of all the people in the world; much bigger than Pushkin, Galina Apollonovna, and the little islands of freedom. What they found was the first of the twentieth century’s Wars of Religion, the last war to end all wars, the Armageddon on the eve of eternity. For those who wished to fight, there was but one army to join. The Red Army was the only force that stood earnestly and consistently against the Jewish pogroms and the only one led by a Jew. Trotsky was not just a general or even a prophet: he was the living embodiment of redemptive violence, the sword of revolutionary justice, and—at the same time—Lev Davydovich Bronstein, whose first school had been Schufer’s heder in Gromoklei, Kherson province. The other Bolshevik leaders standing closest to Lenin during the civil war were G. E. Zinoviev (Ovsei-Gersh Aronovich Radomyslsky), L. B. Kamenev (Rosenfeld), and Ya. M. Sverdlov. 95 These were effects, not causes; icons of a much larger truth. The vast majority of Bolshevik party members (72 percent in 1922) were ethnic Russians; the highest rate of overrepresentation belonged to the Latvians (although after Latvia’s independence in 1918, Soviet Latvians became a largely self-selected political émigré community); and none of the prominent Communists of Jewish background wanted to be Jewish. Which is precisely what made them perfect heroes for rebels like Eduard Bagritsky, who did not want to be Jewish, either. Trotsky declared his nationality to be “Social Democratic,” and that was the nationality the Bolsheviks represented and Bagritsky fought for: “So that the unyielding earth / Would be drenched in blood, / And a brand-new virgin youth / Sprout up from the bones.” Of those fighting on the bones of imperial Russia, the Bolsheviks were the only true priests at the temple of eternal youth, the only crusaders for universal brotherhood, the only party where Eduard Bagritsky and Elijah Bratslavsky could feel at home. 96 When Babel’s narrator next saw him, Elijah the Red Army soldier was dying from his wounds. “Four months ago, on a Friday evening, Gedali the junk salesman brought me to your father, Rebbe Motale, but you were not in the Party then, Bratslavsky.” “I was in the Party then,” the boy replied, clawing at his chest and writhing in fever, “but I could not abandon my mother . . .” “And now, Elijah?” “In a revolution, a mother is but an episode,” he whispered softly. “My letter came up, the letter B, and our Party cell sent me to the front. . . .”