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The Communist Party of the Russian Federation continues to be one of the major forces opposing globalization, and its concomitant bastardization of national cultures, by what Stalinists called “rootless cosmopolitanism.” Russia has shown herself to be the land with the most potential to resist globalization, despite the brief interregnum of the drunken clown Boris Yeltsin, and the disintegration paved by Mikhail Gorbachev, who now postures on the world stage as an elder statesman for a “new world order.”[1] The world kulturkampf remains a primary means for the inauguration of globalist hegemony, as it did during the Cold War era.

Cultural Lines Drawn

The lines of opposition between the main protagonists, the USA and the USSR, were drawn in what is now known as the “Cultural Cold War,”[2] that was attendant with the Cold War era. Cultural subversion became the USA’s means of undermining nations and this remains the case.[3] The USSR since the time of Stalin defined the role of “Soviet culture,” vis-à-vis the “rootless cosmopolitanism” that was being sponsored around the world by the USA via the CIA and plutocratic interests.

While “socialist realism” was formulated in 1932 by Maxim Gorky of the Union of Russian Writers,[4] the position of a new Soviet culture founded upon tradition, was developed and publicly stated in 1946 by A Zhdanov.[5] Classical composers from the Czarist era, such as Tchaikovsky, Glinka, and Borodin, were revived after being sidelined in the early years of Bolshevism, as were great non-Russian composers such as Beethoven, Brahms, and Schubert.[6] Modernists who had been fêted in the early days of Bolshevism were relegated to irrelevance by the 1930s.[7] Jazz and the associated types of dancing were condemned as bourgeoisie degeneracy.[8] Soviet culture was to be folkish and heroic.[9]

In 1948, Zhdanov’s speech to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolshevik) intended primarily to lay the foundations of Soviet music, represents one of the most cogent attempts to define culture.[10] The Zhdanov speech also helped set the foundation for the campaign against “rootless cosmopolitanism” that was launched several years later.[11]

It is notable that these definitive statements on Soviet culture were being made at the very beginning of the “Cold War,” when the USSR rejected US offers to be a junior partner in a post-War “new world order”.[12] It is also notable that the USSR was launching its campaign against “rootless cosmopolitanism” at the same time that the USA was launching its campaign to spread its “modernism” throughout the world, primarily via “abstract expressionism,” the preferred artistic mode of the Rockefellers, CIA, et al, and their Left-wing lackeys.

In 1949 F. Chernov wrote a seminal article declaring war against “rootless cosmopolitanism.”[13] He described the “rootless cosmopolitans” that had entered both the Soviet arts and the sciences as “nihilistic” and “anti-national,” and even repudiated any notion of a “united world science,” seeing this as part of an attempt to create a “world philosophy” devoid of “national distinctions and features,” stating:

The forms in which bourgeois-cosmopolitan petty ideas are dragged into the area of ideology are multifarious: from concealment of better products of socialist culture to direct denigration of it; from denial of the world-historical significance of Great Russian culture and elimination of respect for its traditions to the frank propagation of servility before decadent bourgeois culture; from the spreading of national nihilism and negation of the significance of the question of priority in science to the slogan about “international solidarity” with bourgeois science and so forth and so on. But the essence of all these forms is this antipatriotism, this propaganda of bourgeois-cosmopolitan ideology setting its goal of spiritual disarmament of the Soviet people in the face of aggressive bourgeois ideology, the revival of remnants of capitalism in peoples’ consciousness.[14]

Chernov identified “rootless cosmopolitism” as part of a specific foreign agenda, which was certainly formalized that year – 1949 – with the founding of the Congress for Cultural Freedom:

In the calculation of our foreign enemies they should divert Soviet literature and culture and Soviet science from the service of the Socialist cause. They try to infect Soviet literature, science, and art with all kinds of putrid influences, to weaken in such a way these powerful linchpins of the political training of the people, the education of the Soviet people in the spirit of active service to the socialist fatherland, to communist construction.[15]

Explaining the meaning of cosmopolitanism, Chernov stated:

Cosmopolitanism is the negation of patriotism, its opposite. It advocates absolute apathy towards the fate of the Motherland. Cosmopolitanism denies the existence of any moral or civil obligations of people to their nation and Motherland.[16]

Chernov then outlined the manner by which cosmopolitanism serves global capital:

The bourgeoisie preaches the principle that money does not have a homeland, and that, wherever one can “make money,” wherever one may “have a profitable business,” there is his homeland. Here is the villainy that bourgeois cosmopolitanism is called on to conceal, to disguise, “to ennoble” the antipatriotic ideology of the rootless bourgeois-businessman, the huckster and the traveling salesman.[17]

This is the situation that pertains also to the present, although with the means of mass communications now developed far more so than in Chernov’s time, the world is succumbing ever more, even in the remotest, hitherto inaccessible regions. “Bourgeois cosmopolitanism” in the arts is synonymous with commodity marketing, because the arts have become commodities for mass production and consumption, with the young as primary targets for the past several generations. Chernov identified precisely who was behind this global kulturkampf:

In the guise of cosmopolitan phraseology, in false slogans about the struggle against “nationalist selfishness,” hides the brutal face of the inciters of a new war, trying to bring about the fantastic notion of American rule over the world. From the imperialist circles of the USA today issues propaganda of “world citizenship” and “universal government.”[18]

It is in the above passage that Chernov makes it plain that this was a “Cultural Cold War” as it is now termed.

At the time the CIA was launching its front, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, with the assistance of Trotsky-apologist Professor Sidney Hook, and numerous other ultra-Leftists, and in particular Trotskyites. Its cultural ideology can at least in part be traced to the manifesto on the arts written by Trotsky along with André Breton and Diego Rivera in 1938, entitled Towards a Free Revolutionary Art.[19] Aptly, this was published in the Autumn 1938 issue of the Marxist magazine Partisan Review, which was to play a significant role in the “Cultural Cold War” and was to receive CIA funding.

One of the first projects launched upon the world was an exhibition of “abstract expressionism” in 1952 via the International Program of the Rockefeller founded, funded and run Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). This received a five-year annual grant of $125,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, under the direction of Porter McCray, who had also worked with Nelson Rockefeller’s Latin American Department, and in 1950 as an attaché of the cultural section of the US Foreign Service.[20] Russell Lynes, writing of this period stated that MoMA now had the entire world to “proselytise” with what he called “the exportable religion” of Abstract Expressionism[21].

The Stalinists accurately perceived the cultural strategy of the globalists and their Leftist allies.

Although the Congress for Cultural Freedom, after numerous exposés, was wound up, and the CIA publicly acknowledges its role,[22] other organizations have arisen to continue “Cold War II,” again primarily against Russia, but also against any state that is reticent about a “new world order”: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Milosevic’s Serbia, etc., while the USA has pursued a policy of surrounding Russia by fomenting “color revolutions” in the former Soviet states.[23]

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