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Rootless cosmopolitan () was a pejorative Soviet epithet which referred mostly to
Jewish Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""The ...
intellectuals as an accusation of their lack of allegiance to the
Soviet Union The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen nationa ...
, especially during the antisemitic campaign of 1948–1953. This campaign had its roots in
Joseph Stalin Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili; – 5 March 1953) was a Georgian revolutionary and Soviet Union, Soviet political leader who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. He held power as Ge ...
's 1946 attack on writers who were connected with "bourgeois Western influences", culminating in the "exposure" of the non-existent
Doctors' Plot The "Doctors' plot" affair, group=rus was an alleged conspiracy of prominent Soviet medical specialists to murder leading government and party officials. It was also known as the case of saboteur doctors or killer doctors. In 1951–1953, a gr ...
in 1953.


Origin

The expression was coined in the 19th century by Russian literary critic
Vissarion Belinsky Vissarion Grigoryevich Belinsky ( rus, Виссарион Григорьевич БелинскийIn Belinsky's day, his name was written ., Vissarión Grigórʹjevič Belínskij, vʲɪsərʲɪˈon ɡrʲɪˈɡorʲjɪvʲɪdʑ bʲɪˈlʲinskʲ ...
to describe writers who lacked Russian national character.


Use under Stalin

According to the journalist
Masha Gessen Masha Gessen (born 13 January 1967) is a Russian-American journalist, author, translator and activist who has been an outspoken critic of the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, and the former president of the United States, Donald Trump. Ge ...
, a concise definition of rootless cosmopolitan appeared in an issue of ''Voprosy istorii'' (''The Issues of History'') in 1949: "The rootless cosmopolitan ..falsifies and misrepresents the worldwide historical role of the Russian people in the construction of socialist society and the victory over the enemies of humanity, over German fascism in the
Great Patriotic War The Eastern Front of World War II was a theatre of conflict between the European Axis powers against the Soviet Union (USSR), Poland and other Allies, which encompassed Central Europe, Eastern Europe, Northeast Europe (Baltics), an ...
." Gessen states that the term used for "Russian" is an exclusive term that means ethnic Russians only and so they conclude that "any historian who neglected to sing the praises of the heroic ethnic Russians ..was a likely traitor". According to Cathy S. Gelbin:
From 1946 onwards, then, when Andrei Zhdanov became director of Soviet cultural policy, Soviet rhetoric increasingly highlighted the goal of a pure Soviet culture freed from Western degeneration. This became apparent, for example, in a piece in the Soviet weekly ''
Literaturnaya Gazeta ''Literaturnaya Gazeta'' (russian: «Литературная Газета», ''Literary Gazette'') is a weekly cultural and political newspaper published in Russia and the Soviet Union. It was published for two periods in the 19th century, and ...
'' in 1947, which denounced the claimed expressions of rootless cosmopolitanism as inimical to Soviet culture. From 1949 onwards, then, a new series of openly antisemitic purges and executions began across the Soviet Union and its satellite countries, when Jews were charged explicitly with harbouring an international Zionist cosmopolitanist conspiracy.
According to Margarita Levantovskaya:
The campaign against cosmopolitanism of the 1940s and 1950s ..defined rootless cosmopolitans as citizens who lacked patriotism and disseminated foreign influence within the USSR, including theater critics, Yiddish-speaking poets and doctors. They were accused of disseminating Western European philosophies of aesthetics, pro-American attitudes, Zionism, or inappropriate levels of concern for Jewry and its destruction during World War II. The phrase "rootless cosmopolitan" was synonymous with "persons without identity" and "passportless wanderers" when applied to Jews, thus emphasizing their status as strangers and outsiders.


Post-Stalin

The term is still considered to be an
antisemitic trope Antisemitic tropes, canards, or myths are " sensational reports, misrepresentations, or fabrications" that are defamatory towards Judaism as a religion or defamatory towards Jews as an ethnic or religious group. Since the Middle Ages, such re ...
.


See also

* Person of Jewish ethnicity * Night of the Murdered Poets *
Antisemitism in the Soviet Union The 1917 Russian Revolution overthrew a centuries-old regime of official antisemitism in the Russian Empire, dismantling its Pale of Settlement. However, the previous legacy of antisemitism was continued by the Soviet state, especially under Jo ...
*


References


Further reading

* * * * * {{Joseph Stalin Antisemitism in the Soviet Union Euphemisms Jews and Judaism in the Soviet Union Political slurs for people Political repression in the Soviet Union Soviet ethnic policy Soviet phraseology Conspiracy theories involving Jews