Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Stalin: Man of Steel, Episode 8

Episode Date: August 26, 2024

World War II is over, and Stalin is ready to pick up where Hitler left off. Driven by paranoia, no one is above suspicion, including the wife of his closest friend. Not even her loyalty to him could save her from Stalin’s wrath. And, as his own health deteriorated, Stalin turned on the very people trying to help him. What was behind his sinister plot to target doctors? Credits: Host and Executive Producer: Sharon McMahon Supervising Producer: Melanie Buck Parks Audio Producer: Craig Thompson Writers/researchers: Mandy Reid, Amy Watkin, Kari Anton, Sharon McMahon, Melanie Buck Parks Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Head to SharonMcMahon.com slash ad-free to subscribe today. By the 1950s, Joseph Stalin was in his 70s and spending more and more time alone. He felt he couldn't trust anyone. Occasionally, he still invited officials like his top lieutenant, Vyacheslav Molotov, to his Moscow vacation home where they always drank too much. Stalin would keep pouring, and the guests were too scared to refuse. They'd seen the Great Terror wipe out all of Stalin's Bolshevik comrades in the 1930s, so they were not going to risk their lives by saying,

no thanks. Stalin and his henchmen would spend an entire night drinking and telling dirty jokes. Stalin was glad to see his men get drunk enough to loosen their tongues. Staying sober, in Stalin's mind, would mean they had something to hide. And the men were relieved when Stalin played pranks on them, like putting a tomato on a chair so someone would sit on it. As long as he was teasing them, it meant he was in a good mood and they'd live to see another day. When the men left, usually just before sunrise, Stalin remained restless, often going out to his

garden to prune shrubs, leaving the cut flower heads on the ground for his employees to clean up. His hands trembled so much, probably from high blood pressure, that Stalin seemed to cut his fingers as much as he cared for his plants. Medical staff who were called in to dress his wounds were often so scared to touch him that Stalin had to bandage his own wounds, laughing at the way he could still intimidate people. His increasing age and deteriorating condition kept him from being the scrappy, clever fighter he'd been in his youth. But that wouldn't keep Stalin from starting new kinds of fights. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. Back in February 1945, when FDR, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin met in Yalta for eight days, they knew that World War II was coming to an end. During their meetings in Lavadia Palace, the former summer home of Tsar Nicholas II, the three world leaders formed a plan

that would benefit all of their countries after the war. It was a little hard to stay focused, though, as they were dealing with very un-palace-like conditions, like long lines for the few working toilets in the palace and the stench of the DDT sprayed on mattresses to kill bedbugs. Despite these distractions, the big three agreed on a few key points. After the war, Germany would be divided into four occupied zones, one each for France, America, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union. Germany would pay reparations, and FDR's plan for a new global organization called the United Nations would move forward. None of this meant that FDR or Churchill trusted Stalin. The U.S. and the Soviet Union were already staring

each other down, each believing that the other country had superior weapons and espionage capabilities. The Soviets spied on the Manhattan Project, and Soviet work on the atomic bomb really sped up once the U.S. dropped their nuclear weapons on Japan in 1945. Stalin put one of his most trusted advisors, Leventry Burya, on the top-secret project, and the Soviets had their own atomic bomb by 1949. The U.S. knew that Stalin wanted to spread communism throughout the world. Stalin thought capitalism was the ultimate evil and would not let it destroy the communism that he said was giving Soviets everything they needed. World War II ended, but the Cold War had just begun. It was a standoff between two countries with weapons that could destroy each

other, but it was also a war of ideas. Capitalism versus communism. Stalin wanted to unite his country and increase their patriotism so everyone would be on board with conquering new lands. Luckily, he thought, he'd done this once before. In the 1930s, Stalin claimed that anyone dissenting from communism or Stalin's policies was a threat and carried out what is now called the Great Terror. It's estimated that at least 750,000 Russians, likely far more, were murdered in just two years. Stalin actually looked back with pride at the Great Terror, claiming that it had united his country just in time to fight World War II. And his increasingly delusional mind told him that if murdering his own people had united the country once, surely it would work again.

