Doctors' plot
Ignatiev's first task was to purge the security apparatus. In just over a year, he had 42,000 MGB officers sacked. His tenure as its head coincided with the anti-semitic campaign that began with the arrests of every known Jew employed by the MGB - [[Lev Shvartzman]], [[Leonid Eitingon]], [[Leonid Raikhman]], Andrei Sverdlov, son of [[Yakov Sverdlov]], and many more- and culminated in the infamous [[Doctors' plot]].