Rootless cosmopolitans

Rootless cosmopolitan (Russian: безродный космополит, bezrodnyi kosmopolit) was a pejorative label used during the anti-Semitic campaign in the Soviet Union after World War II. Cosmopolitans were intellectuals who were accused of expressing pro-Western feelings and lack of patriotism. The term "rootless cosmopolitan" referred to Jewish intellectuals. It was popularized during the campaign in a Pravda article condemning a group of theatrical critics.

In 1943 a new propaganda campaign of Russian patriotism began, with many well-known writers, composers and artists writing articles about patriotism in literature and the arts. At the same time the "worship" of foreign culture was denounced. Stalin, in a meeting with Soviet intelligentsia in 1946, voiced his concerns about recent developments in Soviet culture, which later would materialize in the "battle against cosmopolitanism."

Recently, a dangerous tendency seems to be seen in some of the literary works emanating under the pernicious influence of the West and brought about by the subversive activities of the foreign intelligence. Frequently in the pages of Soviet literary journals works are found where Soviet people, builders of communism are shown in pathetic and ludicrous forms. The positive Soviet hero is derided and inferior before all things foreign and cosmopolitanism that we all fought against from the time of Lenin, characteristic of the political leftovers, is many times applauded. In the theater it seems that Soviet plays are pushed aside by plays from foreign bourgeois authors. The same thing is starting to happen in Soviet films.

In 1946 and 1947 the new campaign against cosmopolitanism affected Soviet scientists, such as the famous physicist Pyotr Kapitsa and the president of the Belorussian Academy of Sciences, Anton Zhebrak. They along with other scientists were denounced for contacts with their Western colleagues and support for "bourgeois science."

In 1947 many literary critics were accused of kneeling before the West, anti-patriotism and cosmopolitanism. For example, the campaign targeted those who studied the works of Alexander Veselovsky, the founder of Russian comparative literature, which was described as a "bourgeois cosmopolitan direction in literary criticism."

A new stage of the campaign opened on January 28, 1949, when an article entitled "About one anti-patriotic group of theater critics" appeared in the newspaper Pravda, an official organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party:

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