in diverse ways; and variously described nationalities (“steppe nomads,” “wandering aliens,” Poles) with special restrictions and exemptions. Everyone being unequal, some groups were—in some sense and in some places—much more unequal than others, but in the absence of a single legal gauge, discriminating among them in any general sense is usually more painstaking than rewarding. Jews had more disabilities than most Orthodox Christian members of their estates (merchants and townsmen, in the vast majority of cases), but a comparison of their status with that of Tatar traders, Kirgiz pastoralists, “priestless” sectarians, or indeed the empire’s Russian peasant majority (even after the abolition of serfdom) is possible only with regard to specific privileges and disabilities. The “prisonhouse of nations” was as large as the tsar’s domain. Among the tsar’s subjects were several groups that were predominantly or exclusively Mercurian: from various Gypsy communities (extremely visible in “bohemian” entertainment, as well as the traditional smithing and scavenging trades); to small and narrowly specialized literate Mercurians (Nestorians/Assyrians, Karaites, Bukharans); to Russia’s very own Puritans, the Old Believers (prominent among the wealthiest industrialists and bankers); to such giants of Levantine commerce as the Greeks (active in the Black Sea trade, especially in wheat export) and the Armenians (who dominated the economy of the Caucasus and parts of southern Russia). But of course the most prominent Mercurians of the Russian Empire were the Germans, who, following Peter the Great’s reforms, had come to occupy central roles in the imperial bureaucracy, economic life, and the professions (very much like Phanariot Greeks and Armenians in the Ottoman Empire). Relying on ethnic and religious autonomy, high literacy rates, strong communal institutions, a sense of cultural superiority, international familial networks, and a variety of consistently cultivated technical and linguistic skills, the Germans had become the face (the real flesh-and-blood kind) of Russia’s never-ending Westernization. Not only was the university matriculation rate among Russia’s Baltic Germans the highest in Europe (about 300 per 100,000 total population in the 1830s at Dorpat University alone); Germans composed approximately 38 percent of the graduates of Russia’s most exclusive educational institution, the Tsarskoe Selo Lycée, and a comparable proportion of the graduates from the Imperial School of Jurisprudence. From the late eighteenth to the twentieth century, Germans constituted from 18 to more than 33 percent of the top tsarist officials, especially at the royal court, in the officer corps, diplomatic service, police, and provincial administration (including many newly colonized areas). According to John A.