The Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public (Russian: Антисионистский комитет советской общественности, Antisionistsky komitet sovyetskoy obshchestvennosti; abbreviated AZCSP Russian: АКСО) was a body formed in 1983 in the Soviet Union as an anti-Zionist propaganda tool.
By 1983, the Soviet regime needed a new propaganda weapon in the Cold War, as well as against an increasingly active internal dissident movement, to arrest or discredit the mass emigration of Soviet Jews and to alleviate the Arab concerns about its effects on Israel's demographics.
[citation needed] David Abramovich Dragunsky, Colonel-General, twice Hero of the Soviet Union and World War II hero (he was the commander of the 55th Guards Tank Brigade), well known inside the country and abroad, was designated its chairman.
The writers who specialized in the Soviet-invented and sponsored doctrine of Zionology ("сионология") considered any expressions of Jewishness as Zionist and therefore subject to being stamped out.
In November 1975, the leading Soviet historian academic M. Korostovtsev wrote a letter to the Secretary of the Central Committee, Mikhail Suslov, regarding the book The encroaching counterrevolution by prominent Zionologist Vladimir Begun: "...it perceptibly stirs up anti-Semitism under the flag of anti-Zionism".