passing of ethnic discontent would result in the demystification of ethnic groups and their ultimate fusion under communism. Nationality, as every Marxist knew, was a facade that concealed the reality of class struggle. Bolshevik multiculturalism was like politeness: nothing was valued as highly and cost as little (or so the Bolsheviks thought). By promoting the “national form,” the Party was reinforcing the “socialist content.” Diversity was the surest path to unity. The greatest monument to this dialectic was the first ethnoterritorial federation in the history of the world: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. 62 The Jews were considered a formerly oppressed Soviet nationality and were treated like all the other formerly oppressed Soviet nationalities (all except the Russians, that is). Religion was a bad thing, of course, as was the use of scriptural languages for secular purposes (the Muslims had to abandon Arabic script), but a modern, secular national culture was a very good thing indeed. In the case of the Jews, this meant the creation of several special ethnoterritorial units in Ukraine and the Russian Republic and a massive promotion of the Yiddish language, theater, press, schools, and literature (complete with a large- scale celebration of Sholem Aleichem as the Jewish Pushkin). The enthusiasm of the Bolshevik Yiddishists was great, but the overall results—by 1934, when the Soviet state paused to take a breath—were meager. The problem was not Zionism, Hebraism, or Judaic traditionalism, which were negligible irritants compared to the challenges that the Soviet culture-building effort encountered in Central Asia, for example. The problem was that, according to the official Marxist blueprint, the Jews were too far ahead of the Soviet culture-building effort. There were many Soviet nationalities without compact homelands and many more Soviet nationalities that seemed unable to separate religion from ethnicity, but no other Soviet nationality was as top-heavy, in class terms (resembling, like the iconic Trotsky, a downward-pointing triangle); as heavily represented at the Soviet top; or as little interested in either the state’s attack on its religion or the state’s promotion of its “national culture.” No other ethnic group was as good at being Soviet, and no other ethnic group was as keen on abandoning its language, rituals, and traditional areas of settlement. No other nationality, in other words, was as Mercurian (all head and no body) or as revolutionary (all youth and no tradition). 63 Accordingly, in one crucially important sense, the “normalization” of the Jews was the reverse of the “modernization” of all the other Soviet nationalities. The purpose of fostering ethnic units, cultures, cadres, and institutions was to eliminate nationalist obstacles on the way to socialist urbanization, education, and cosmopolitanism. The Jews, however, were so heavily urbanized, so well