The Russian nation was celebrated as never before. Propaganda
praised everything Russian and gave Russians credit for inventing all manner of technological innovations—the electric lamp, the telephone, the airplane, and more. "Cosmopolitanism" became a dirty word. It reflected the growing association of "enemies" with ethnic rather than class criteria and the crackdown on all nationalist sentiment except Russian. In the spring and summer of 1949, nearly 100,000 alleged "counterrevolutionaries" and their families were deported from the newly annexed Baltic Republics, so as to crush resistance to Sovietization. But campaigns against cosmopolitanism focused mainly on Jews. In 1948, when the Jewish community joyfully welcomed the Russian-born Golda Meir, Israel's new ambassador to Moscow, the simmering anti-Semitism of the postwar period became overt. The authorities publicly attacked prominent Jews. Many lost their jobs; dozens were imprisoned. The great actor Solomon Mikhoels, who as a member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee had raised funds in the United States for the Soviet war effort, was murdered on Stalin's orders.