COMMUNISTS: Naming Names

In the flood of words that poured out of Moscow last week, there were only two sentences that gave any hint of the Russian public's reaction to the news that Politburocrats Zhdanov and Shcherbakov had been murdered by nine top Soviet physicians. "The charges," said an A.P. dispatch, "sent thousands to the newspaper stands to obtain more details. The story was being discussed everywhere."

The Muscovites got no new details from their newspapers, but every device of propaganda was used to make certain that they discussed the alleged murders in their fullest implication. Pravda and Izvestia brought up the death of Old Bolshevik Valerian V. Kuibyshev, the victim of an alleged "murder by doctors" in 1935 (TIME, Jan. 26), and lashed out anew at the nine physicians arrested last week. Many a head had rolled because of Kuibyshev's death. Looking around for heads that might now be hanging by a thread, correspondents noted that Viktor S. Abakumov, Soviet Minister of State Security, has not appeared at any state or party function in recent months.

In an address celebrating the 29th anniversary of the death of Lenin, Nikolai A. Mikhailov, one of Stalin's new party secretaries, underlined the real target. Said he: "U.S. imperialism, which heads the capitalist camp, is the super-reactionary and dark force, the gendarme and the strangler of the freedom of nations."

The Red propagandists appropriated an old Russian word to label the condition they wished to eliminate: rotozeistvo, gaping, or, as they translated it, "gullibility" (i.e., receptivity to non-Soviet ideas). Suspicion and denunciation were to be the order of the day. It was a time for the naming of names.

¶ In a bitter attack on the Institute of Law, the government newspaper Izvestia named a score of leading lawyers—some of them associates of Andrei Vishinsky—as guilty of "bourgeois ideology," "bourgeois nationalism" and other Soviet crimes, such as "formalism" and "dogmatism." At least six of the lawyers are believed to be Jews.

¶ The Order of Lenin—the Soviet government's highest decoration—was awarded to a woman "for assistance in exposing the doctor assassins." Her name: Dr. Lydia Fedoseevna Timashuk.

¶ Yuri Zhdanov, son of "murdered" Politburocrat Andrei Zhdanov, a member of the Communist Party Central Committee and chief of its science section, denounced Soviet scientists for allowing "violent enemies of Marxism" (Physicists Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, etc.) to circulate their opinions within Soviet society.

By week's end the alarm had spread to the farthermost corners of the Soviet empire. In Riga the newspaper Soviet Latvia exposed "slackness and lack of vigilance" in the Latvian Theatrical Society. In Kaunas, Soviet Lithuania reported: "Some of our organizations have been penetrated by enemy elements—bourgeois nationalists and Jewish Zionists." In Minsk the newspaper Soviet Belorussia charged seven doctors with "malingering." Their names: Epstein, Blok, Kokash, Kantorovich, Slobodskaya, Nisnevich, Paperno.