Bolshevik writer F. Chernov’s March 15th, 1949 article attacking unpatriotic elements in Soviet society and the arts

The following article on “rootless cosmopolitanism” was originally published during the period of the Zhdanov Doctrine, the post-War cultural policy pursued by Agitprop Director Andrei Zhdanov from 1946 until Stalin’s death in 1953. Zhdanov, one of the chief theoreticians of the Stalinist regime, initiated the Soviet Union’s new cultural doctrine with a number of speeches attacking Soviet literary journals, musicians, film-makers, artists, and novelists for their modernist and experimentalist tendencies. Zhdanov’s intention was to root out and excise all vestiges of Western and foreign influences (“cosmopolitanism”); in their place a new Soviet culture was championed, one based on folk culture and classical arts and merging Great-Russian nationalism with Bolshevik tradition. The article below was not written by Zhdanov, but by a mysterious and possibly pseudonymous ‘F. Chernov’. Nonetheless, its publication in a Central Committee theoretical journal during this period attests to its official nature, and with its attacks on anti-patriotic “cosmopolitans” and its veneration of a culture “national in form, socialist in content” it provides a seminal example of attitudes during this period of Stalinist nationalism. It should also be noted that ‘rootless cosmopolitan’ is often regarded as a euphemism for ‘Jew’; many of the artists and intellectuals hounded for their alleged anti-patriotic or pro-Western sentiment in this period were Jewish, and the Zhdanov Doctrine provided much of the groundwork for the later anti-Semitic ‘Doctor’s Plot’ pogrom which Stalin was preparing before his death.

Due to the length of the article, it has been broken into two segments. The article’s first two sections are reproduced below, and its final two have been posted here.

I: COSMOPOLITANISM infiltrates Soviet arts, sciences, history.

The lead editorials in the Pravda and Kultura i Zhizn [“Culture and Life”] newspapers unmasked an unpatriotic group of theatre critics, of rootless cosmopolitans, who came out against Soviet patriotism, against the great cultural achievements of the Russian people and of other peoples in our country.

Appearing as messengers and propagandists for bourgeois ideology, the rootless-cosmopolitans fawned over and groveled before decadent bourgeois culture. Defaming Soviet socialist culture, they praised to the heavens that which was found in the emaciated and decayed conditions of bourgeois culture. In the great culture of the Russian people they saw echos and rehashings of Western bourgeois culture.

Harmful and corrupting petty ideas of bourgeois cosmopolitanism were also carried over into the realms of Soviet literature, Soviet film, graphic arts, in the area of philosophy, history, economic and juridical law and so forth.

The rootless-cosmopolitan Subotsky tried with all his might to exterminate all nationality from Soviet literature. Foaming at the mouth this cosmopolitan propagandist hurls epithets towards those Soviet writers, who want “on the outside, in language, in details of character a positive hero” to express his belonging to this or that nationality.

These cosmopolitan goals of Subotsky are directed against Soviet patriotism and against Party policy, which always has attached great significance to the national qualities and national traditions of peoples. Lenin spoke out at the 8th Party Congress against the Trotskyite Pyatakov, who had suggested (as a provocation) to eliminate the point about national self-determination from the Party programme, saying, “This could be done, if there were people without national characteristics. But there are no such people, and we cannot build a socialist society any other way.” [see Lenin’s Collected Works, Vol. 24, ‘Speech on the National Question’].

In mockery of literary works showing the superior qualities of Soviet people, Subotsky competed with the notorious cosmopolitan Yuzovsky. Yuzovsky venomously sneered that “across the lips of ‘positive heroes’ in these works,” there “inevitably plays such a ‘Marxist smile,’ that the positive hero of Soviet dramatic art knows all, sees all. For to Continue reading →