America was the Soviets' new enemy, for sure. And Stalin's paranoia just continued to increase. He saw threats around every corner. And one group he felt particularly threatened by were Russian Jews. His father had taught him to hate Jewish people when he was a child, believing that they had taken some of his father's shoemaking business away, leaving Stalin's family destitute. Stalin also had a stereotyped image of Jewish people as being highly intellectual, which made working class Stalin feel inferior. Stalin knew that he could twist lies together until the Soviet people believed, or at least pretended to believe, that Soviet Jews were working with the Americans to destroy the Soviet Union,

and his own increasing paranoia helped him believe the lies. Truly, terrifying his own people was his goal. Scare them enough so that they would see him as their only protector and obey him in all things. Loyalty had long been more important to Stalin than love, even in his relationships with his wives and children. And he'd always been good at imagining that people were disloyal to him, even with absolutely no evidence. He'd done it with his wife, Nadia, and now he would do it with the wife of Vyacheslav Molotov, his lead henchman. His wife's name was Paulina. Molotov had been Stalin's right-hand man for years. His title was actually the Commissar of Foreign Affairs, and he was one of the officials who actually carried out Stalin's orders to kill

people. Winston Churchill once described Molotov as, quote, a human being who perfectly represents the modern conception of a robot. His smile was of Siberian winter. But Molotov's wife, Polina, was warm and kind. She had curly brown hair, and people said she was elegant. Polina may have been the last person to see Stalin's second wife, Nadia, alive. After Nadia and Stalin had their very public fight and Nadia went out for a walk, it was Polina who went out to help her calm down. But Polina knew that loyalty to Stalin was more politically important than loyalty to Nadia, so immediately after mourning her friend, Polina filled some of Nadia's role. She helped host

state events and also took over the education of Nadia and Stalin's daughter, along with her own daughter who was just a bit younger. Both girls were named Svetlana, and Paulina kept them busy with classes in gymnastics, music, German, French, and English. The girl's English teacher said, quote, the two Svetlanas came together and studied together. They were sweet, modest girls. They wore wretchedly thin fur coats. When Svetlana Malatova caught me looking at hers, she said, Mama doesn't want people in town to know who I am.

We have to be modest. The whole country's looking at us. Paulina splurged on manicures, though, and she didn't let much rattle her. Even on the day her own husband issued the official declaration of war after Germany invaded Russia, she casually listened to the radio broadcast while getting her nails done. Maybe because Polina was such a modest, devoted Bolshevik, Stalin had a soft spot for her. He didn't even have her punished when her older brother moved to America and became a capitalist, and she still wrote to him. Communicating with a capitalist was

considered a serious crime and often got people kicked out of the party or even sent to prison. Polina kept busy as a deputy commissar of the food industry, and then a commissar of the fish industry, and then as a director of the state perfume industry. All of these appointments were personally authorized by Stalin, making it even more clear that he liked and trusted her. The real trouble was waiting for Polina after the war. Partly because she had joined the new Soviet Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. Polina was Jewish, something Stalin had overlooked. Until the war ended. And now Stalin could make Paulina a very public example of the imagined disloyalty of Soviet Jews.

JAC, was not brand new. It was formed in 1941 to unite Jews against Hitler. Stalin knew that the Soviets had to align with the Allies at this point in the war. He allowed the JAC to form because it was far less threatening to Stalin than Hitler, and having Jewish groups like this allowed Stalin to say to the Allies, see, look what I'm doing over here. I'm just like you. I support Jewish people. The JAC even toured the U.S. during the war, raising millions of dollars for the Soviet fight against the Nazis and helping to raise awareness of the humanitarian needs of the Soviet people. So the work of the people in these groups was often very sincere. but to Stalin, the groups were just smoke and mirrors, a way to get support from the Allies until the war was over and it was time to turn on them. Just like the great terror of the 1930s had begun with the murder of Sergei Kirov, who had been shot in the

hallway of his office building, now Stalin's persecution of Jewish people would start with just one woman, Polina. As World War II ended, the Cold War began, and America was the Soviet Union's new enemy. And that meant that Stalin's government no longer needed to earn America's favor by supporting the JAC. In fact, Stalin thought, maybe I'll just kill them all. In 1948, Israel was founded and Golda Meir was appointed Israel's ambassador to Moscow, where she arrived for a visit. Russian Jews showed up by the tens of thousands to see the woman they called Our Golda and to celebrate the fact that despite murdering six million Jewish people, Hitler had not been able to stop Judaism. When Golda Meir

arrived in the city, crowds cheered and Paulina threw a reception for her. Perhaps Jews didn't see much reason for alarm because now Stalin appeared to be supporting the creation of Israel, and they probably didn't know that Stalin was about to turn on them. There were KGB officers in the crowd taking notes because Stalin saw all of this celebrating as provocation. By the late 1940s, Stalin had convinced himself that a secret, sinister Jewish organization had been operating in the country for decades. According to Stalin, this secret Jewish plot had been around since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, working against him to create its own language and culture. But now, according to Stalin's delusions, this secret and also imaginary Jewish organization was loyal only to Israel and the United States, a clear enemy. Stalin believed that the Jewish organization he thought was working against his government was backed by imperialist cosmopolitans who were poisoning the principles of the Soviet Union from the inside.

