I would have learned Russian— If only because That language was spoken by Lenin. But since he had learned it as a native language, as Lenin had, he had no choice but to create the rest of the world in its image. “My feelings and my perception of the world were formed and developed, above all, by the Russian word, Russian mentors, and Russian translations of Shakespeare, Hugo, Dickens, Mark Twain, and Jack London.” For Hodl and her children, Pushkin Street and the road to socialism were one and the same thing. “To be Russian,” wrote Kopelev, quoting Dostoevsky’s “Pushkin Speech,” “means being a Universal Human Being.” 54 The mass migration of Jews to the big cities, their close identification with Bolshevism, and their emergence as the core of the new Soviet Russian intelligentsia provoked hostility among those who objected to the arrival of these new immigrants, did not approve of Bolshevism, or could not, for various reasons, join the new Soviet Russian intelligentsia. “If you only knew what the city’s population looks like,” wrote one Leningrad resident to a friend in the United States in 1925, “what kind of revolting Jewish types you run into—with earlocks, speaking their croaking, hiccuping jargon.” And as another one wrote to a correspondent in Yugoslavia three months later, “the sidewalks are filled with people in leather jackets and gray trench coats, spitting sunflower seeds in your face, and there are so many Jews with long earlocks feeling totally at home that you might as well be in Gomel, Dvinsk, or Berdichev.” One Muscovite, in a letter sent to Leningrad in April 1925, felt the same way: “I don’t go to public places anymore and try not to walk around too much because of the aggravation of having to look at Jewish faces and Jewish store signs. Pretty soon, a Russian sign will become a rarity in Moscow, or I should say, in New Berdichev. This Soviet nation is everywhere; I make the point of not reading newspapers or servile literature.” 55 The association of Jews with the Soviet state was a common theme in the anti-Jewish letters intercepted by the Leningrad secret police in the mid-1920s. “The Jewish dominance is absolute” (October 1924); “the whole press is in the hands of the Jews” (June 1925); “the Jews, for the most part, live extremely well; everything, from trade to state employment, is in their hands” (September