In the 40s and 50s of the last century, some rootless cosmopolitans suddenly came into vogue on the territory of the Soviet Union. Linguists - people engaged in the science of language - this phrase was puzzled. But, since many of them could easily be attributed to this phrase with ease of clicking, they did not publicly express their concern.
According to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, cosmopolitans are Drosophila flies, cockroaches, some cereals from plants, dioecious nettle, duckweed, and gray rats from mammals, which can be found on most of the inhabited spheres of the earth. Therefore, most likely, people called cosmopolitans, this is also something not very pleasant
.In any case, Soviet propaganda introduced this concept into the consciousness of the Soviet people for many decades.
Rootless cosmopolitans
Ilya Ehrenburg and Eduard Bagritsky, Alexander Green and Leon Feuchtwanger - many modern intellectuals would be honored to be in such a decent company. Lucky few. But there was a time when it turned out that all these people are cosmopolitan. They are also rootless, that is, it is not clear where their homeland is, who fed them, drunk them, raised them, educated them. But it is clear that they are ungrateful, not loving the country, suspicious persons and, most likely, traitors. Maybe even agents of foreign intelligence or even enemies of the conditional Uralvagonzavod. Therefore, do not bring the Lord to be with them in the same company.
And it’s not that all these people have traveled the world especially. Although Leon Feuchtwanger is generally a foreigner, Ehrenburg didn’t just travel, he lived abroad for a long time and made friends with many suspicious people of a humanitarian direction. Maybe even spies.
In any case, the program editorial article of the Izvestia newspaper dated 02.10.1949 on theatrical critics - rootless cosmopolitans - most likely hinted at this, since it was written in it as follows: "Antinational by its very essence, this group of theater critics became the bearer of an alien, hostile to Soviet man, rootless cosmopolitanism. Especially cheekily speaking on the pages of the art history press, anti-patriotic, cosmopolitan criticism took up arms against Soviet theater art, skusstvo our homeland, theater and drama."
Since the message of the whole article was addressed directly to Comrade I.V. Stalin, and since Comrade Stalin had shown his whole life that he was opposed to tearing, the whole specified group of theater critics and other numerous figures of science, art and literature who joined them, expected many years correction in the vast expanses of the Gulag.
All the theater critics mentioned in the article, and other cosmopolitans brought to the open water, in addition to professions, had one more commonality - an insignificant detail: in the fifth column of their Soviet profiles, in the column of nationality they had it written - a Jew. Since after the signing of the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact by Molotov, the word “Jew” became indecent to pronounce, they found an equivalent substitute - cosmopolitan. What does it mean “man of the world”, “man of the universe”, because in this word two Greek words are connected: space and citizen. And who, if not Jews, as a nation, traveled most of all around the world? Everything is logical. Therefore, the concept of Soviet logic fully complies with the fact that a citizen harming the country is a rootless cosmopolitan.
