WI: Stalin killed the Jews? (The Doctors Plot)

James G

Gone Fishin'
I read a little about the Doctor's Plot recently and was thinking about the consequences of it had Stalin supposedly had his way.
Would Stalin really have killed off all of the Soviet Union's Jews had be lived a little longer?
Would the so-called evidence of a Doctor's Plot been enough for him to enlist the help of those he needed to help him carry out a Second Holocaust?
How would the Second Holocaust haved taken place?
Would the rest of the world reacted - because word would surely have got out during and afterwards? Would people worldwide today view Stalin as they do Hitler?
Or is the link between the Doctor's Plot and a Second Holocaust hypebole?
 
No chance he would have killed the Jews; more likely he would use it as an excuse to purge high ranking political and military officials who he saw as a threat, some Jewish, some not.
 

Deleted member 1487

I read a little about the Doctor's Plot recently and was thinking about the consequences of it had Stalin supposedly had his way.
Would Stalin really have killed off all of the Soviet Union's Jews had be lived a little longer?
Would the so-called evidence of a Doctor's Plot been enough for him to enlist the help of those he needed to help him carry out a Second Holocaust?
How would the Second Holocaust haved taken place?
Would the rest of the world reacted - because word would surely have got out during and afterwards? Would people worldwide today view Stalin as they do Hitler?
Or is the link between the Doctor's Plot and a Second Holocaust hypebole?

Assuming that Julian wrong about Stalin's intentions (I agree with him that it would have been just an excuse for some purges rather than a full genocide), and there was a genocide, would anyone really know? The Iron Curtain was notoriously difficult to penetrate deep in the Russian heartland especially in the 1940s and early 50s, so assuming it happened I'm not sure anyone would have realized until later because of the police state keeping it hushed up.
That said I don't think it would have been a Second Holocaust, but there would have been some serious bloodshed and those with Jewish heritage would either try and escape or really hide their ethnicity.
 
That said I don't think it would have been a Second Holocaust, but there would have been some serious bloodshed and those with Jewish heritage would either try and escape or really hide their ethnicity.

The foundation of the Jewish Autonomous Soviet Republic IOTL makes it quite clear what would happen: a mass deportation. Stalin has used mass deportations along ethnic lines in numerous times, quite successfully (for a certain definition of "success") to quell uprisings - ask the Lithuanians, Chechens or Crimea Tatars. The death toll of the deportation itself would be probably around 5-10% if the OTL deportations are to be taken as comparison; after that, depending on how much infrastructure is available where people are dumped (in this case: virtually none) you can expect another 20-25% to die due to diseases, starvation, exposure and fighting for vital resources among each other.
So, not quite a second Holocaust, but an atrocity of staggering proportions for sure - OTOH probably not better or worse than the fate of a dozen or more of ethnicities whose representatives dared - or could be expected to dare - resist the USSR rule ITTL.
 
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