Behind the Headlines: How Stalin’s Plan to Annihilate USSR Jews Was Thwarted, January 8, 1974
... March 5–when Stalin died in 1953 from a stroke–should be marked by Jews as a miraculous day to remember. His sudden death came as a great miracle for the 3,000,000 Jews in the Soviet Union. It thwarted his plans, to be started the next day, to annihilate the Jews in Russia through mass-pogroms and deportation of all surviving Jews to slave labor camps in remote Arctic regions to die there... The signal to this brutal plan was to be given March 6 at the opening of the notorious “Doctors’ Trial” at which six prominent Jewish and three non-Jewish physicians were accused by Stalin falsely of having plotted to poison him and other Soviet leaders in the Kremlin. The trial was cancelled upon Stalin’s death; physicians were released and rehabilitated. ... Details of the pogrom planned by Stalin and of his sudden death which saved the Jews in the Soviet Union from a catastrophe similar to Hitler’s annihilation of the 6,000,000 Jews in Europe, were related by me in my book, “Soviet Jewry Today and Tomorrow,” published by Macmillan in 1971. ...
Not coincidentally, Stalin’s stroke occurred on Purim.