But Stalin's most powerful weapon in
mobilizing the people was his campaign against kowtowing to the west.
Stalin was behind Zhdanov's famous 1946 speech
which denounced the literary magazines Zvezda and Leningrad.
The speech launched the campaign of unmasking
kowtowing to bourgeois culture among Soviet intelligence.
In the USSR, culture,
literature, and politics were very closely connected.
Two people who were denounced in the speech where
Mikhail Zoshchenko, a satirist, and Anna Akhmatova, poet.
The magazines published both and they were the first victims of the campaign.
In 1948, Stalin ordered the dissolution of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee.
It was created during the war.
The hand of the committee,
Solomon Mikhoels, he was a theatre director,
was assassinated by the Security Service.
This started a wide ranging anti-Semitic campaign.
It was aimed against rootless cosmopolitans.
This was how Jews were branded at the time.
The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee affair grew and branched off.
It ended in a trial in May, July 1952.
All the defendants but one were executed.
Both the trial and the campaign were driven personally by Stalin.
This is one of the posters which accompanied the campaign.
'Be vigilant: the class enemy works amongst us.'
The text of the newspaper in the hand of
this Soviet man is "Spies and assassins are exposed".
Stalin's anti-Semitic campaign went beyond
Soviet borders ahead of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia was Jewish, Rudolf Slansky.
He was put on trial and executed in 1952.
Several other leaders followed.
Stalin held the trial under his personal and close control.
In the last months of his life,
Stalin devoted much time to 'The Doctors' Plot'.
The Security Service uncovered a plot among doctors,
mostly Jewish, who treated top government officials.
In October, November 1952 several were arrested.
Here is the article in the Pravda,
'Vile Spies and Assassins under the Mask of Medical professors'.
And of course a picture of a very Jewish looking doctor
with a mask and gold flooding from his pockets.
One of the accused was Vladimir Vinogradov, Stalin's personal physician.
He was 70-year-old academician.
Under torture, the doctors confessed of
attempting to shorten the lives of Soviet leaders,
and of attempts to kill them not just of their own volition but
on orders from an international Jewish organization,
and from the American and British intelligence service.
They also implicated some Soviet security officials in assisting the plot.
The doctor's affair was started by this woman,
Lidia Timashuk, whose report was used to accuse doctors of the plot to kill Zhdanov.
She was immediately awarded the Order of Lenin.
Stalin's colleagues shivered with fear because under torture
the elderly doctors might say absolutely anything about their high ranking patients.
In January 1953, Stalin decided to turn the plot into a major campaign.
It was launched by an article in the Pravda and unfolded into a frenzy of denunciations,
accusations, dismissals, arrests, and executions of Jews.
Did the campaign reflect Stalin's personal anti-Semitic feelings?
Or was it a response to anti-Semitic tendencies in wider Soviet society?
Such tendencies became much more pronounced during the war.
In other case, the campaign was very useful for Stalin's purposes.
Jews became yet another internal enemy with roots abroad.
The campaign helped to mobilize the population against
an imagined enemy distracting it from its real problems yet again.
At the time of Stalin's death,
there were 2.5 million people in the camps,
penal colonies and prisons and 2.8 million 'banned people' in remote areas.
But these impressive numbers did not deliver economic miracles any longer.
The country needed modernization and for it,
it needed technically literate and creative labor force.
The prisoners could not deliver it.