And he decided they were doing this by getting information from high-level officials in Stalin's government. Or maybe their wives. In November 1948, the JAC was shut down. Over the next year, hundreds of members were arrested. Those who were arrested were tortured until they confessed to espionage and treason, and then they were thrown in jail or sent to Siberia. Any leader of any organization in the Soviet Union had to always be wary when they became too popular. Stalin was the sun, and the moon must never outshine it. Jewish leaders in particular had to fear for their lives.

Solomon Mikhaels was a well-known actor in his 40s when he was appointed chair of the JAC. He had performed as King Lear for Stalin before World War II and spent the war years raising awareness of the Soviet war effort and campaigning for donations around the world. Mikhaels was an international Soviet representative and a hero for bringing money into the country. But after the war, Stalin saw Mikhaels as only a Jewish leader who could influence other Jewish people to support America. Mikhaels wanted to get back on the stage, but Stalin convinced himself that he was leading a network of Jewish spies backed by the United States. In early 1948, Mikhaels was visiting Minsk, the capital city of Belarus, to judge plays for the Stalin Prize Committee. Mikhail's finished his work for the day,

ate dinner, and then left his hotel to go to a party that his friend invited him to. Mikhail's friend sent a car to pick him up at his hotel. But it turned out that his friend had been paid by the Soviet secret police to get Mikhail's into that car, which brought him to the vacation home of a convicted

murderer now working for the KGB. The murderer was known to be ruthless, often called a beast, and he injected Mikhaels with poison to knock him unconscious. The poison didn't take effect fast enough, and Mikhaels struggled with his captors until one of them smashed him on the head with a blunt object and then shot him. Then they shot the friend who had lured Mikhail's to the site, just for good measure. Then their bodies were disposed of by driving them to a quiet street near their hotel, dumping them in the snow, and then running them over with a truck. For years, the only story that was told about Mikhail's death was that running them over with a truck. For years, the only story that was told about Mikhail's death was that he was hit by a truck. The coroner knew better because he'd

seen a bullet hole in his body and an injury to his head that was not caused by a car accident, but no one could say anything without risking their own lives. Mikhail's was widely honored around the Soviet Union, even having a Moscow theater named after him. He was given a state funeral to throw off those pesky rumors that he had been murdered by the Soviet government. And Stalin's people made sure to spread rumors that Mikhail's had been a spy, maybe even killed by Jewish nationalists. Mikhaels' quote-unquote accident is often considered by historians to be a turning point in Soviet history. It was the event that opened the floodgates to what amounted to a national policy of anti-Semitism. All of the other members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee were rounded up and arrested. Almost all of them were executed. But Polina had been granted special privileges

from Stalin for decades and moved forward with more confidence than caution. She embraced the newly formed Israel and, it was suspected, began working with Golda Meir on plans for a similar Jewish homeland in the Soviet Union. Polina didn't plan for Beria, who'd been one of Stalin's top advisors for over 10 years. Stalin had trusted Beria enough during the war to put him in charge of the atomic weapons program, but Beria had many jobs under Stalin, like personally organizing and committing murders during the Great Terror of the 1930s. And now Beria was the head of the KGB, or the Soviet Secret Police. And he had been lurking around gathering information on Paulina. Whatever Berea learned about Paulina was nothing she'd been keeping secret. It basically just detailed her friendly visits with Golda Meir, but for Stalin,

that was more than enough to make her an enemy. There's no indication that anything personal happened between Stalin and Paulina to make him want to punish her. It's just that his paranoia had grown so strong that he was no longer making any exceptions for personal relationships. Interior Chinatown is an all-new series based on the best-selling novel by Charles Yu about a struggling Asian actor who gets a bigger part than he expected when he witnesses a crime in Chinatown. Streaming November 19th only on Disney+. Visa and OpenTable are dishing up something new.

