Translated material
The Doctors' Case
How a show trial was prepared in the USSR and what stopped the repressions
1953. February. She's 14.
Employees of the Ministry of State Security break into her and her parents' communal apartment on Sokol. They came for their father, the famous pathologist Yakov Rapoport. But my parents are not at home - they are at work. They hid from their daughter that they had actually already prepared a bag with things in case of arrest. Their doctor friends have already been arrested. Whole families.
From surprise - she was sure that robbers had broken into the apartment - schoolgirl Natalya Rappoport would faint. When he wakes up, only his mother and some MGB employees will be at home. My father will already be taken away.
About what it’s like to be the daughter of a “killer doctor,” when the yard boys throw stones and dead rats at you, and at school some classmates give you hate; when the mother takes the packages to the Lubyanka and is refused, which means only one thing - execution...
And only the beginning of March 1953, when the first reports about the illness of the Leader of all times and peoples appeared, did this 14-year-old girl and her mother have a tiny hope.
And at that moment, during interrogations, the investigator actively asks their father and husband, instead of clarifying the circumstances of the “sabotage medical activity,” to recommend a luminary for an important patient, without naming the person’s name. Deprived of sleep for weeks, exhausted and weakened, Professor Rapoport shrugs his shoulders: all the decent specialists he knows are arrested, just like him. Then the investigator asks the unsuspecting Rapoport what he knows about “Chayne-Stokes Breath”...
About the atmosphere of that time, Stalin’s last and unfinished case - “The Doctors’ Case”, the fate of doctors, and specifically about the fate of pathologist Yakov Rappoport - watch and listen in Natalya Rappoport’s interview with Vera Chelishcheva especially for the Novaya Gazeta project - “Heirs”.