1949 was a bad year to be a communist or nomenklatura.

Apart from the Rajk trials of national development line communists in the new soviet-style societies, there was the Leningrad affair ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leningrad_affair ) and Zhadanovishchina (1946~1957).

The most general context was a fear of left social democracy or reformism within Stalinist parties under Soviet hegemony. Yugoslavia was busy demonstrating that a Soviet party could exist outside of intimate relations with the Soviet party. At the same time the workers parties of Central Europe were left social democrats forcibly fused with Stalinist communists who controlled leadership positions. This required a purifying purge of stalinists who may have slid left (towards the actual working class controlling things) and thus the demonstrative Rajk purges. Correspondingly the Leningrad party centre had to be disciplined for their popularity (again, note the fear of the working class).

Rootless cosmopolitanism is an appeal to nationalism and parochial anti-intellectualism as a way to hegemonise workers that may have seen some advantage to controlling a captive intelligentsia. “Rootless” is a hopeful insult, a desire that the Leningrad working class won’t back such a fraction.

While there are anti-Semitic elements here, there’s a general attack on intellectuals, urban intellectuals, urban intellectuals committed to an international revolution. 

The attack on rootless cosmopolitanism is associated with th