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brought before the Central Committee and accused of sustaining criminal relations with Jewish nationalists for several years and conducting enemy work with them against the Soviet Union. The interrogations went on for most of the year. Polina was questioned about whether she'd gone to one synagogue service three years earlier. Attending any religious services went against party principles at that time. Polina's repeated testimony was, It's pure lies. I was not at the synagogue. I have committed no crimes against the Soviet state. I deny the charges of having criminal contacts with Jewish nationalists. Even members of the JAC testified against her,

probably in an attempt to save themselves. At trial, they said things to Paulina like, you were a despot. When anyone tried to argue with you, you would shut them up. People were afraid of you because you were cruel. Some of these were people who had previously groveled to try to get on her good side. And now they would say anything to keep Stalin's eyes focused on someone else. Paulina's own family members testified against her. One cousin said, remember when you returned from America in the spring of 1936 and you gave me a letter and $20 from your brother? It was an unthinkable crime in Stalin's Soviet Union to not only write to a capitalist in America, but to accept money from them. Stalin had overlooked her relationship with her brother years before. But now that the Cold War had begun and America was a new Soviet enemy, she had to deny that this happened.

Molotov, Polina's husband, did not ask Stalin for any favors on her behalf. And if there was anyone in a position to ask favors of Stalin, it would have been Vyacheslav Molotov. He worked side by side with Stalin for 20 years, accompanying him to Yalta and other places to meet with world leaders. Molotov had carried out many of Stalin's programs over the years, including starving millions of people to death in Ukraine and invading Finland. Stalin kept promoting Molotov so that he was always one of the highest ranking officials in Stalin's government. And he was also one of the very few people that Stalin considered a friend. Their families lived next door to each other in the Kremlin, and Stalin spent nearly as much time at Molotov's house as he did at his own. Molotov carried out

Stalin's orders without question or any apparent attacks of conscience. He hated anyone Stalin called an enemy. But he loved his wife, and now he had to decide if he could stand up to Stalin to defend Polina. In 1949, a secret meeting of the Politburo was held, and charges were read against Polina. She was accused of working with Israeli Ambassador Golda Meir to turn Crimea into a Jewish nation. First, Polina was expelled from the party, but not arrested. Her husband, Molotov, abstained from voting against his wife. Very quickly after that, Molotov changed his mind and sent Stalin this top-secret note. It said, quote, After thinking the matter over, I now vote in favor of the Central Committee's decision. Furthermore, I acknowledge that I was gravely at fault in not restraining my wife from

taking false steps. In other words, I should have controlled my own life. I'm very sorry. It's possible that Molotov wrote this hoping that he would be the one punished, and not Polina. Polina was sentenced to five years of exile in Siberia, but also spent time in prison first. On the prison form, she marked herself a single, either because she was angry with her husband or because she thought that would protect him. She entered prison with her head held high, wearing a squirrel fur coat. Molotov must have been gnawing his fingernails, waiting for what was going to happen to him after his wife was arrested. First, he was fired from his job as Minister of Foreign Affairs.

Invitations to the drunken parties at Stalin's home stopped. By March of 1949, he was fired from all of his party jobs because his wife was Jewish. While Polina was in prison, Stalin's paranoia only grew. The Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had not met since 1939 when World War II began. On the eve of the 19th Congress in 1952, Stalin went through a list of people elected to membership of the Central Committee in 1939, and he put crosses next to the names of those who were already dead. Many of them he had personally ordered killed. He put question marks next to those who were still living.

But there really was no question about what would happen to those people. It was Stalin's list of the next people to purge. Stalin was in a pretty strange place in his life at this point. When he was home, he was usually all alone. And since his family members were either dead or estranged, he cut out photos of children from magazines and pinned them to his walls. He wanted to pretend that these were his grandchildren. He was also struggling with health concerns like his trembling hands, so he called his doctor, who he had trusted for almost 10 years. His doctor diagnosed Stalin with high blood pressure, hardening of the arteries, and inconsistent circulation of the

blood to his brain, which caused Stalin to have minor strokes. He suggested that Stalin avoid working and get as much rest as possible. He would not be able to sustain his regular workload much longer. Stalin's mind must have echoed when he heard those words, the same ones he'd said to Lenin when he wanted Lenin to step aside so he could take over. All he could see was his past coming back to haunt him. He knew what the words, slow down, take a break, meant to him in the past, and so Stalin ignored the recommendations, but did not forget what he saw at his own doctor's betrayal. How dare his doctor suggest that he was weakening? Yet Stalin would wait before inflicting punishment on his doctor. Let him think he was still safe,

while Stalin made sure the Jewish people were completely terrified. He had already shut down Jewish newspapers, theaters, publishers, and schools. He limited the number of Jews who could be admitted to universities, and identity cards now said, nationality, Jewish. His line of thinking was that Jewish people surely supported the creation of Israel. So did the United States. And Jewish people probably had a lot of relatives in the United States. So there were two reasons for Jewish Soviets to side with America, which again was now Stalin's enemy. And Stalin had learned a thing or two from Hitler. This detail is particularly jarring. Jews in Moscow, seven years after the end of the Holocaust, had to start wearing armbands with yellow stars.

