1925); “every child knows that the Soviet government is a Jewish government” (September 1925). Some members of the prerevolutionary elite, in particular, resented the “antibourgeois” quotas in educational institutions and the subsequent rise of the Jewish immigrants as both prominent new Kulturträger and leading “proletarian” iconoclasts. The art historian A. Anisimov wrote to a colleague in Prague (in November 1923), “Out of 100 applicants to Moscow University, 78 are Jews; thus, if the Russian university is now in Prague, the Jewish one is in Moscow.” The father of a student about to be “purged” for alien origins wrote to a friend or relative in Serbia: “Pavel and his friends are awaiting their fate. But it’s clear that only the Jerusalem academics and the Communists, Party members generally, are going to stay.” And according to the wife of a Leningrad University professor, “in all the institutions, only workers and Israelites are admitted; the life of the intelligentsia is very hard.” 56 Mikhail Bulgakov, who thought of the Soviet regime as above all the reign of vile plebeians with “dogs’ hearts,” considered Jews important (if clearly secondary) instigators and beneficiaries of what had happened to “the great city of Moscow.” As he wrote in his diary on December 28, 1924, after a public reading of his “Fatal Eggs” at a meeting of the fashionable “Nikitin Saturdays,” “there were about thirty people there, not one of them a writer and none with any understanding of Russian literature. . . . These ‘Nikitin Saturdays’ consist of stale, slavish, Soviet riffraff, with a thick Jewish admixture.” A week later, accompanied by his friend M. (Dmitry Stonov, a writer and a Jewish immigrant from the Pale of Settlement), he visited the editorial offices of the Godless magazine. The circulation is 70,000, as it turns out, and it is going fast. The offices are filled with unbelievable scum coming and going. There is a little stage, some kind of curtains, decorations. . . . On the stage there is a table; on the table there is some kind of holy book, perhaps the Bible, with two heads hovering above it. “Reminds me of a synagogue,” said M. as we walked out. . . . That very night, I skimmed the issues of the Godless and was stunned. The point is not just that this is a sacrilege, although the sacrilege is, of course, boundless, formally speaking. The point is that they represent Christ, Christ himself, as a scoundrel and a cheat. It is not hard to see whose work it is. This crime is immeasurable. 57 The Party took such views seriously. According to the August 1926 Agitprop