Myth #177: Because of his anti-Semitism, Stalin initiated a fight against “rootless cosmopolitans” in the USSR
Myth #177: Because of his anti-Semitism, Stalin initiated a fight against “rootless cosmopolitans” in the USSR.
On the history of the emergence of the term "cosmopolitan" in the Russian socio-political lexicon.
It will probably surprise many, but one of the first appearances of the term "cosmopolitan" on the forefront of Russian socio-political language occurred in the mid-19th century. This happened at the instigation of I.A. Goncharov, the author of the famous work "The Frigate Pallada." In his variation, this term equated the word "zhyd" (Jew), which at that time denoted ethnic belonging to the Jewish nation (incidentally, this is not the best legacy of the Polish language's influence on Russian), with the word "cosmopolitan" itself. The result was "zhyd-cosmopolitan." If you don't believe me, let them turn to page 120 of I.A. Goncharov's "The Frigate Pallada: Essays on Travel in Two Volumes" (Leningrad, 1986).
Regarding the use of the term "cosmopolitanism" in Soviet times, particularly in the post-war period, it should be remembered that the actual campaign against servility to the West, dubbed the "fight against cosmopolitanism," began with the letters of the eminent Russian-Soviet scholar Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa. One circumstance should be kept in mind here. Returning in 1936 from a long-term assignment abroad in England, P.L. Kapitsa, as a truly eminent scholar, considered it his patriotic duty to express his thoughts to the country's leaders, especially Stalin. He frequently sent letters containing various proposals, advice, and so on.
On January 2, 1946, P. L. Kapitsa sent Stalin a letter that was made public only in 1989. Along with the letter, Kapitsa also sent Stalin the manuscript of Gumilevsky's book, "Russian Engineers." Gumilevsky was already famous before the revolution, when he began writing. Kapitsa indicated that "Russian Engineers" was written by Gumilevsky at his, Pyotr Leonidovich's, request. In the letter, Kapitsa wrote the following: "We have little idea what a great treasure trove of creative talent has always been in our engineering thought. From the book it is clear: first, a large number of major engineering endeavors originated in our country; second, we ourselves almost never knew how to develop them; third, often the reason for not capitalizing on innovation is that we usually underestimated our own and overestimated foreign ones. Organizational shortcomings usually prevented our technical pioneering work from developing and influencing world technology. Many of these shortcomings persist to this day, and one of the main ones is the underestimation of our own and the overestimation of foreign forces. It's clear that we now need to step up our own innovative technology. We must develop our own unique approach to the atomic bomb, the jet engine, oxygen intensification, and much more. We can do this successfully only when we believe in and respect the talent of our engineers and scientists, and when we finally understand that the creative potential of our people is no less than, if not greater than, that of others, and can be confidently relied upon. That this is true is evident from the fact that, over all these centuries, no one has managed to swallow us up."
What powerful words, still incredibly relevant today! Kapitsa posed a truly colossal problem! Indeed, many very significant discoveries in aviation, radio, television, chemistry, physics, and many other branches of science and technology were made here independently and for the first time in history, but, unfortunately, were implemented abroad.
Stalin replied to Kapitsa on April 4, 1946. His reply included the following lines: "I have received all your letters. They contain much that is instructive. I hope to meet you sometime and discuss them. Regarding Gumilevsky's book, 'Russian Engineers,' it is very interesting and will be published soon." The book was published in early 1947.
It was this letter from Kapitsa that became the immediate impetus for the fight against servility to the West, or, as is sometimes mocked, the notorious servility. However, when Stalin addressed writers in 1947, he literally repeated Kapitsa's words from the aforementioned letter verbatim. This fact is recorded in the memoirs of K. Simonov. Incidentally, in the first stage, that is, in 1947, the term "servility" was used —Stalin used it in his speech—and the term "cosmopolitanism" only came into common use in 1948. The term "rootless cosmopolitan" also appeared at that time, coined by A.A. Zhdanov. In his January 1948 speech at a meeting of Soviet music figures at the Party Central Committee, he declared that "internationalism is born where national art flourishes." To forget this truth means… to lose one’s face, to become a rootless cosmopolitan.”