By August 1952, prisons were full of Jewish people accused of treason and espionage. Thousands of them were tortured in Soviet prisons for information they did not have about a conspiracy that did not exist. for information they did not have about a conspiracy that did not exist. They were isolated in dank cells or deprived of sleep and put on what was called the conveyor belt, a line of prison guards ready to beat them and pass them on to the next torturer. One defendant, a JAC member, said that after being tortured, he was, quote, ready to confess that he was the Pope's own nephew and that he was acting on his direct personal orders. That's how bad the torture was. Another Jewish prisoner counted over 2,000 blows to his backside and heels during the first months he was in prison. Three years later,

he had to be carried on a stretcher because he still could not walk, but he refused to confess because he had done nothing wrong. On August 12, 1942, these men and 11 other Jewish intellectuals, writers, and members of the JAC were rounded up from their cells in prison. All of them had already been tortured, and all except one had been put on trial and confessed to conspiring to, quote, topple, undermine, or weaken the Soviet Union. But on this hot August night, all 13 prisoners were marched down to the basement of the prison to stand in front of a concrete wall and wait for their turn to be shot by the secret police. Not one Soviet newspaper reported

the executions. Families of the victims were charged with being related to traitors of the motherland and exiled. They didn't learn the fates of their executed loved ones until years later, and it wasn't until the 1990s that the world would learn what really happened. Among the men murdered that night in 1952 were multiple poets and a novelist. That mass execution is now called the Night of the Murdered Poets. But it didn't quench Stalin's paranoia. He turned his murderous eye to Jewish doctors. Stalin believed that all doctors whose names sounded Jewish were plotting to kill him. The secret sinister Jewish organization that existed only in Stalin's imagination

was, in his mind, going to hand the Soviet Union over to the Americans as soon as they could. Andrei Zhdanov, a Soviet politician who was close to Stalin and known as the propagandist-in-chief, died in 1948 after treatment for heart disease. A Soviet medical worker filed complaints that Zhdanov had not received proper treatment. She said she saw a veteran doctor make a mistake in his diagnosis and give him treatment that caused his death. Her complaint was ignored until Stalin needed it to shore up his suspicions. The letter that listed the medical workers' complaints was pulled out of the files in 1953 and used as evidence of what came to be called the doctor's plot. The doctor's plot was a plot that Stalin

imagined Jewish doctors were making against him and his government. Again, Stalin made up a story and just acted on it. This time, the story was that the doctors had purposely killed Andrei Zhdanov and would continue killing people if Stalin didn't stop them. In January 1953, an article appeared in Pravda announcing that nine doctors had been arrested and accused of poisoning two of Stalin's aides a few years earlier. They were also accused of working with the CIA to try to kill Kremlin leaders like Shtanov and Stalin. And seven of the nine accused doctors were Jewish.

Stalin had not forgotten that his own doctor had betrayed him and his country by suggesting that it would be best for Stalin's health if he retired and rested. Stalin claimed that he had evidence that his doctor and other doctors were collaborating with the Americans. And when he ordered his doctor to be arrested, he shouted, leg irons, put him in leg irons. And when Stalin felt that the jailers and torturers were not harsh enough to these doctors, he commanded them to, quote, beat them until they confess. Beat, beat and beat again. Put them in chains. Grind them into powder. Yes, he actually said grind them into powder.

Stalin's propaganda machine did its work, and newspapers ran headlines like murderers in white coats and spies and murderers under the mask of doctors. The fervor spread, and before long, many doctors, some Jewish, some not, were fired, arrested and tortured all over the country. At the start of 1953, loudspeakers all over Moscow shouted threats about doctors.

