Rootless cosmopolitan


Rootless cosmopolitan was a pejorative Soviet epithet which referred mostly to Jewish intellectuals, as an accusation of their lack of patriotism, i.e., lack of full allegiance to the Soviet Union, especially during the anti-cosmopolitan campaign of 1948–1953. The anti-cosmopolitan campaign began in 1946, when Joseph Stalin in his speech in Moscow attacked writers who were ethnic Jews, and culminated in the exposure of the non-existent Doctors' Plot in 1953.

Origin

The expression was coined in the 19th century by Russian literary critic Vissarion Belinsky to describe writers who lacked Russian national character. The idea also comes from German Romantic criticism of Bodenlosigkeit.

Use under Stalin

According to the journalist Masha Gessen, a concise definition of rootless cosmopolitan appeared in an issue of Voprosy istorii 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 she concludes that "any historian who neglected to sing the praises of the heroic ethnic Russians ... was a likely traitor".
According to Cathy S. Gelbin:
According to Margarita Levantovskaya:

Post Stalin

The term is widely considered to be an anti-Semitic trope.