ABSTRACT
Fraught with the genocide of the Soviet Jews and their deportation to the country's remote regions, it is one of the darkest pages in the modern history of the Jewish people. The Doctors' Plot was the natural outcome and apotheosis of the policy of state anti-Semitism pursued over the years by Stalin's totalitarian regime. The ground had been prepared by numerous anti-Jewish actions on the part of the Stalinist leadership in the preceding decades, and it was by no means a chance occurrence. Stalin's struggle against Trotsky and his numerous Jewish supporters fuelled the anti-Semitic trends in the Kremlin dictator's policy. Anti-Semitism and anti-Trotskyism reared their heads simultaneously', Trotsky wrote. The Jewish population was in a state of shock. Everyone was expecting mass anti-Jewish repressions, a Holocaust Soviet style. It was rumoured that after the trial and the doctors' public executions in the country's major cities, the Jews would be deported to remote regions of the Far East.
