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"Rootless cosmopolitan" (Template:Langx Template:Transliteration) was a pejorative epithet that was mostly applied to Jews during the Stalinist era of the Soviet Union. It became especially prevalent during the country's anti-cosmopolitan campaign, 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,<ref name="Figes">Template:Cite book</ref> culminating in the "exposure" of the non-existent "doctors' plot" against the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.Template:Efn
In the Communist Party's discourse, rootless cosmopolitans were defined as unpatriotic Soviet citizens, chiefly Jewish intellectuals, who disseminated foreign influence favouring the socio-political atmosphere or aesthetics of Western Europe or the United States. For Jews, in particular, this definition was specifically extended to include those who showed "inappropriate" levels of concern for the Holocaust and those who expressed support for Israel.
The term is considered to be an antisemitic trope.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
OriginEdit
The expression was coined in the 19th century by Russian literary critic Vissarion Belinsky to describe writers who lacked Russian national character.<ref name="Figes2">Template:Cite book</ref>
Use under StalinEdit
{{#invoke:Labelled list hatnote|labelledList|Main article|Main articles|Main page|Main pages}} 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." 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".<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> 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 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.<ref>Template:Cite journal at p.865.</ref>
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.<ref>Template:Cite thesis</ref>
See alsoEdit
- Person of Jewish ethnicity
- Night of the Murdered Poets
- Antisemitism in the Soviet Union
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NotesEdit
ReferencesEdit
Further readingEdit
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