The first concrete steps toward combating servility were taken as early as 1946. It is known that it was then that the Secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), A.A. Zhdanov, summoned the writer Alexander Popovsky and told him the following: “The Party believes that history and the teaching of science and technology in our country are in a completely unsatisfactory state. People graduate from schools and universities convinced that domestic artisans and scientists are worthless, that they can only poorly copy the achievements of their Western colleagues. This servility, this inferiority complex in relation to everything Western, must be overcome. The corresponding instructions have already been issued to universities, editorial boards, and the Academy of Sciences. You are instructed to draw up a plan for a literary campaign for the simple and accessible dissemination of the authentic history of science and technology, not that distorted by Western falsifiers and their domestic lackeys. Draw up a list of topics, a plan for publishing the corresponding books, and identify authors. All publishing houses will receive the corresponding instructions.”
That same year, 1946 , the fight against sycophancy received a particularly powerful boost following the publication in the West of a book on cancer treatment by two Leningrad scientists, N.G. Klyueva and G.I. Roskin. The issue was that they had illegally submitted the manuscript of their monograph for publication in the United States. Academician V.V. Parin, who had passed the manuscript on to American publishers, was accused of espionage and sentenced to 25 years in prison.
In connection with this case, a widespread campaign of condemnation of the participants in this story as cosmopolitans was carried out throughout the country. On March 28, 1947, "honor courts" were established within ministries and departments. According to their charter, they were to "conduct an uncompromising struggle against sycophancy and servility to Western culture and eliminate the underestimation of the significance of Russian scientists and cultural figures in the development of world civilization."
On July 16, 1947, the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) distributed among party members a special closed letter, “On the Case of Professors Klyueva and Roskin,” which sharply condemned “the presence among a certain part of the Soviet intelligentsia… of servility and obsequiousness toward foreigners….”
Despite the ideological nature of this campaign, despite all the excesses it contained—no serious campaign in Russia can do without them—it carried a powerful charge of deep-seated patriotism and was fundamentally truthful. Could a normal, patriotically minded person not be scornful of the stereotype, well-known from literature and practice, of the Russian bureaucrat accustomed to thwarting the advancement of our own Kulibins, Polzunovs, Lobachevskys, and Mendeleyevs? Wouldn't the Russian bureaucracy's attempts to force scientific and engineering thought to follow the West's lead provoke righteous indignation?
A quick comment. We're already in the same situation. We're diligently copying all sorts of rubbish—both material and intellectual—from the West. And we're copying it mindlessly, but under pressure from the economic and intellectual executioners entrenched in Russia's government. Just look at the education reform, damned by God and Russia! What will happen now is not the production of highly educated engineers and scientists, nor brilliant doctors and scholars, but rather the production of narrow specialists with diplomas of superficial education. And even with titles like "Master's," "Bachelor's," and the like, which are strange for the Russian higher education system. The great British wit and apt wisecrack Bernard Shaw was very fond of a saying he himself coined: "Narrow specialization in the broad sense of the word leads to broad idiocy in the narrow sense of the word." This is precisely what all modern reforms are aimed at. Because such a population is easier to manage!
Of course, there was also some boasting, pseudo-patriotism, and even plain stupidity. After all, fools are one of the main, clearly ineradicable national ills of our country. Wasn't it sheer foolishness to claim that the "world's first hot air balloon flight" was made by the Ryazan clerk Krayakutny, or that Novgorodians discovered Spitsbergen? Yes, all of this happened, and denying it would be simply stupid. You can't take words out of history, just like you can't take words out of a song.
But there was also a stunning, phenomenal result. Popular science magazines exploded in popularity, boasting millions of copies sold at extremely low prices, accessible to virtually everyone. Various popular science brochures were published in millions of copies for various segments of the population. Scientific and technical youth clubs were created en masse, where a new, glorious generation of conquerors of scientific heights grew up to replace the renowned Russian and Soviet scientists, engineers, and designers. During the author's school years, it was considered a particular shame among boys not to know by heart all the makes of Soviet aircraft, especially combat aircraft, primarily those used in the Great Patriotic War. And now?! Now any toddler can name a dozen aircraft from our main adversary, the United States, but not a single one from Russia!
Brilliant writers and popularizers of science, such as B. Agapov and B. Rosen, with their fantastically engaging works, introduced boys and girls thirsting for discovery to the magical world of fabulous scientific and technological achievements, revealing to them unprecedented horizons of a joyful and bright future filled with meaning and reason. And who in those years didn't avidly read Perelman's magnificent, still unrivaled, works, "Entertaining Physics" and "Entertaining Mathematics"? Who didn't devour astronomy from Vorontsov-Velyaminov or geology from Obruchev and Fersman? These greatest minds of our science, these brilliant popularizers, achieved the incredible: Soviet youth strove for knowledge the way their fathers stormed Berlin. They sought university not to evade military service, but to faithfully serve the Fatherland.
