few of them and they had, it is true, set themselves apart “from the bulk of the Jewish population” (including their own children, virtually none of whom knew any Yiddish or showed any interest in Jewish culture). The principal targets of Stalin’s anti-Jewish campaign, however, were Russians of Jewish descent or, as far as the Party’s Agitprop was concerned, Jews who claimed to be Russians in order to appear Soviet. The Party’s relentless will to purge and its routine “personnel policy” merged to become an exercise in investigative genealogy: every Russian in high position was a potential Jew, and every Jew without exception was a potential enemy. The campaign to cleanse the Soviet elite of ethnic Jews began as early as May 1939 when, in an apparent attempt to please Hitler, Stalin put Molotov in charge of Soviet diplomacy and ordered him to “get rid of the Jews” in the Commissariat of External Affairs. The purge gathered speed during the Nazi- Soviet alliance; became a part of government policy during the Great Patriotic War (as an expression of revamped official patriotism and a response to the new Jewish self-assertion); and turned into an avalanche in 1949, when ideological contagion became the regime’s chief concern and Jews “by blood” emerged as its principal agents. Party officials responsible for the “cadres” flailed about in search of covert aliens. The closer to the core, the more rot they found. 136 Who were the guardians of Marxism-Leninism? In 1949, “passport” Jews made up 19.8 percent of all Soviet professors of Marxism-Leninism, 25 percent of all those teaching Marxism-Leninism in the colleges of Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Kharkov, Rostov, Saratov, Kazan, and Sverdlovsk, and 7 out of 19 faculty members in the Dialectical and Historical Materialism Unit in the Philosophy Department of Moscow University. At the main Soviet research institute for the study of political economy (wrote the head of Agitprop to the head of the State Planning Agency), out of 51 senior researchers, there were 33 Jews, 14 Russians, and 4 others. (After the first series of firings, the new head of the reformed institute had to apologize to the Central Committee for the fact that out of 34 Academy of Sciences members, corresponding members, and “doctors of sciences” still employed by the institute, there were 20 Jews, 12 Russians, and 2 others.) In August 1949, the Red Presnia District Party Committee discovered that Jews made up 39 percent of the faculty at the Moscow Institute of Jurisprudence; and in 1950, the newly appointed director of the Institute for the Study of Law reported that he had succeeded in reducing the proportion of admitted Jewish graduate students from 50 to 8 percent. According to another Agitprop investigation, the secretariat of the editorial board of the multivolume History of the Civil War included 14 Jews, 8 Russians, and 6 others. Perhaps