FORWARD : Arts & Letters: "But in this new and important book, 'Stalin's Last Crime: The Plot Against the Jewish Doctors, 1948-1953,' Jonathan Brent and Vladimir P. Naumov argue that the Doctor's Plot was much more than just another attack on Jews. Using government and secret police documents hitherto unavailable to researchers, Brent and Naumov assert that the plot was orchestrated by Stalin to justify a new purge of the party and the police and to prepare the country for a war with the United States. The choreography of the plot was extremely complex and tied together many different events: the heart attack of Politburo member A.S. Shcherbakov in 1945; the Lysenko affair, in which a crackpot biologist promised to revolutionize Soviet agriculture and successfully terrorized his fellow scientists; the death of Politburo member Andrei Zhdanov in 1948; the execution of the Leningrad Party leadership in 1950, and the arrest of Ministry of State Security head Abakumov in 1951. All this played out against a backdrop of rising tension with the United States and Stalin's rabid suspicion that all Soviet Jews were potential American agents."