Discovering Soviet Archives: The Papers of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee

The announcement, forty years ago, on 13 January 1953, of the “Doctors’ Plot” was the culmination of the anti-Jewish campaign initiated in the autumn of 1948 and an ominous step towards Stalin’s solution of the “Jewish problem” in the USSR. The scenario of the “Plot” was closely intertwined with previous waves of anti-Jewish terror directed at the Soviet-Jewish intelligentsia, Jewish culture and the only central Jewish structure in war-time and post-war Russia-the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAFC).