Antropologicheskij forum, 2016, no. 31

“POISONED COTTON” AND “VACCINATED HYPERTENSION”: ORIGINS AND FUNCTIONS OF RUMORS AROUND THE “DOCTORS’ PLOT”

Galina Zelenina

Russian State University for the Humanities
6 Miusskaya Sq., Moscow, Russia
galinazelenina()gmail.com

Abstract: This paper examines public sentiments and newslore during the Doctors’ plot (January — April 1953), which remain underestimated and understudied in the historiography of Late Stalinism. This research is based on a comparative analysis of three groups of sources: central and regional press, “responses” of the population (both non-Jewish and Jewish) to the arrest of the “killers in white gowns” and to their subsequent rehabilitation three months later, and Jewish memories of this period both in written memoirs and in interviews recorded long after the events. Besides description and classification of rumours and libels, this paper seeks to identify their direct sources and indirect stimuli, as well as to interpret their ideological and social functions and consequences. The newslore of the Doctors’ plot is argued to originate from the amalgam of several factors including artificially generated anxiety coupled with informational vacuum and various collective phobias developed by previous anti-Semitic campaigns and recollections of the war (either of Nazi genocide, or of the Jews “fighting in Tashkent”). Functionality of those rumours includes the feeling of revenge and retribution among non-Jewish haters of Jewish doctors, as well as the social separation between “simple Soviet people” and “learned” Jews, and self-apology of the Jews through discrediting the accusations as generated by ordinary people’s ignorance and envy.

Keywords: Doctors’ plot, anti-Semitism, rumours, newslore, Great Patriotic war, Soviet Jewry, blood libel.

To cite: Zelenina G., '“Otravlennaya vata” i “privitaya gipertoniya”: istoki i funktsii slukhov vokrug dela vrachey' [“Poisoned Cotton” and “Vaccinated Hypertension”: Origins and Functions of Rumors around the “Doctors’ Plot”], Antropologicheskij forum, 2016, no. 31, pp. 119–154.

URL: http://anthropologie.kunstkamera.ru/files/pdf/031/zelenina.pdf