Riga.” And in 1965, all archival documents relating to Lenin’s Jewish grandfather were ordered “removed without leaving any copies.” The reason behind this was no longer a fear of providing more ammunition to the counterrevolutionary identification of Bolshevism with the Jews (as had been the case in the 1920s and early 1930s); it was a fear of sacrilege. Jews were aliens; Soviet heroes who happened to be Jews were either not true heroes (Jews were not mentioned on the lists of war heroes as Jews) or not really Jews (Yakov Sverdlov, for instance, was primarily associated with a square in Moscow and a city in the Urals). 184 Like the “emancipated” European Jews at the turn of the twentieth century, the Soviet Jews of the “stagnation period” combined unparalleled social success with indefensible disabilities and a “chimerical” nationality unprotected by state nationalism. Their response, in a familiar mode, was either principled liberalism (exemplified—or so it seemed—by the United States) or Jewish nationalism (represented—more and more forcefully—by Israel). The third—Soviet—option was no longer available. As Mikhail (formerly Marx-Engels-Liebknecht) Agursky wrote about the Soviet 1960s, The Jews had been converted into an estate of slaves. Could one really expect that a nation that had given the Soviet state political leaders, diplomats, generals, and top economic managers would agree to become an estate whose boldest dream would be a position as head of a lab at the Experimental Machine-Tool Research Institute or senior researcher at the Automatics and Telemechanics Institute? The Jews were oppressed and humiliated to a much greater degree than the rest of the population. 185 On the face of it, this statement may appear patently untrue and perhaps morally questionable. Not only were some deported nationalities still in exile, some Christian denominations formally banned, and most nomadic communities forced to part with their children, but the overwhelming majority of the Soviet population was not allowed to reside in large cities (let alone work in elite research institutes), and most rural inhabitants, whatever their nationality, were not entitled to internal passports and remained, in effect, serfs of the state. But of course Agursky was not (on this occasion) writing a work of history—he was writing a memoir about the making of a rebel, and what made Jewish rebels was the perception of unrelieved humiliation. In late imperial Russia, Jews had been —according to various economic and cultural criteria—better off than many other groups, but they had become the most revolutionary of them all because