"Rootless cosmopolitan" ( ) was a pejorative epithet that was mostly applied to

intellectuals An intellectual is a person who engages in critical thinking, research, and Human self-reflection, reflection about the nature of reality, especially the nature of society and proposed solutions for its normative problems. Coming from the wor ...

and

Jews Jews (, , ), or the Jewish people, are an ethnoreligious group and nation, originating from the Israelites of History of ancient Israel and Judah, ancient Israel and Judah. They also traditionally adhere to Judaism. Jewish ethnicity, rel ...

with ties to the West during the Stalinist era of the

Soviet Union The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...

. It became especially prevalent during the country's

anti-cosmopolitan campaign The anti-cosmopolitan campaign (, ) was an anti-Western campaign in the Soviet Union which began in late 1948 and has been widely described as a thinly disguised antisemitic purge. A large number of Jews were persecuted as Zionists or rootless co ...

, which began in 1948 and continued until Stalin's death in 1953, as part of a post-1946 assault on " bourgeois Western influences" that widely targeted writers and other intellectuals, culminating in the

doctors' plot The "doctors' plot" () was a Soviet state-sponsored anti-intellectual and anti-cosmopolitan campaign based on a conspiracy theory that alleged an anti-Soviet cabal of prominent medical specialists, including some of Jewish ethnicity, intend ...

against the

Communist Party of the Soviet Union The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU),. Abbreviated in Russian as КПСС, ''KPSS''. at some points known as the Russian Communist Party (RCP), All-Union Communist Party and Bolshevik Party, and sometimes referred to as the Soviet ...

. In the Communist Party's discourse, rootless cosmopolitans were defined as unpatriotic Soviet citizens, chiefly Jewish intellectuals with ties to the West, who disseminated foreign influence favouring the socio-political atmosphere or aesthetics of

Western Europe Western Europe is the western region of Europe. The region's extent varies depending on context. The concept of "the West" appeared in Europe in juxtaposition to "the East" and originally applied to the Western half of the ancient Mediterranean ...

or the

United States The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 U.S. state, states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 ...

. The term is considered to be an antisemitic trope.

Origin

The expression was coined in the 19th century by Russian literary critic Vissarion Belinsky to describe writers who lacked Russian national character.

Use under Stalin

According to the journalist Masha Gessen, 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, also known as the Great Patriotic War (term), Great Patriotic War in the Soviet Union and its successor states, and the German–Soviet War in modern Germany and Ukraine, was a Theater (warfare), theatre of World War II ...

." 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".

Origin

Use under Stalin

See also

Notes

References

Further reading