On 13 January 1953, Pravda and Izvestiya announced that a group of Kremlin physicians — most of them Jewish — had been arrested for having murdered senior Soviet officials through deliberate misdiagnosis and improper treatment, and for having plotted the deaths of the Soviet military leadership on behalf of American and British intelligence and a Jewish organization.
Nine doctors were named. Arrests spread. Jewish physicians across the Soviet Union were dismissed, and there is evidence that preparations were being made for a mass deportation of Soviet Jews to the east.
Stalin died on 5 March 1953. On 4 April Pravda announced that the case had been fabricated, that the confessions had been obtained by impermissible methods, and that the doctors had been released and rehabilitated. The physician who had been most aggressive in the interrogations was himself arrested.
The choice of target is what makes this case analytically distinct from the rest of the Great Terror.
Attacking physicians attacks the safety base of a population. Everyone gets ill. Everyone eventually places themselves, or their child, in the hands of a person whose competence they cannot evaluate, and that transaction rests on a trust relationship that is close to primary. Removing it produces anxiety with no available resolution — you cannot stop needing doctors, and you cannot verify one.
The second element is the fusion with an existing stereotype. Illusory correlation, in Hamilton and Gifford's account, describes the tendency to over-perceive associations between minority group membership and rare negative events, because both are distinctive and their co-occurrence is disproportionately memorable. The Doctors' Plot did not have to establish an association from nothing. It supplied an instance of one that was already available in the culture, and the instance then confirmed the pattern that made it plausible.
And the frame was self-sealing, which is a property conspiracy narratives share and which is the reason they are so durable. Under a conspiracy hypothesis, absence of evidence is evidence of concealment; denials are what a conspirator would say; and the failure of investigators to find anything demonstrates the conspiracy's reach. There is no observation that counts against it, which means the belief is not held for evidential reasons and cannot be dislodged by evidential ones.
The reversal after Stalin's death is unusual and worth noting, because it is one of the very few occasions on which a regime of this kind publicly retracted a fabricated case within weeks. It happened because the interested party died, not because the evidence changed.
Aftermath & Cross-Reference: Conspiracy Inoculation Defence