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Rootless cosmopolitan - About one antipatriotic group of theater critics
The state-wide campaign was set out by an article appeared in Pravda on January 28, 1949 entitled About one antipatriotic group of theater critics:
"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 accusations of conspiracies (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. Yiddish theaters and newspapers were promply shut down, books by some Jewish authors (including Eduard Bagritsky, Vasily Grossman, Mikhail Svetlov, Iosif Utkin, and Boris Pasternak) were seized from libraries. Even Vyacheslav Molotov's wife, Polina Zhemchuzhina, who was Jewish and became Golda Meir's friend, 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 Jew is a nationalist and potential agent of the American intelligence." (recorded by Vice-Chair of the Sovmin V.A. Malyshev)
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 Award (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.
Scores of Soviet Jews were fired from their jobs. In 1947, Jews constituted 18% of Soviet scientific workers, but by 1970 this number declined to 7%. (Source: Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews).
Anything Jewish became suppressed by the Soviet authorities, and even the word Jew disappeared from the media. Many were shocked to find a Yiddish verse (sung by Mikhoels) cut out from the famous lullaby known by heart by millions, in the Soviet classic movie Circus ("Tsirk", 1936), still very popular after the war.
The stage was set for the Prague Trials and the Doctors' plot.
1 At the time, her last name was Myerson. She changed it to Meir in 1956.
Other related archives1936, 1947 UN Partition Plan, 1948, 1948 Arab-Israeli war, 1949, 1952, 1953, Anti-Zionist committee of the Soviet public, Arab-Israeli conflict, Black Book, Boris Pasternak, Bund, CPSU, Circus, Cold War, Czechoslovakia, December 1, Doctors' plot, Eduard Bagritsky, Enemy of the people, Golda Meir, Great Purge, History of anti-Semitism, History of the Jews in Russia and Soviet Union, Holocaust, Ilya Ehrenburg, Iosif Utkin, Israel, January 28, Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, Jewish Autonomous Oblast, Jews, Joseph Stalin, Marxist, Mikhail Svetlov, Moscow, Palestine, Polina Zhemchuzhina, Politburo, Population transfer in the Soviet Union, Prague Trials, Pravda, Rosh Hashanah, Russian language, September 21, Solomon Mikhoels, Soviet, Soviet Union, Soviet people, Sovmin, Stalinist, State of Israel, Svetlana Alliluyeva, United States of America, Vasily Grossman, Vyacheslav Molotov, West, World War II, Yevsektsiya, Yiddish, Yom Kippur, Zionology, ambassador, anti-Semitic, assimilation, conspiracies, conspiracy, crusade, embargo, establishment, euphemism, fifth column, fraternity of peoples, human rights, international connections, lullaby, mass media, peace activist, proletarian internationalism, propaganda, pseudonyms, synagogue
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