Mikhail Dmitrievich Ryumin Михаил Дмитриевич Рюмин (1 September 1913 – 22 July 1954) was a Soviet security officer and deputy head of the Soviet MGB (Ministry of State Security) who engineered the "Doctors' Plot" in 1952–1953. The case was dismissed on Joseph Stalin's death and Ryumin was arrested and executed. Biography Early career Ryumin was born in a peasant village in the Kuban area. Reputedly, his family were wealthy farmers, his brother and sister were convicted thieves, and his father in law fought against the Bolsheviks in the White Army commanded by Admiral Kolchak. Despite his background, he survived the wholesale arrests of 'kulaks' instigated by Josif Stalin. By about 1931 was working as bookkeeper on a collective farm in the Urals. His next break came after Nikolai Yezhov ordered the mass arrest of NKVD officers suspected of loyalty to his predecessor, Genrikh Yagoda in 1937, when Ryumin joined the NKVD as a bookkeeper. He worked for SMERSH during the war. In 1948 he was transferred to the Department for Specially Important Cases, within the MGB. Ryumin personally tortured prisoners in the Sukhanovo Prison, and appears to have enjoyed doing it. His victims included a young American, Alexander Dolgun who was arrested in Moscow in 1948, but later released and deported. In his memoirs, he recalled being told by Ryumin: "I have a Cossack method of beating. I draw as I hit. You will never have felt such pain! Ever!". Ryumin then beat him unconscious, using a two-foot long rubber club. Early in 1949, he supervised the interrogation of Boris Shimeliovich, a long-standing party member who came under suspicion because of his war time involvement in the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. Accused of terrorism, he refused to confess, and was beaten so badly that he had to be brought in on a stretcher for his interrogation to continue. At his trial, Shimeliovich told the judge: "I received approximately eighty to one hundred blows a day, so altogether I think I was hit about two thousand times." The Doctors' Plot In 1950, Ryumin began the interrogation of Professor Yakov Gilyarievich Etinger, an eminent, elderly Jewish cardiologist, who had made critical remarks about the regime to family and friends. Dr. Etinger had treated two very high ranking communists, Andrei Zhdanov and Alexander Shcherbakov who had died from heart disease. Ryumin tried to force him to confess to murdering them both. This was the