Rootless cosmopolitan

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Rootless Cosmopolitan ( Russian Безродный космополит Besrodny kosmopolit ) was a catchphrase in the Soviet Union during Josef Stalin's anti-Semitic campaign between 1948 and 1953, which reached its climax with the “exposure” of the alleged “ doctors' conspiracy ”.

The term and the official persecution were clearly aimed at Jews , but this was never officially admitted in order to avoid accusations of state anti-Semitism. Open hostility towards Jews would have discredited the Soviet leadership, as it was viewed as a violation of the principles of Marxism-Leninism such as the brotherhood of peoples and the international equality of the proletariat .

background

Towards the end of World War II and immediately afterwards, the influence of the Jewish Antifascist Committee (JAC) on Soviet Jews grew , and the JAC was accepted as their representative in the West. The Hearing Commission of the Central Committee of the CPSU found that the JAC, instead of the desired "fight against the forces of international reaction", continued the line of the General Jewish Workers' Union - a dangerous association, since former "Bund" members had to be "exterminated". The leader of the JAC, the prominent actor Solomon Michoels , died in January 1948 in a mysterious car accident. This was followed by the arbitrary detention of JAC members and the closure of the JAC.

In 1947 the USSR voted for the UN partition plan for Palestine . On May 17, 1948, it recognized the State of Israel as the first state of the international community to also de jure and then supplied it with weapons (partly from stocks of the former Wehrmacht , partly from Czech production) via Czechoslovakia , which had become communist , in violation of an international embargo ) in defense against the threat posed by Arab armies in the Palestinian War . Many Soviet Jews sympathized with Israel and sent thousands of letters to the (formally still existing) JAC offering help or even volunteering for the Israeli army .

At the beginning of September 1948, Golda Meïr (then still under the name Golda Meyerson) arrived in Moscow as the first Israeli ambassador to the USSR. An estimated 50,000 people cheered her enthusiastically when she visited the Moscow synagogue on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur .

On September 21, the output containing Pravda article a letter concerning of Ilya Ehrenburg , who was himself of Jewish origin. In it he criticized anti-Semitism, but saw the future of the Soviet Jews not in Israel and Zionism , but in assimilation into the united Soviet people . It is likely that this article was based on a direct commission from the leadership of the CPSU.

Controlled by official Soviet propaganda, Russian nationalism received a significant boost at this time, not least because of the intensifying Cold War and the realization of the Soviet leadership that Israel was increasingly drawing closer to the Western powers . In addition, Jews were classified as a security risk because of their international connections, particularly to the USA, and because of their growing national consciousness as a result of the Israeli declaration of independence (May 14, 1948). By the end of 1948, the USSR changed sides in the Arab-Israeli conflict and began to initially provide political support to the Arab forces against the Israelis, and later military aid. This policy was maintained until the dissolution of the Soviet Union . At the same time, after formal recognition by the USA from the Knesset election of January 25, 1949, Israel came closer and more publicly to the United States under Harry S. Truman as its new protecting power during the beginning of the Cold War .

campaign

The nationwide campaign began with the Pravda article On an Antipatriotic Group of Theater Critics , January 28, 1949:

"Uncontrolled, malicious cosmopolitans, profit hunters without roots and without a conscience [...] grown on the moldy yeast of cosmopolitanism, the decadence and formalism of the bourgeoisie [...] nationalists, not at home here, without a motherland, who poison our proletarian culture with stench. […] What can A. Gurwitsch understand at all about the national character of a Russian Soviet person? "

Standard Stalinist accusations of “Zionist conspiracy ” were accompanied by a campaign by the state-controlled mass media calling for pseudonyms to be exposed.

Many Yiddish writers were imprisoned and many were executed. Numerous Yiddish theaters and newspapers were closed immediately, and the books of some Jewish authors such as Eduard Bagrizki , Wassili Grossman , Michail Swetlow , Iossif Utkin and Boris Pasternak were immediately banned from the libraries. Even Molotov's wife Polina Shemchushina , who was Jewish and became Golda Meïr's girlfriend, did not escape prison in 1949.

In her book Twenty Letters to a Friend, Stalin's daughter Svetlana Allilujewa remembers her father's answer to the question about her imprisoned Jewish father-in-law IG Morozov: “You don't understand! The entire old generation is infected with Zionism and they teach it from their youth. " Vice-Chairman of the Council of Ministers Vyacheslav Malyshev reports that at a meeting of the Politburo on December 1, 1952, Stalin proclaimed: “Every Jewish nationalist is an agent of the American secret service . The Jewish nationalists believe their nation was saved by the United States (you can get rich, bourgeois , etc. there). They believe they owe the Americans a debt. "

Even Ehrenburg, who was a two-time Stalin Prize winner , got into trouble. In February 1949 his articles, which had previously often been included in the propaganda of the Soviet Union, were suddenly no longer printed and at a mass meeting - untruthfully - the arrest of the "cosmopolitan Ehrenburg" was announced. Ehrenburg then sent a letter to Stalin with the request to "end the uncertainty". In fact, his articles were then republished.

Everything Jewish was suppressed by the Soviet authorities, and even the word Jew disappeared from the media. Many were shocked to find that a Yiddish verse of the famous lullaby sung by Michoels had been cut from the Soviet classic Circus ("Zirk", 1936), which was still popular in the post-war period , even though millions of people knew the song by heart.

The ground for the Slansky trial in Prague and for the “ doctors conspiracy ” was thus prepared. In the GDR, Ernst Hoffmann, a member of the Central Committee of the SED, wrote in the theoretical monthly magazine Einheit of the SED about “bourgeois cosmopolitans” as “money people” and “ journeymen without a fatherland ”.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews , Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London 1987, p. 72.
  2. ^ From the diary of the Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR Vyacheslav Malyshev, according to Gennadji Kostirtschenko: Gosudarstvennyj antisemitizm v SSSR: ot načala do kul'minacii 1938–1953 . Meždunarodnyj Fond “Demokratieija”, Moscow 2005, ISBN 5-85646-114-2 , pp. 461–462.
  3. ↑ Jeffrey Herf , Divided memory. The Nazi past in the two Germanys 1997, p. 111 on Google Books ; see. Thomas Gloy: Late Stalinism and the Jewish Minority - Effects in the GDR . In: Birgit Kletzin (Ed.): Strangers in Brandenburg. Of Huguenots, socialist contract workers and right-wing enemy , Lit, Münster a. a. 2004, 2nd edition, p. 215.

literature

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