cosmopolitanism

The quality of being cosmopolitan; cosmopolitism.

Although in English "cosmopolitan" means a citizen of the world or a person who has no permanent home, "cosmopolitanism" in the Soviet Union meant a rejection of Russian and Soviet values. However, after the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, "cosmopolitanism" became a code word for "Jewish" and marked a period of lethal state anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union designed to eliminate Yiddish culture, Jewish intellectuals, "nationalists," and Zionists. After permitting greater freedoms during the war, the Soviet regime in 1945 tried to reimpose control in face of a new Cold War. "Cosmopolitanism" became a "reactionary bourgeois ideology" more akin to capitalism than communism. Artists and intellectuals came under attack for subservience to the West and for not expressing adequate Soviet/Russian patriotism.

During the 1920s "cosmopolitanism" had been synonymous with "internationalism," one of the basic principles of Marxism-Leninism. However, in the 1930s the regime turned toward Russian nationalism, and cosmopolitanism became more closely associated with capitalism - the antithesis of communism. Before 1948, culture chief Andrei Zhdanov led condemnation of many intellectuals for favorable portrayals of Western culture without mentioning the grand achievements of the Soviet experiment. In literature, architecture, biology, philosophy, and many other disciplines, the regime singled out people for "kowtowing" to the West and not showing adequate patriotism. In biology, for example, this led to the rejection of modern genetics, and reaction in many other disciplines was likewise destructive. Apart from enforcing intellectual conformity, "cosmopolitanism" engulfed internationalists and Jews charged with bourgeois nationalism, such as members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC), who raised money, awareness, and support abroad during World War II.

In early 1949, a Pravda article railed against an "unpatriotic group of theater critics," signaling the first attempt to assign collective, rather than individual, guilt for not sufficiently glorifying the Soviet system. Because most of the critics named were Jewish, this is often noted as the beginning of the anti Semitic stage of the anticosmopolitan campaign. Articles soon followed about "rootless cosmopolitans" and "passportless wanderers," which clearly referred to the Jewish diaspora outside the new state of Israel. Jews and other cosmopolitans, according to these press attacks, were isolated and/or hostile to Russian and Soviet culture and traditions. The unspoken assumption was that cosmopolitans, because they were allegedly unpatriotic, would not be loyal when the Cold War turned into an armed conflict.

The anticosmopolitan campaign destroyed the careers and lives of many of the Soviet Union's intellectual elites and separated Soviet culture and learning from much of the rest of the world. When combined with the campaign against "bourgeois nationalists," both assimilated Jewish intellectuals and Yiddish culture suffered irreparable harm. For example, when the JAC collected information on wartime atrocities against the Jews, it led to charges of nationalism. Moreover, contact with Jewish groups abroad and calls for a Jewish homeland in Crimea and contact with foreigners were "unpatriotic" and brought charges of treason. In short, doing the regime's bidding in World War II led to the imprisonment, execution, and silencing of many of the Soviet Union's leading Jewish artists and intellectuals between 1949 and 1953 after the JAC was closed in 1948. Moreover, many JAC members were executed in August 1952 in what has been called the Night of the Murdered Poets. The investigation into the activities of these JAC members seems to have been the prelude to the Doctor's Plot, which aimed at the execution of many Jews and physicians in 1953. The trials and executions were aborted after Josef Stalin's death in March 1953.

Bibliography

Dunmore, Timothy. (1984). Soviet Politics, 1945 - 1953. New York: St. Martin's Press.

Hahn, Werner. (1982). Postwar Soviet Politics: The Fall of Zhdanov and the Defeat of Moderation, 1946 - 1953. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Pinkus, Benjamin, and Frankel, Jonathan. (1984). The Soviet Government and the Jews, 1948 - 1967: A Documented Study. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Rubenstein, Joshua, and Naumov, V. P., eds. (2001). Stalin's Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, tr. Laura E. Wolfson. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Vaksberg, Arkadii. (1994). Stalin Against the Jews. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

—KARL D. QUALLS