about the moats closing in over the heads of the executed, and about the “signature on the death sentence spilling out of the hole in the head.” And then he intones some of the age’s most famous lines: Our age is awaiting you out in the yard, Alarmed and alert as a well-armed guard. Go, stand by its side, don’t hesitate. Its solitude is at least as great. Your enemy’s everyone you meet, You stand alone and the age stands still, And if it tells you to cheat—then cheat. And if it tells you to kill—then kill. 150 The culmination of the story of Jewish commissars in Soviet literature was the famous history of the construction of the White Sea Canal, 1931–34. The book was produced by thirty-six writers (including Gorky, M. Zoshchenko, Vs. Ivanov, Vera Inber, V. Kataev, A. Tolstoy, and V. Shklovsky). The canal was built by labor camp inmates (“reforged” thereby into socially useful citizens). The construction was run by the secret police (the OGPU, the successor to the Cheka). All the top leadership positions were held by Jews: G. G. Yagoda, the OGPU official in charge of the project; L. I. Kogan, the head of construction, M. D. Berman, the head of the Labor Camp Administration (Gulag); S. G. Firin, the head of the White Sea Canal Labor Camp; Ya. D. Rappoport, the deputy head of construction and of the Gulag; and N. A. Frenkel, the head of work organization on the canal. 151 As portrayed in the History , these people were in much better health than their civil war predecessors, but they had lost none of their essential attributes: consciousness, restlessness, ruthlessness, promptness, precision, prodigious powers of penetration, and the optional Jewishness as a confirmation and possibly explanation of all the other attributes. They were the last representatives of the Heroic Age of the Russian Revolution: the age that preferred mobility to stability, boundlessness to borders, proteanism to permanence, consciousness to spontaneity, exile to domesticity, artifice to nature, necessity to beauty, mind to matter, Stolz to Oblomov, those who could not swim to those who could. It was the Mercurian phase of the revolution, in other words; the German Stage without the Germans; the Jewish Age. 152 No icon better expresses the essence of that age (Kultura 1, in Vladimir