There is no question that at the beginning of 1937, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin launched a series of terrible, bloody purges in his country that wiped out not only the surviving corps d’elite of the early Bolshevik movement, but the entire high command of his army as well.

Rather than make a study of Josef Stalin’s twisted psyche to arrive at a determination of whatever passes for objective truth, it might be better to make a study of the motives of those who write about him. Anti-communist writers are by no means popular with major publishing houses. Al­though communism has officially died as a state religion in Russia, many of its believers are alive, very active and practicing in other countries. With rare exceptions, mainline anti-communist works are seldom seen in the major bookstores or on their mail order book lists. Liberal themes are far more attractive, and far safer, than strongly conservative ones and publishers and book sellers like the media always go where the money is.

For years, many Stalin apologists such as Isaac Deutscher, have claimed that there was a genuine plot against Stalin on the part of Soviet generals, a plot that Stalin was entirely justified in eradicating. With the death of Stalin, anything he did became the object of criticism and Soviet historians, safe from the attentions of the dictator and his murder squads, decided, post mortem, that there really was no plot at all and Stalin was a betrayer of the ideals of Marx and Lenin and a crazy murderer.

What is generally not discussed by any historian or journalist of a liberal persuasion is that just before his death by a stroke in 1953, it has been well established that Stalin was planning a pogrom against Soviet Jewry which would have put to shame anything attributed to the Germans of Hitler’s Third Reich. This was the so-called “Doctor’s Plot” and is a classic example of the way in which Stalin perpetrated his Mongolian massacres. Firstly, charges were made by loyal supporters that certain doctors, all Jewish, were responsible for the murder of their patients. These charges were well publicized and orchestrated demands on the part of the public were made for the punishment of these unfortunates. Many prominent doctors, among them the Kremlin medical staff, were rounded up, horribly tortured and either shot on the spot or kept alive in dungeons for another of Stalin’s famous show trials. From a reading of material now available in Russia, it appears that Stalin’s ultimate aim was to use the excuse of murderous Jewish doctors to launch a terrible purge of all Jews throughout his empire, but most especially in Moscow.

The coming reign of terror followed a long-established pattern of arrests, extorted confessions, false accusations, ficticious charges aired in the press and the removal of many Jewish functionaries of the Communist Party higher ranks. At the same time,.thousands of boxcars were assembled at railroad sidings in and near Moscow for the sole purpose of deporting all of Moscow’s Jewish population into the winter wilds of Siberia, there to be left without shelter, to die very swiftly of hypothermia or slowly of starvation. Only a providential stroke prevented this terrible act. If Stalin had indeed followed through on his plans for the mass extermination of his Jewish population, it would have been interesting to see if the media would have replaced Stalin for Hitler in liberal circles as the greatest , butcher of the Twentieth Century.

However, given the mindset of ideologues, it is highly doubtful if this would ever come to pass.