitism more dangerous, because you never know how politics will change and what they will do with us the next time around.” Natasha was thwarted in her attempts to leave the country for Israel or the United States. Israelis promised her an immediate post at the Chaim Weizmann Institute in Jerusalem, but she could not persuade her parents to move. And her husband, Vladimir, was also hesitant. “He is a very indecisive man,” she said. “This issue almost broke up our marriage. I think my life would have been different in Israel. As a scientist I could have worked as far as my talents could bring me. Here I am trapped, kept in a cage.” Natasha was determined that at least her daughter, Vika, would learn to live and think like a free woman. At first, when the little girl came home humming and singing the Bolshevik hymns she had been taught in school, Natasha was furious. “I told her to shut up,” Natasha said, “but she loved those songs. When I tried to counter the lies she was being told in school and I told her to look around at the real life around her, she started crying and shouting, defending what she was told in the second and third grade. She was struggling for the sake of these beautiful lies.” But as Vika grew older, she began to understand the deep contradictions between the textbooks in school and everything she knew about the real history of her own grandfather and the world around her. Like so many, she grew cynical, alienated from anything that smacked of official Soviet life. She decided she would emigrate if she could. “By the time I was thirteen I already knew that I could no longer live here,” Vika told me. “I was still in the Soviet Union, but I knew it was temporary. Just thinking that way set me free.

“I’m not scared of the latest wave of anti-Semitism. They are pathetic people, and they will always be around. I’m leaving because I cannot stand it here any longer: the rules, the psychology, the gray sameness of everything. If I stay here, I will suffocate. Unless a brick were to fall on my head, I could predict every moment of my life here until I die. I want to have children one day, but I will not have them here. I will miss everyone, but I am gone.” A few nights before she was to leave for Israel, Vika and her mother staged an extraordinary puppet show for all their friends and relatives. Around seventy-five people were packed into a single tiny room. The puppets, with voices supplied by Vika’s friends, played out her own personal history and coming exodus. When it was over, and the puppets lay in a heap, some people were still laughing, the rest were in tears.

Until the last minute, Vika was reminded of just why she was leaving. On the night of her departure, she and Natasha were driving through their neighborhood in north Moscow in Natasha’s tiny orange Lada. Natasha glanced in the rearview mirror and noticed they were being followed. She pulled into the local police station and said, “What the hell is going on? Why are you having me followed?” “It’s for your own protection,” the police captain said.

Natasha was furious, but her daughter smiled, as if in justification of her decision to go. That night, Vika flew to Budapest, then switched planes for the flight to Tel Aviv. When Vika left, Natasha said, “it was the first time in weeks that I had a good night’s sleep.” A little while later, I visited Natasha Rapoport once more. With her daughter in Jerusalem and her father still in Moscow, Natasha said she felt like a “woman in the middle.” Whenever we talked, she did everything she could to avoid the inevitable question of her father’s death and her long wait to emigrate. Finally, she brought it up herself.

“I know what you are thinking,” she said. “And the answer is yes. When he is gone, I will be gone, too.”