This story is from Misha Koffman.

I was born on March 5, 1952, in a village about eighty miles southeast of Leningrad, now St. Petersburg. It was a peculiar time and place for Russia, and because Russia was what it was, for the whole world.

To explain why, you have to go back a few years.

In 1948, one of the ugliest antisemitic crusades in Soviet history began. It started with the purge of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, also known as the Soviet Anti-Fascist Committee. That organization had been created during World War II to rally international, especially Jewish, support for the Soviet war effort. It represented a whole network of Soviet Jewish intellectual and cultural leadership.

Most of its core figures, around twenty-five people, were arrested that year. The campaign was splashed across Soviet newspapers, radio, and the rest of the propaganda machine, which produced one of Russia’s oldest and favorite entertainments: antisemitism.

Most of the leaders of the committee died in prison or were executed in August 1952. By March 1953, when Stalin died, only one of them was still alive.

Then came the Doctors’ Plot. A group of leading Kremlin doctors was accused of conspiring to murder senior government officials. Most of those doctors were Jews. Soviet propaganda whipped the country into a frenzy. Pravda called them “murderers in white coats.” Another giant anti-Jewish wave was clearly coming, and this time it threatened to spill into outright pogroms.

Both of my parents were Jews. Both were doctors. I was one year old and obviously had no idea what might be about to happen to our family.

Looking back, I think we were saved partly by geography. We lived far from the big cities, and my parents were the only doctors serving a vast rural territory, something like a small American state such as Rhode Island. That isolation may have helped protect us.

Then Purim arrived. In 1953 it fell on March 5, my first birthday.

That day it was announced that the great Josef Stalin was dead.

The news was so unexpected that for several days people could barely process it. Everybody had been taught that the Great Communist Leader of all humanity was effectively immortal, and many could not imagine life continuing without his so-called wise rule. But slowly the antisemitic psychosis faded, at least on the surface.

And so our family went on living what counted as a normal Soviet life.

But that is another story.