invasive than medicine, and because medicine was the most Jewish of all professions. In traditional societies, those who communicate with spirits are both feared and revered. To ward off evil, one must enter into contact with it; the power to cure suggests the power to injure. By destroying the church’s distinction between priests and magicians, the modern state had reintroduced shamans—or rather, professionals who possessed secret knowledge that could be used to either save or destroy souls, bodies, countries, and the planet Earth. Not unlike Nazi Germany, but much more coherently and consistently, the Soviet Union was a modern state with an official church. The Party, embodied by Stalin, claimed both transcendental and political authority and encouraged a Faustian quest for limitless knowledge on the assumption that scientific truth pursued by trained professionals would coincide with the Marxist-Leninist truth upheld by “conscious” officials. Before the coming of the millennial fusion of the people with the Party and spontaneity with consciousness, however, the Soviet Union remained an uneasily dualistic society, with the Party enforcing ideological orthodoxy among the professionals on whose expertise it depended. In the 1920s, the opposition between commissars and “bourgeois specialists” was stark and asymmetrical; in the 1930s, it seemed to disappear as the new “Soviet intelligentsia” embraced both science and Party orthodoxy; in the 1940s and 1950s, it reemerged with a vengeance in response to the growing demands of the arms race and the widespread sense among war survivors that the great victory entitled them to a greater role in decision making. The more autonomy the Soviet professionals acquired, the more difficult it became to reconcile the science-based modernity they represented with the charismatic faith they were supposed to profess. Stalin’s deathbed crowning as “the coryphaeus of Soviet science” was the last serious attempt to reestablish prewar conceptual seamlessness. In his capacity as linguist and economist, among other things, Stalin argued that no progress toward communism was possible without science, that “no science [could] develop and flourish without a struggle of opinions”; that no struggle of opinions could take place in the shadow of a “closed group of infallible leaders”; and that no one outside the Kremlin was capable of determining what constituted progress, science, or worthy opinions. 143 For as long as Stalin was alive and incontestably infallible, such reasoning— and the world it held together—seemed to make sense to most members of the Soviet elite. There were three professions, however, that questioned the sacred unity of knowledge and virtue simply by performing their regularly assigned tasks. One was the secret police, which sought out corruption within the Party