The official who exposed the fabricated Doctors' Plot
The review team's conclusion in 1953 was unequivocal: “The Doctors' Plot was fabricated, the doctors were innocent, and they should be released.”
Nikolai Mesyatsev was a postwar Soviet Komsomol and state official whose career reveals the tension between political direction and factual investigation. In 1953, assigned by Malenkov to review the Doctors' Plot and the Abakumov case, he helped establish quickly that the doctors' case had been fabricated. He later recalled that Stalin himself had ordered a review before his death, a disputed testimony that must be weighed alongside other evidence. He subsequently led Soviet state television and radio, overseeing the construction of the Ostankino center and the expansion of multi-program broadcasting.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1941–1945Investigator, Navy commissariat, NKVD Special Departments and SMERSH
- 1946–1952Official, Central Committee of the Komsomol
- 1953State security investigative unit, review of the Doctors' Plot
- 1955–1959Secretary, Komsomol Central Committee
- 1962–1964Minister-counsellor in China; deputy head of CPSU international-relations department
- 1964–1970Chairman, Soviet State Committee for Television and Radio Broadcasting
- 1970–1972Soviet Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to Australia
- 1972–1988Senior researcher and head of historical sciences, INION
Related historical events
The 1995 defamation suit against the Sudoplatovs
The 1994 book published in the United States by Pavel Sudoplatov and his son Anatoli, Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness, a Soviet Spymaster, named Mesyatsev as a central figure in the investigative work of 1953. The book said that he and other investigators had "beaten prisoners to death", and it claimed that he had put Abakumov in a refrigerated special cell at Lefortovo and was responsible for "the criminal interrogation and beating of the doctors" at the height of the antisemitic campaign. In 1995 Mesyatsev filed suit in Moscow's Ostankino court, saying that his honour and dignity had been harmed. He called the book's contents a "slanderous fabrication", claimed 360 million rubles in damages for moral harm and demanded a refutation of the false information spread in the Russian and foreign press. Mesyatsev said that he had not risen to high government office by beating suspects under interrogation, and that he had gone to court because he did not want his grandchildren to see him as a murderer. The records of the central archive, for their part, noted that Mesyatsev "appears neither in the documents of the doctors' case nor in those of the Abakumov case", and no information that he took part in the interrogations in the doctors' case was confirmed in the archive. The trial was postponed again and again from the winter of 1995 because the defendant Pavel Sudoplatov was in hospital. This shows that the conflicting accounts of his investigative work in 1953 have remained unsettled by the sources.