Hello and welcome to the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson

the past brought to life by those who were there. This week high hopes and great

excitement we recall the moment Fidel Castro took Havana.

We take you to the opening of the world's repository of seeds in the frozen Arctic.

Plus we have the author of Fat is a feminist issue a book that shifted perceptions in the 1970s

and from Brazil a black and poor single mother who told the world what her life was really like.

A rarely matched essay on the meaning and feeling of hunger, degradation and want.

One of the most astonishing documents of the lower depths ever printed.

That's all coming up later in the podcast,

but we begin with an extraordinary story from the paranoid years of Stalin's dictatorship in the Soviet Union.

Paranoid, because Stalin was nothing if not rigorous in his determination to cement the Communist

Revolution and rid the USSR of so-called enemies of the working classes, even after the great purge of the 1930s, in which it's

thought around 700,000 people were executed and a million imprisoned, Stalin wasn't finished. The paranoia lasted well into the 1950s, two decades after he came to power,

and it manifested itself oddly in 1953 when many of the best Soviet doctors were arrested, they were accused of spying

and plotting to kill senior Communist Party officials, including Conrad Stalin himself.

Dina Neuman has spoken to Natasha Rappaport, the daughter of one of the accused

Yakov Rappaport.

The State Security Services have uncovered a terrorist group of medical doctors who aim to shorten the lives of

Soviet politicians by providing harmful treatment.

It's January 13th, 1953 and Soviet Radio is announcing the so-called Doctor's Plot.

Relevant documents, expert research and confessions of the accused have all confirmed that these criminals were the secret enemies of the people.

These killer doctors, scum of the earth, betrayed their signs and were paid by foreign secret services.

...