Rootless cosmopolitan

"Rootless cosmopolitan" (Russian: безродный космополит bězródnïj kósmopólït) was a pejorative epithet that was mostly applied to intellectuals and Jews with ties to the West during the Stalinist era of the Soviet Union. It became especially prevalent during the country's anti-cosmopolitan campaign, which began in 1948 and continued until Stalin's death in 1953, as part of a post-1946 assault on "bourgeois Western influences" that widely targeted writers and other intellectuals, culminating in the doctors' plot against the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

In the Communist Party's discourse, rootless cosmopolitans were defined as unpatriotic Soviet citizens, chiefly Jewish intellectuals with ties to the West, who disseminated foreign influence favouring the socio-political atmosphere or aesthetics of Western Europe or the United States.

The term is considered to be an antisemitic trope.