Rootless cosmopolitan
"Rootless cosmopolitan" (Russian: безродный космополит, romanized: bezródnyj kosmopolít) was a pejorative epithet that was mostly applied to creatives, intellectuals, and prominent political figures, particularly Jewish, during the Stalinist era of the Soviet Union. In the Communist Party's discourse, rootless cosmopolitans were defined as unpatriotic Soviet citizens who disseminated foreign influence and favoured the socio-political atmosphere or aesthetics of Western Europe or the United States. It became especially prevalent during the country's anti-cosmopolitan campaign, which began in 1946 and continued until Stalin's death in 1953, as part of an assault on "bourgeois Western influences" that widely targeted writers and other intellectuals, culminating in the "exposure" of the non-existent "doctors' plot" against the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The term is considered to be an antisemitic trope.
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"Rootless cosmopolitan" (Russian: безродный космополит, romanized: bezródnyj kosmopolít) was a pejorative epithet that was mostly applied to creatives, intellectuals, and prominent political figures, particularly Jewish, during the Stalinist era of the Soviet Union.
In the Communist Party's discourse, rootless cosmopolitans were defined as unpatriotic Soviet citizens who disseminated foreign influence and favoured the socio-political atmosphere or aesthetics of Western Europe or the United States.
It became especially prevalent during the country's anti-cosmopolitan campaign, which began in 1946 and continued until Stalin's death in 1953, as part of an assault on "bourgeois Western influences" that widely targeted writers and other intellectuals,[1] culminating in the "exposure" of the non-existent "doctors' plot" against the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.[a]
The term is considered to be an antisemitic trope.[14][15]
Origin
[edit]The expression "rootless cosmopolitan" was coined in the 19th century by Russian literary critic Vissarion Belinsky to describe writers who lacked Russian national character.[16]
Use under Stalin
[edit]The term is associated with the anti-cosmopolitan campaigns of the Soviet Union following World War II.
The campaign began when the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union under the leadership of Andrei Zhdanov passed a resolution targeting two state newspapers, Zvezda and Leningrad, for publishing material of satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko and the poet Anna Akhmatova. Both were denounced and expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers. This marked the beginning of the Zhdanov Doctrine in the Soviet Union.[17]
According to the doctrine, Soviet artists and writers were expected to support socialism and reject Western, particularly bourgeois or individualist, influences. All forms of creative expression had to follow the principles of socialist realism, glorifying the state, the working class, and communist values. The policy led to widespread censorship, suppression of artistic freedom, and condemnation of prominent figures in the arts and academia.[18]
The campaign continued after the death of Zhdanov. In 1948, his successor, Georgy Aleksandrov, published an article denouncing early Soviet political figures as 'rootless cosmopolitans'. These included Pavel Milyukov, Nikolai Bukharin, Georgy Pyatakov, and Alexander Yashchenko as well as Left Socialist Revolutionaries and Left Communists.[19]
Prominent Soviet figures denounced as 'cosmopolitans' during the campaign:
- Anna Akhmatova,[17][18] Russian writer
- Mikhail Zoshchenko,[17][18] Russian satirist
- Pavel Milyukov,[19] Russian historian and politician
- Nikolai Bukharin,[19] Russian revolutionary and politician
- Georgy Pyatakov,[19] Russian-Ukrainian revolutionary and politician
- Dmitri Shostakovich,[20] Russian pianist and composer
- Sergei Prokofiev,[20] Russian composer
- Aram Khachaturian,[20] Armenian composer
- Dmitri Klebanov,[20] Ukrainian composer
- Vano Muradeli,[20] Georgian opera composer
- Daniil Andreyev, Russian writer and mystic
- Lydia Chukovskaya, Russian writer and poet
Definitions
[edit]Andrei Zhdanov's first mention of the term "rootless cosmopolitanism" was in a 1948 speech to the Central Committee of the CPSU. Zhdanov provides the following definition:
Internationalism is born where national art flourishes. To forget this truth means [...] to lose one's face, to become a rootless cosmopolitan.[21]
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".[22]
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.[23]
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.[24]
See also
[edit]- Mankurt
- Person of Jewish ethnicity
- Night of the Murdered Poets
- Antisemitism in the Soviet Union
- Globalism § Usage in national politics
Notes
[edit]References
[edit]- ^ Figes, Orlando (2007). The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia. New York City: Metropolitan Books. p. 494. ISBN 978-0-8050-7461-1.
- ^ Azadovskii, K.; Egorov, B. (2002). "From Anti-Westernism to Anti-Semitism". Journal of Cold War Studies. 4 (1): 66–80. doi:10.1162/152039702753344834. S2CID 57565840.
- ^ Greenfield, Jeff (3 August 2017). "The Ugly History of Stephen Miller's 'Cosmopolitan' Epithet: Surprise, surprise—the insult has its roots in Soviet anti-Semitism". Politico.
