as their colleagues’ equals or betters, yet they were being treated like the Kirgiz, the Aleut, or the peasants. Those who made it anyway protested against discrimination; many of the others preferred world revolution. But the Jews were not just the most revolutionary (along with the Latvians) national group in the Russian Empire. They were also the best at being revolutionaries. As Leonard Schapiro put it, “It was the Jews, with their long experience of exploiting conditions on Russia’s western frontier which adjoined the pale for smuggling and the like, who organized the illegal transport of literature, planned escapes and illegal crossings, and generally kept the wheels of the whole organization running.” 74 As early as the mid-1870s, according to the People’s Will operative Vladimir Yokhelson, Vilna became the main conduit for Petersburg’s and Moscow’s contacts with other countries. To transport books shipped through Vilna, Zundelevich would go to Koenigsberg, where he would meet with the medical student Finkelstein, who was the representative of the revolutionary presses from Switzerland and London. Finkelstein used to study at our rabbinical seminary but had emigrated to Germany in 1872, when an illegal library was found in the seminary’s boarding school. . . . Our border connections were used to transport not only books, but also people. 75 The Jewish revolutionary and educational networks—of people, books, money, and information—were similar to the traditional commercial ones. Sometimes they overlapped—as when students who were also revolutionaries crossed borders and stayed at the houses of their businessmen uncles; when the American soap (Naphtha) millionaire, Joseph Fels, underwrote the Fifth Congress of the RSDLP; or when Alexander Helphand (Parvus), himself both a revolutionary and a millionaire, arranged Lenin’s return to Russia in 1917. There was no master plan behind any of this, needless to say, but the fact that the overwhelming majority of ethnically Jewish revolutionaries in the Russian Empire were raised in self-consciously Jewish homes meant that they had acquired some traditional Mercurian skills. Nor were mobility and secrecy the only traditional Mercurian skills that served the cause of the revolution. Most members of radical circles devoted themselves to the study of sacred texts, revered proficient interpreters of the scriptures, adapted everyday behavior to doctrinal precepts, debated fine points