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"Rootless cosmopolitan" (Russian:безродный космополитbězródnïj kósmopólït) was a pejorative epithet that was mostly applied to creatives, intellectuals, and prominent political figures, particularlyJewish, during theStalinist era of theSoviet Union.
In the Communist Party's discourse, rootless cosmopolitans were defined asunpatriotic Soviet citizens who disseminated foreign influence and favoured the socio-political atmosphere or aesthetics ofWestern Europe or theUnited States.
It became especially prevalent during the country'santi-cosmopolitan campaign, which began in 1946 and continued untilStalin's death in 1953, as part of anassault on "bourgeois Western influences" that widelytargeted writers and other intellectuals,[1] culminating in the "exposure" of the non-existent "doctors' plot" against theCommunist Party of the Soviet Union.[a]
The term is considered to be anantisemitic trope.[14][15]
The expression "rootless cosmopolitan" was coined in the 19th century by Russian literary criticVissarion Belinsky to describe writers who lackedRussian national character.[16]
The term is associated with the anti-cosmopolitan campaigns of the Soviet Union followingWorld War II.
The campaign began when theCentral Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union under the leadership ofAndrei Zhdanov passed a resolution targeting two state newspapers, Zvezda and Leningrad, for publishing material of satiristMikhail Zoshchenko and the poetAnna Akhmatova. Both were denounced and expelled from theUnion of Soviet Writers. This marked the beginning of theZhdanov 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 includedPavel Milyukov,Nikolai Bukharin,Georgy Pyatakov, and Alexander Yashchenko as well asLeft Socialist Revolutionaries andLeft Communists.[19]
Prominent Soviet figures denounced as 'cosmopolitans' during the campaign:
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 journalistMasha Gessen, a concise definition of rootless cosmopolitan appeared in an issue ofVoprosy 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 theGreat 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 weeklyLiteraturnaya 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]
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.'
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.
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
