The Thinking Reed

This is a slander on Russian Soviet man. A foul slander. And just because complacency is profoundly alien to us, we cannot refrain from branding this attempt to calumniate the Soviet national character.23

Here is another example, from an article by A. Gerasimov: ‘For Soviet Patriotism in Art’ — in this case the subject was painting, for the ‘cosmopolitans’ were doing their fell work in every sphere of cultural activity:

Beskin’s malicious attack and conscienceless persecution compelled the artist A. Yar-Kravchenko to withdraw from the exhibition hall of the Moscow Artists’ Association his talented painting ‘Maxim Gorky reads his story Death and the Maiden to Comrades Stalin, Molotov and Voroshilov’, for which in 1940 he was awarded a Stalin Prize.24

The other ‘crimes’ of our ‘cosmopolitans’ were of the same order. In general, they did not understand how to carry out the task of depicting ‘man of the Stalin epoch’, they were given to ‘cringing before the decadent art of the bourgeois West’, and so on.25 At the same time, the reader was informed that the Soviet fine arts were on an incomparably higher level than anything created in the capitalist countries in the previous half-century, ‘which servile Efros and his like try to present as the last word in art.’26

In France Chagall and Picasso were painting; in Soviet Russia Plastov reigned supreme. However, in the forties it was senseless to argue with Pravda, and today those who participated in the witch-hunts of that time disavow what they said then. It would be boring to rehearse a lot of articles about ‘cosmopolitanism’ which contain nothing but monotonous abuse and unfounded accusations. It is worth drawing attention only to a couple of important details. Pravda devoted more space to articles about ‘cosmopolitanism’ than to the most significant international events. The fight against a group of dramatic critics, to deal with whom it would have been enough to summon a meeting of the All-Russia Dramatic Society (VTO), or to write two or three lines, was transformed into an affair on the all-national scale. Clearly, what was at stake was not just some ideologically ‘incorrect’ article in the journal Teatr but state policy, the struggle against the creative intelligentsia generally. Significant, too, was the fact that among the ‘cosmopolitans’ there were hardly any members of the old intelligentsia. They were all people who had come up under Soviet rule, bearers of the new traditions. What was at stake was not just errors committed by writers in Teatr but something bigger.

‘The campaign against “cosmopolitanism” embraced at the end of the 1940s not only dramatic criticism and literature’, Roy Medvedev wrote later, ‘but also all the social and natural sciences.’27 On 24 March 1949 I. Gladkov launched an attack in the Academic Council of the Institute of Economics against ‘cosmopolitan economists’, calling for a showdown: ‘This is not the time’, he said, ‘or the place to argue with the cosmopolitans… We have to talk with those people by other means and in another language.’28 The ‘cosmopolitans’ — Academician Varga, Trachtenberg, Eventov, Rubinshtein, Lif, Roitburd, Bokshitsky, Berdnikov — were, again somehow, mostly non-Russians. True, in each successive list the representatives of ‘these people’ — in plain words, Jews (‘the concepts “Jew” and “cosmopolitan”’, writes Boffa, ‘actually coincided’29) always had one or two Russians ‘mixed in’ with them, but that had no particular political significance since the anti-Semitic campaign was closely interwoven with a campaign against intellectuals in general. Not only ‘the Jewish question’ but the problem of culture as well was threatened with a ‘final solution’.