The two trends—the ethnicization of the Soviet state and the nationalization of ethnic Jews—kept reinforcing each other until Stalin and the new Agitprop officials made two terrifying discoveries. First, the Jews as a Soviet nationality were now an ethnic diaspora potentially loyal to a hostile foreign state. After the creation of Israel and the launching of the Cold War, they had become analogous to the Germans, Greeks, Finns, Poles, and other “nonnative” nationalities presumed to be beholden to an external homeland and thus congenitally and irredeemably alien. The official assault on the Jews would be a belated application of the ethnic component of the Great Terror to an ethnic group that had escaped it (as an ethnic group) in 1937–38. Second, according to the new Soviet definition of national belonging and political loyalty, the Russian Soviet intelligentsia, created and nurtured by Comrade Stalin, was not really Russian—and thus not fully Soviet. Russians of Jewish descent were masked Jews, and masked Jews were traitors twice over. All Stalinist purges were about creeping penetration by invisible aliens—and here was a race that was both ubiquitous and camouflaged; an ethnic group that was so good at becoming invisible that it had become visible as an elite (perhaps the Soviet elite). Here was a nationality that did not possess its own territory (or rather, possessed one but refused to live there), a nationality that did not have its own language (or rather, had one but refused to speak it), a nationality that consisted almost entirely of intelligentsia (or rather, refused to engage in proletarian pursuits); a nationality that used pseudonyms instead of names (this seemed true not only of Old Bolsheviks and professional writers but also of most immigrants from the former Pale of Settlement: the children of Baruchs, Girshas, and Moshes had routinely changed their patronymics to Borisovich, Grigorievich, and Mikhailovich). Being Jewish became a crime: those who claimed a separate Yiddish culture were “bourgeois nationalists”; those who identified with Russian culture were “rootless cosmopolitans.” The more brutal, if relatively small-scale, campaign was waged against the first group (the public Jews). In January 1948, the best-known Soviet Yiddishist, Solomon Mikhoels, was murdered on Stalin’s orders by the secret police. (The man who had lured him into the trap, a Jewish theater critic and police informer, V. I. Golubov-Potapov, was murdered with him. They were both tied up, thrown to the ground, and run over by a truck as part of the plot to make it look like a traffic accident.) Over the next two years, all Yiddish theaters and writers’ organizations were closed, and most Yiddish writers were arrested. In the spring and summer of 1952, fifteen former members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee were put on trial as “bourgeois nationalists.” One was spared; one