citizens, including the Jews, were classified by blood and expected to listen earnestly to its call. From its inception, the Soviet state had been promoting ethnicity as a remedy against the memory of oppression. In the absence of new oppression, ethnicity was—eventually—going to die from an overdose of oxygen (the way the state itself was going to wither away as a consequence of being strengthened). In the meantime, the state needed to know the nationality of its citizens because it needed to delimit ethnic territories, teach native languages, publish national newspapers, and promote set percentages of indigenous cadres to a variety of positions and institutions. The state kept asking its citizens about their nationality, and they kept answering, over and over again—first according to their self-perception or self-interest and then according to their blood (whether they liked it or not). With the introduction of the internal passport system in 1932, nationality became a permanent label and one of the most important official predictors of admissions and promotions in the Soviet Union. When, at the age of twenty, Lev Kopelev received his first passport, he did what many of Hodl’s children would do: he chose to be a Jew. Russian and Ukrainian by culture and conviction, he “had never heard the call of blood” but he did understand “the language of memory,” as he put it, and he believed that to renounce his parents, who had always thought of themselves as Jews, would be “a desecration of their graves.” What made his choice easier was the fact that it did not make any difference. One could benefit from being an Uzbek in Uzbekistan or a Belorussian in Belorussia; “Jewish” and “Russian” were—back in 1932—virtually interchangeable (both inside and outside of the Russian Republic). 109 But the Kopelev option proved short-lived. As the Soviet Union became more thoroughly ethnicized, ethnic units became more rooted (in history, literature, and native soil), and personal ethnicity became exclusively a matter of blood. When it came to killing enemies, in particular, biological nationality proved far superior to fluid political and class affiliations. On April 2, 1938, as most diaspora ethnic groups were being purged, a special secret police instruction introduced a new, strictly genetic, procedure for determining nationality. If one’s parents are Germans, Poles, etc., irrespective of where they were born, how long they have lived in the USSR, or whether they have changed their citizenship, etc., the person being registered cannot be classified as Russian, Belorussian, etc. If the nationality claimed by the person being registered does not correspond to his native language or last