Stalin's schooling provided a high level of literacy and cultural outlook; Stalin's universities trained excellent engineers and scientists, and most importantly, Soviet society at that time as a whole joyfully—I emphasize, joyfully—believed in science, sincerely empathized with it, and was well informed about its achievements and usefulness.
No matter who or how much they tried to discredit the campaign against sycophancy (cosmopolitanism), it produced a stunning result— it was then that the solid Soviet education system, unrivaled to this day, was finally forged. It was this system that guaranteed the enormous, often fantastic, successes of Soviet science in the 1950s–1970s.
A quick comment. Just consider the sheer scale of the real consequences of this campaign.
1. Beginning in 1946, work on developing atomic weapons was sharply intensified, and by 1949 the US atomic monopoly was eliminated. And in 1953, the US monopoly on the hydrogen bomb was also eliminated. While the atomic monopoly lasted four years, the hydrogen monopoly lasted only one. The Americans tested a hydrogen bomb in 1952, and the USSR in 1953.
2. Work was underway to develop powerful rocket technology, including space technology. Thanks to this alone, in 1957 the USSR became the first human being to launch an artificial satellite into space, and in 1961, the world's first cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin.
3. Thanks to the efforts of Russian scientists, automation of technological processes in production began for the first time in the world: in 1946, the world's first automatic production line was put into operation; in 1948, the control of 25 of the largest hydroelectric power stations was automated for the first time in the world; in 1949, the first plant for the production of industrial automatic machines was put into operation.
4. Work on the creation and implementation of the latest computing technology was expanded on a massive scale - in 1950, the first computer was created in the country.
5. Building on the best achievements of Soviet scientists and engineers, an industry was developed for the production of household appliances—the latest radios, cameras, watches, televisions, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, etc. Older people still remember that Soviet watches and cameras were already in great demand among foreigners in the 1950s, not only because of their low cost, unusual for the West, but above all because of their superior quality.
The successes of the Soviet education system were so obvious that already in 1958, one of the most outstanding American statesmen of the 20th century, future US President John F. Kennedy, speaking in Congress, noted the significant lag of Americans behind the Soviet people in the field of space research as a result of their differences from ours in the education, medicine, and science systems.
Despite the crudeness and unattractiveness of the basic term used to describe its essence, the campaign launched was a unique, global project by Stalin to forcibly extricate Soviet scientists and cultural figures from the tightly held networks of scientific and cultural marginality. But not for the stated purpose, but above all to create the conditions for a global and powerful breakthrough in a particularly high-priority area—education. This is precisely why a sweeping offensive was organized, as they say, across the entire front. Ideologues, writers, journalists, historians of science, and teachers were mobilized to achieve these objectives. Patriotic feelings, already inflamed to the max by the terrible but victorious war, were subjected to maximum exploitation. Incidentally, it is astonishing that, despite the frequent abuses of patriotic feelings, even these very abuses also carried a considerable positive charge.
The few advantages of a centralized, but quite democratically structured society at that time were used to the maximum extent possible: education at all levels was truly universal and truly equally accessible to all.
And all this was done with the goal of directly influencing those for whom all this fuss was being waged—the younger generation. Figuratively speaking, the project wasn't just a tick-box exercise or a report to be forgotten, but rather a rigorous implementation by society as a whole. The ideological climax of the project's implementation came at the anniversary session of the USSR Academy of Sciences, held in 1949 in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) to mark the 225th anniversary of its founding. It was then that the exceptional role of Russian science in human history was demonstrated for the first time, and on an unprecedented scale. As a result, for many decades to come, the idea of self-reliance in scientific inquiry, the search for new, original solutions, and the idea of a unique path in the world of science and technology were firmly ingrained in the consciousness of society, especially its scientific elite. This is precisely what produced the historically unprecedented scientific, technical, and technological breakthrough achieved by the USSR in the 1950s–1970s, the supreme effectiveness of which, despite all the twists and turns of the policies of the post-Stalin Soviet Union's leaders, Russia still feels today. For in many respects, it still retains a dominant position in the world of science and technology.
This is the true story of the struggle against cosmopolitanism. But where is Stalin's anti-Semitism here, if various Jewish figures were so actively involved in the implementation of this project?! A deep bow to all of them, including them, for so sincerely and accurately extolling the outstanding role of Russian science and technology, for inspiring several generations of young people in the Soviet Union to achieve fantastic scientific aspirations!
Myth #178: On Stalin's orders, the MGB falsified the case of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and then brutally dealt with its leadership
