Rootless cosmopolitan

"Rootless cosmopolitan" (Template:Langx Template:Transliteration) was a pejorative epithet that was mostly applied to intellectuals and Jews with ties to the West 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, culminating in the 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 with ties to the West, who disseminated foreign influence favouring the socio-political atmosphere or aesthetics of Western Europe or the United States.

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." 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".

See also

• Person of Jewish ethnicity
• Night of the Murdered Poets
• Antisemitism in the Soviet Union
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Further reading

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