had dutifully followed the Party line and had accepted the extermination of most of his old friends as part of the grammar of revolution, but when he was put on trial for having a mother called Hannah, he refused to go on speaking the Party language because he seems to have concluded that communicating in that language—even in the Bukharin-Vatenberg mode of confessional self-abasement —was no longer possible. He reconsidered his whole life and found it wanting— or rather, he expressed pride in his service to the cause but maintained throughout that the official case against him “contradicted truth, logic, and common sense.” He might not have read a word of Yiddish “in sixty years,” but he did not think that writing in Yiddish was a form of nationalism; was not ashamed of his parents; refused to accept that there was anything wrong with “three Soviet citizens writing a letter to their own government”; and insisted to the end that he, “not as a Central Committee member but as a regular Soviet citizen,” had “the right to know” what he was going to be executed for. With an eloquence wasted on his hanging judges but not on his fellow defendants, who cautiously followed his lead, he described the indictment against them as issuing from “the realm of poetic calumny, if not of political inspiration,” and concluded the proceedings by stating: I have said it all and want no special consideration. I demand either full rehabilitation or death. I have devoted my entire life to the Party’s cause and do not want to be a parasite. If the court finds me guilty of anything at all, I request that the Government change my sentence to execution. But if it turns out someday that I was innocent, then I ask that I be posthumously readmitted to the Party and that the fact of my rehabilitation be announced in the newspapers. 154 He received no special consideration. He was executed along with the others. Three years later he was rehabilitated and posthumously readmitted to the Party. It was a different Party from the one he had joined. The great alliance between the Jewish Revolution and Communism was coming to an end as a result of the new crusade against Jewish Communists. What Hitler could not accomplish, Stalin did, and as Stalin did, so did his representatives in other places. In the fall of 1952, a large show trial was staged in Czechoslovakia. Eleven of the accused, including the general secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, Rudolf Slánský, were identified as ethnic Jews and accused of being agents of international Zionism and American imperialism. Other Soviet dependencies had to follow suit, whether they wanted