patriotism, a motherland, brothers-in-arms, sons of the nation, daughters of the revolution, and so on. The other is membership in a variety of voluntary associations, of which youth groups are probably the most common and effective precisely because they combine the ascription, solidarity, and intense intimacy of the family with the choice, flexibility, and open-endedness of the marketplace. What happened in late imperial Russia was that large numbers of young people who had been raised in patriarchal families and introduced to Western socialism rebelled against Russia’s backwardness and Western modernity at the same time. They saw both evils as their own (“spoilt” as they were “for Russia by Western prejudices and for the West by Russian habit”), and they saw both of them as strengths, for that very reason. They were going to save the world by saving themselves because Russia’s backwardness was the most direct route to Western socialism—either because it was so communal or because, as Lenin would later discover, it was “the weakest link in the chain of imperialism.” Suspended between the illegitimate patriarchies of the family and autocracy, they created a durable youth culture imbued with intense millenarian expectation, powerful internal cohesion, and a self-worship so passionate it could be consummated only through self-immolation. For Russia’s young intellectuals, the halfway house of a generation had become a temple dedicated to eternal youth and human sacrifice. 61 These were the neutral spaces—or the “little islands of freedom,” as one participant called them—that most Jews entered as they made their way down Pushkin Street. Russia had fewer salons, museums, stock exchanges, professional associations, dental offices, and coffeehouses than the West; their social significance was limited, and Jewish access to them was made difficult by legal handicaps. The temple of youth, on the other hand, was both very large and genuinely welcoming. Jews were appreciated as Jews: a few revolutionaries interpreted the pogroms of the early 1880s as the expression of legitimate popular resentment against exploitation, but the dominant intelligentsia view was that most Jews belonged among the insulted and the injured—and thus among the virtuous. S. Ia. Nadson, the most commercially successful Russian poet of the nineteenth century, “grew up apart from that disparaged nation,” to which, he thought, his ancestors had belonged, But when your foes, like packs of vicious hounds, Are tearing you apart, consumed by greed and hate, I’ll humbly join the ranks of your determined fighters, A nation scorned by fate!