"The Final, Final Solution"

While I was looking up links for the post below, I came across this item from The Belmont Club’s Wretchard, who looks at what he calls Stalin’s “final, Final Solution“, his proposed destruction of Russia’s Jews in the early 1950s:

Though the Great Terror of the late 1930s is widely viewed as the height of Stalin’s purges, the number of arrests actually peaked in the early 1950s, and Stalin was planning hundreds of thousands more on the eve of his death in 1953. These arrests were spurred by the “doctors’ plot,” a supposed conspiracy among Jewish doctors to kill members of the government and destroy the U.S.S.R. at the behest of the Americans. Brent, the editorial director of Yale University Press, and Naumov, executive secretary of Russia’s Presidential Commission for the Rehabilitation of Repressed Persons, trace how Stalin himself put together … (a plan) … to accomplish several goals: to purge his Ministry of Security and upper ranks of government; to defuse the potential threat posed by Soviet Jews, many of whom had ties to the U.S. and the new state of Israel; and to provide fuel for an armed conflict with the U.S.

Fortunately, Stalin’s stroke and death soon afterwards put a stop to it, but not before four large prison camps in Kazakhstan, Siberia and the Arctic north were built. And not before all of Stalin’s other monstrous crimes had occurred during his long, bloody reign. As Wretchard writes, “This was pretty heavy stuff, but then Stalin had the dubious distinction of killing many more people than Adolph Hitler”.

(Via Willisms.)