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In 1945 Stalin launched a huge propaganda machine against the outside world to cut his country off from the rest of the world. This overwhelming propaganda was accompanied by a fierce campaign of terror on a massive scale. Murder and deportation followed press articles, which attacked above all academics and artists. The theme of the propaganda campaign was the fight against cosmopolitism. This fight was based on Russia’s chauvinism, anti-Semitism and many other types of xenophobia. The whole propaganda effort (from 1945 to 1953) was orchestrated by Stalin himself. The documents related to this problem were published by Russian scholars in a huge volume entitled Stalin and Cosmopolitism 1945-1953. The author comments on this work, comparing some of the aspects with his own memories of himself then (1952), a 17-year-old history student sent from Poland to the Kazan University on the banks of the Volga.