Rootless Cosmopolitan - "About One Antipatriotic Group of Theater Critics"

"About One Antipatriotic Group of Theater Critics"

The aggressive stage of the state-wide campaign opened on January 28, 1949 when an article entitled "About one antipatriotic group of theater critics" appeared in the newspaper Pravda, an official organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party:

"unbridled, evil-minded cosmopolitans, profiteers with no roots and no conscience… Grown on rotten yeast of bourgeois cosmopolitanism, decadence and formalism… non-indigenous nationals without a motherland, who poison with stench… our proletarian culture."… "What can A. Gurvich possibly understand about the national character of a Russian Soviet man?"

Standard Stalinist conspiracy theories (see Great Purge) were accompanied by a crusade in the state-controlled mass media to expose pseudonyms.

Many Yiddish writers were arrested and eventually executed in the event known as the Night of the Murdered Poets. Yiddish theaters and newspapers were promptly shut down, books by some Jewish authors (including Eduard Bagritsky, Vasily Grossman, Mikhail Svetlov, Iosif Utkin, Boris Pasternak and others) were seized from libraries. Even Vyacheslav Molotov's wife, Polina Zhemchuzhina, who was Jewish, did not escape arrest in 1949.

Stalin's daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva recalls in her book Twenty Letters to a Friend that when she asked her father about her arrested father-in-law, I.G. Morozov (also Jewish), he replied: "You don't understand! The entire old generation is infected with Zionism and they teach their youth." In a December 1, 1952 Politburo session, Stalin announced:

"Every Jewish nationalist is the agent of American intelligence service. Jewish nationalists think that their nation was saved by USA (there you can become rich, bourgeois, etc.). They think they're indebted to the Americans. Among doctors there are many Jewish nationalists."

Ehrenburg, who visited the US in 1946 and whose decidedly anti-American articles echoed the Soviet propaganda, and who was by then an international peace activist and the winner of the Stalin Prize (1947), was so afraid of being arrested that he wrote Stalin a letter asking to "end the uncertainty". He claimed later that he was spared because the regime needed to conceal the campaign from the West, where the plight of Soviet Jews was becoming a major human rights concern.