they had measured themselves according to the strictest meritocracy (and not in reference to Lamaists or peasants); thought themselves capable of making it to the very top (with very good reason); and considered their disabilities completely illegitimate (based as they were on the old confessional, not the new liberal, state-building principle). In late Soviet Russia, the “Jewish problem” was at least as acute: the disabilities were milder, but the official position was less defensible (in official terms), and the degree of Jewish social achievement—and thus the danger of downward mobility—much greater. The Jews were not more oppressed and humiliated than the rest of the population, but they had, indeed, provided the Soviet state with political leaders, diplomats, generals, and top economic managers, and they were poised to provide more if the officially adopted meritocratic principle were duly enforced. Jews were not more oppressed than the rest of the population, in other words, but they felt more humiliated because of their peculiarly exalted and vulnerable position in Soviet society. Moreover, the covert official persecution encouraged open popular anti- Semitism, which seems to have thrived on a combination of the old Apollonian hostility to “disembodied heads” and a vested interest on the part of new-minted Slavic technocrats that some of their more successful competitors be removed as ethnically ineligible. Swann’s nose was a dangerous attribute to have; the public statement “I am a Jew” was either a confession of guilt or a gesture of defiance. 186 The Jewish problem was a distillation of the general intelligentsia predicament. The father of Russian socialism, Alexander Herzen, had rebelled against the tsar not because he was being oppressed as much as his serfs; rather, it was because he considered himself equal to the tsar but was being treated like a serf. The same was true of Andrei Sakharov, who considered himself superior to Mitrofan Nedelin (not to mention Leonid Brezhnev or Mikhail Gorbachev) but was still being treated like a serf. The same, mutatis mutandis, was true of the Jews—except that in the postwar Soviet Union they were not just analogous to the antiregime intelligentsia—they were, in many ways, the core of the antiregime intelligentsia. The Jews were overrepresented among those who were making the Soviet Union hard, and they were underrepresented among those who were doing the guiding (and felt even more underrepresented among the latter because they were so strongly overrepresented among the former). In the 1970s and 1980s, the gerontocratic Soviet state had trouble telling the Jews and the intelligentsia apart; a large proportion of Soviet intelligentsia members (especially in the most elite occupations in Moscow and Leningrad) considered themselves Jews; most Moscow and Leningrad Jews thought of themselves as