spent most of her career reporting on Moscow intellectuals but had to retire as a lieutenant colonel in 1949 because of the anti-Jewish campaign. After a lifetime of moral certainty, the two found themselves betrayed by their Party and compelled—for the first time ever—to talk to their children about the emerging distinction between the state and the family, the public and the private, the “brazen anti-Semitic statements” and their mother’s Semitic “nationality.” 152 The Sudoplatov household solution was to continue to regard Pravda (which, after all, “contained no hint of pogroms”) as the whole Truth and nothing but the Truth, but also to emphasize (especially if asked by middle school teachers) that utmost vigilance was needed in the face of hostile provocations in the form of rumors. Such “grammatical fiction,” as Arthur Koestler’s Rubashov calls it, was still the dominant true-believer strategy. At the trial of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, Ilya Vatenberg (a former Zionist, ardent Communist, Columbia Law School graduate, and secret police informer), declared that he had signed his falsified interrogation record because he and his interrogator were on the same side of the barricade. PRESIDING OFFICER: One must tell the truth everywhere, except when it needs to be hidden from the enemies. VATENBERG: There is no such thing as abstract truth. Truth is always class-based, and since truth is class-based, I thought, then maybe he was right, after all. PRESIDING OFFICER: But if he really was right, then why are you retracting your testimony? VATENBERG: Perhaps he really is right. I need to reconsider my whole life.153 There was another solution, however—virtually inconceivable for a high- ranking true believer during the Great Terror of 1937–38 but possible now, when some Party spokesmen seemed to have adopted the Nazi definition of the enemy (thereby making it impossible for a Vatenberg to remain within the fold no matter how thoroughly he reconsidered his whole life). This solution consisted in allowing for the possibility that Truth and the Party were two different entities; that Truth could be pursued according to the rational grammar of logic and common sense; and that if the Party did not agree with the Truth, then so much the worse for the Party. Remarkably, this approach was embraced by the highest- ranking of all the JAFC defendants, Solomon Lozovsky. The only person associated with the work of the JAFC because of his Party position and not because he had ever shown any interest in Yiddish culture, Lozovsky was a prominent Old Bolshevik who had been a member of the Party’s Central Committee and the Presidium of the Comintern, head of the Communist Trade Union International, deputy foreign minister of the USSR, and, as head of the Soviet Information Bureau, the supreme chief of Soviet external propaganda. He