Opinion

No escape from the Russian terror playbook

In the early 1950s, a group of prominent, mostly Jewish doctors from Moscow was accused of plotting to assassinate Soviet leaders on orders from the West. The accused were fired from their jobs, arrested, and tortured. But after Joseph Stalin died in 1953, Lavrenty Beria — one of Stalin's longest-serving secret police chiefs, who oversaw the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) in 1938–45 and spent decades filling the Gulags — called off the investigation. As it turned out, the sec