- ^ "Stalin on Art and Culture". International Association of Friends of the Soviet Union. Archived from the original on 7 March 2023. Retrieved 5 December 2021.
In 1946 Stalin met with Soviet intellectuals to discuss and analyze the trends developing in Soviet art, music, literature and theatre – after the Second World War. Here we give a shortened version of his replies to questions posed by the intellectuals. '[...] 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 cosmopolitism 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.'
- ^ "Six Jewish doctors arrested, jumpstarting 'Doctors Plot'". World Jewish Congress.
- ^ "Stalin's last purge: the Doctors' Plot". The Article. 23 May 2024.
- ^ "A viral post demonizing Zionist doctors sounds eerily like a Soviet antisemitic conspiracy theory". The Forward.
- ^ "American 'anti-racism' activist condemned over 'terrified about Zionist doctors' claim". Jewish News.
- ^ "STALIN'S LAST CRIME: The Plot Against the Jewish Doctors 1948–1953 by Jonathan Brent". Publishers Weekly.
- ^ "State anti-semitism: Doctors' plot as an abandoned holocaust amid the Stalin's Russia". Modern Diplomacy. 19 January 2017.
- ^ "Why Couldn't Soviet Jews See Stalin for the Anti-Semitic Monster He Was?". Tablet Magazine.
- ^ "Memo to Secret Police Chief Reveals Hunt for Chabad's Soviet Underground". Chabad.
- ^ "New Soviet Twists on Anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism (Published 1970)". The New York Times.
- ^ Glasman, Maurice (22 May 2019). "No direction home: the tragedy of the Jewish left". New Statesman.
I knew that the phrase "rootless cosmopolitan" was minted by Stalin and his executioners in the show trials to exterminate Jews, particularly Trotskyists, for whom this became the standard expression. I cannot hear it without the dread fear of the knock on the door by the Cheka in the early hours.
- ^ Brook, Vincent (2006). You Should See Yourself: Jewish Identity in Postmodern American Culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. p. 166. ISBN 0813538440.
This outlook can be viewed positively as a condition that enhances Jews' and adaptability and empathy for others, or it can have a negative connotation, as in the recurring trope of the rootless cosmopolitan
- ^ Figes, Orlando (2007). The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia. Macmillan. p. 494. ISBN 978-0805074611.
- ^ a b c "Zhdanovshchina | Stalinism, Repression, Terror | Britannica". www.britannica.com. Retrieved 5 July 2025.
- ^ a b c "Zhdanov". Seventeen Moments in Soviet History. 19 June 2015. Retrieved 5 July 2025.
- ^ a b c d "«Низкопоклонники» и «космополиты» - Национальная идея - РУССКОЕ ВОСКРЕСЕНИЕ" ["Cleavers" and "Cosmopolitans" - National Idea - RUSSIAN RESURRECTION]. www.voskres.ru. Archived from the original on 9 March 2018. Retrieved 6 July 2025.
- ^ a b c d e Braudel, Fernand (1994). A history of civilizations. New York, N.Y., U.S.A: A. Lane. ISBN 978-0-7139-9022-5.
- ^ "Безродные космополиты" [Rootless Cosmopolitans]. bibliotekar.ru. Retrieved 6 July 2025.
- ^ Gessen, Masha (2005). Two Babushkas. London, UK: Bloomsbury. p. 205. ISBN 978-0-7475-7080-6.
- ^ Gelbin, Cathy S. (2016). "Rootless Cosmopolitans: German-Jewish writers confront the Stalinist and National Socialist atrocities". European Review of History. 23 (5–6): 863–879. doi:10.1080/13507486.2016.1203882. S2CID 159505532. at p.865.
- ^ Levantovskaya, Margarita (2013). Rootless Cosmopolitans: Literature of the Soviet-Jewish Diaspora (PDF) (PhD). UC San Diego. p. 1.
Further reading
[edit]- Hoberman, J. (18 March 2019). "The Rootless Cosmopolitan Who Mocked Totalitarian Consciousness". Tablet. Retrieved 19 March 2020.
- Miller, Michael L.; Ury, Scott (2010). "Cosmopolitanism: the end of Jewishness?". European Review of History. 17 (3): 337–359. doi:10.1080/13507486.2010.481923. hdl:20.500.14018/10574. S2CID 144567082.
- Miller, Michael L.; Ury, Scott, eds. (2014). Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism and the Jews of East Central Europe. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-1-13801-852-5.
- Pinkus, Benjamin (1984). The Soviet Government and the Jews 1948-1967: A Documented Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 147–192. ISBN 978-0-52124-713-9.
- Spector, Hannah (10 March 2016). "The cosmopolitan subject and the question of cultural identity: The case of 'Crime and Punishment'". Crime, Media, Culture. 13 (1): 21–40. doi:10.1177/1741659016634813. S2CID 146984216.