The 5 months between the Nineteenth Congress in October 1952 and Stalin's death in March 1953 witnessed the first phase of a new purge which would certainly have attained large proportions and destroyed thousands of suspected but innocent persons if Stalin had remained alive...
Stalin's second Great Terror probably had motivations similar to the first. From 1936 to 1939, Stalin blotted out the memory of other Old Bolsheviks, laying a convenient foundation for his own "cult of personality." Stalin's purges left behind few key players from the October 1917 events and the unfolding history of Bolshevik rule thereafter. The slate was clean for a new history of Soviet communism. A second round of Terror would erase Stalin's collaborators in the Great Patriotic War, eliminating all who might recall a narrative other than the wise leadership of the Great Stalin.
The main novelty of the new purge was the fact that it was coupled with an anti-Semitic drive of tremendous scope. In the fall of 1944 at a meeting in the Kremlin, there was talk about the "Jewish problem" and calls for "increased vigilance", after which the appointment of Jews to high positions became difficult...
As a measure of repression, Jewish professors were quietly being dropped from their university posts. Many Jewish writers, including a number who long since had adopted Russian names, found that editors no longer desired their contributions, and critical articles appeared in the press, attacking persons who hid their true identity under pen names and giving lists of such Jewish writers...
In mid-January 1953 the Soviet government announced the discovery of a plot of physicians against the leaders of the Communist party ; almost all of the physicians involved were Jews. The case of the "doctors' plot' was concocted on Stalin's orders in the winter of 1952-53 by the then Minister of State Security, S.D.Ignatiev, and his deputy, Ryumin. Several dozen of the leading doctors in Moscow were arrested [the number crucially mentioned was 16], headed by the top specialists of the Kremlin hospital who treated Stalin and all the Soviet chieftains. They were officially charged with using improper medical techniques in order to murder their patients. Specifically, they were accused of having poisoned Andrei A. Zhdanov and Alexander S. Shcherbakov and of attempting to poison Marshals Konev, Vasilevsky, Govorov and others.
The first official announcement of the case appeared on 13 January 1953 in Pravda and Izvestia...
The heaviest run of cases was in the Ukraine — that old seedbed of anti-Semitism. It was also Khrushchev's territory. First came the exposure and arrests of the Jews. Then the drumfire was laid down against the Party organizations which had permitted the "corruption." The target quickly broadened out. Khrushchev was involved because his Party chiefs were being attacked. Beria was involved because of the security angle. Mikoyan was involved deeper and deeper because of the alleged scandals in the trade organizations...
At the height of the new purge Stalin fell ill. He died on March 5, 1953. His death was officially ascribed to a brain hemorrhage; the illness and death bulletins were signed by a number of doctors and ministers.