ABSTRACT
On 4 April 1953, the USSR Ministry of the Interior released a statement exonerating all physicians accused in the Doctor's Plot. This chapter examines the reaction of various elements of the population at large to the information that the Doctors' Plot had been a fabrication and that all the accused were completely innocent. It also examines the subject will help to convey the social and political atmosphere in which Soviet Jews found themselves in the spring of 1953, immediately prior to and in the first few weeks following Stalin's death. The chapter mainly devoted to an analysis of the letters written by non-Jews, which the author believes to be of particular interest. The Soviet era and the Stalinist period in particular, produced a special epistolary genre: letters to the editor of central newspapers which usually consisted of programmatic political declarations, incorporating substantial doses of Stalinist mythology.