Soviet people angrily condemned this criminal gang of murderers and their foreign masters. criminal gang of murderers and their foreign masters. This was always followed by the sinister promise that anyone suspected of inspiring or helping these doctors or believing in their cause would also be punished. Posters with Stalin's image hung all over the country with the message, the world will be saved and enhanced if people take responsibility for maintaining peace into their own hands and defend it to the end. But of course, this really meant keep track of your own neighborhoods and root out the outsiders and criminals, which now apparently included doctors, intellectuals, anyone with an unfavorable opinion of Stalin, and of course, Jews. with an unfavorable opinion of Stalin and, of course, Jews. Stalin's delusions led to persecutions of anyone praising anything foreign. In Stalin's mind, a Soviet who liked anything from another

country was clearly rebelling against communism and against Stalin himself. But it was tough to avoid everything foreign made. So Stalin had historians create propaganda showing that Russians had invented many things that other countries had taken credit for. They said that airplanes were invented in Russia, not by the Wright brothers in America. They also claimed that the steam engine, the light bulb, and the radio, those were all invented in Russia too. Anything considered outside of the Soviet world and ideals must be eliminated, and Jewish people to Stalin were definitely outsiders. All of this propaganda began to incite mass hysteria. People started believing that babies delivered by Jewish doctors would be born blue because the Jewish doctor was a vampire who would suck the child's blood. Newspapers began

publishing reports of suspected spies being arrested in towns across the Soviet Union. Black limousines drove around Moscow after dark and shadowy figures would get out of the limos and arrest prominent Jewish people who would disappear into the cars and never be seen again. It seemed to most people as if no one could escape. An anonymous person living under Stalin's regime wrote in their diary, Stalin here, Stalin there, Stalin everywhere. You can't go out to the kitchen or sit on the toilet or eat without Stalin following you. He creeps into your guts and your very soul, creeps into your brains, stops up all holes, treads on a person's heels, gets into bed with you under the blanket, haunts your memories

and your dreams. Prominent Jews were forced to write an appeal asking Stalin to deport their people to Siberia instead of killing them. They were told that if they didn't write it, anti-Semitic riots would happen and more people would die. Were there any truth to Stalin's claims? I think you know by now that the answer to that question is no. Stalin's own dentist and the Kremlin's head of facial and oral surgery didn't go home for a week because he worried the police were coming for him and he was not even Jewish mass hysteria continued to roll across the huge country newspapers published articles listing the names of Jewish people who were supposedly quote quote, swindlers or saboteurs

or scoundrels. And propaganda like this started to work. Some people were convinced that Jews really were the problem, so they took whatever action they could. Jewish people were fired from their jobs and attacked in the streets. And then the worst rumor of all. Stalin was planning to deport all of the Jews in central Russia to Siberia. It was an idea that was passed in whispers, friend to friend, husband to wife. They're making lists of Jews. They know the date already. Protect yourself if you can. Don't let them take you away.

yourself if you can. Don't let them take you away. People tried to reassure themselves by reasoning that it would take thousands of railroad cars to transport all of those people. It would never work. But some Soviets had survived the Holocaust and rumors of transport by rail car were more than chilling. And then there was Paulina, back under interrogation, this time to try to get her to name names and persecute more Jewish doctors. But Paulina had been down this road before when her own life was on the line, and she never lost her own nonchalance. If she'd been able to get a manicure while being questioned, she probably would have, interrupting Stalin's henchmen so she could pick out her nail polish color, and then waving a hand dismissively for them to continue. Paulina revealed nothing. And in March 1953, something momentous would happen that would finally let her walk free. The record of Paulina's

release states, it is now established that the statements against her were extorted through brutality and beatings. In other words, all of the people who testified against her had only done so because they were tortured. After five years in prison and Siberia, Paulina left wearing the same squirrel fur coat she'd worn when she first arrived. Now the coat had patches of fur missing and couldn't have been keeping her very warm. Still, she walked out with her head held high. Yet Paulina and all of the other Jewish people in the Soviet Union were facing a danger they thought had ended when Hitler died. facing a danger they thought had ended when Hitler died? Was there anything that could stop all of this and save millions of lives in the Soviet Union? Stay tuned for the final episode in our

series to find out. Thank you for listening to Here's Where It Gets Interesting. I'm your host and executive producer, Sharon McMahon. Our supervising producer is Melanie Buck-Parks. The show is written and researched by Mandy Reed, Amy Watkin, Kari Anton, Sharon McMahon, and Melanie Buck-Parks. Our audio producer is Craig Thompson. And if you enjoyed this episode, sharing, rating, and subscribing helps podcasters out so much. Thanks again for listening to Here's Where It Gets Interesting, and I'll see you again soon.