We did our share of toasting, We had our drinking fun. Yet somehow we all shared A faith in future rockets: My friends were well prepared To do their job as prophets. 44 Some of those who survived to become “the war generation” would go on to become “the generation of the sixties” and eventually the oldest of the “foremen” of Gorbachev’s perestroika. But in the 1930s (before “the fight was done”), they were still the eternally young boys and girls of the remarkable revolution. What all the members of the prewar Soviet elite had in common was their total identification with their “age”; their belief that they—and their country —were the embodiment of the revolution; their conviction that, as Kopelev put it, “the Soviet power was the best and most just power on earth.” All of them— from Hodl to Hodl’s children—were ready and willing to do their job as prophets. 45 Most members of the new Soviet elite were not Jews, and most Jews were not members of the new Soviet elite. But there is no doubt that the Jews had a much higher proportion of elite members than any other ethnic group in the USSR. In absolute terms, they were second to the Russians, but if one divides the elite into groups whose members came from the same region, shared a similar social and cultural background, and recognized each other as having a common past and related parents, it seems certain that Jews would have constituted the largest single component of the new Soviet elite, especially (or rather, most visibly) its cultural contingent. They tended to be the poets, the prophets, and the propagandists. According to David Samoilov, a member of the Kogan generation who was born in Moscow to a Jewish doctor from Belorussia and went on to become one of the most eloquent chroniclers of the Soviet cultural elite, Jews had filled “the vacuum created by the terrorist regime” and then graduated from a “social stratum” to become a “part of the nation.” The Jews, he believed, represented “a certain kind of mentality, a branch of the Russian intelligentsia in one of its most selfless variants.” 46 In effect, the role of the Jews in the prewar Soviet Union was similar to the role of the Germans in imperial Russia (or the role of Phanariot Greeks in the