relentless official discrimination against their children, created unprecedented opportunities (by any standard anywhere) for Jewish immigrants to Soviet cities. Of the two traditional Jewish pursuits—wealth and learning—one led into the NEP trap. The other, also facilitated by the absence of well-prepared competitors, was the ticket to success in Soviet society. Most Jewish migrants, and almost all the young ones, chose the latter. 23 By 1939, 26.5 percent of all Jews had had a high school education (as compared to 7.8 percent of the population for the Soviet Union as a whole and 8.1 percent of Russians in the Russian Federation). In Leningrad, the proportion of high school graduates among Jews was 40.2 percent (as compared to 28.6 percent for the city as a whole). The number of Jewish students in the two upper grades of Soviet high schools was more than 3.5 times their share in the general population. Education was one of the top priorities of a Marxist regime that came to power in a country it considered “backward” and in a manner it described as inverted. The mission of the Soviet state (“superstructure”) was to create the economic preconditions (“base”) that were supposed to have brought it into existence. Forced industrialization was deemed the only way to correct history’s mistake; mass education of the “conscious elements” was viewed as the key to successful industrialization; the Jews were seen as the most educated among the conscious and the most conscious among the educated. For the first twenty years of the regime’s existence, the connection seemed to hold. 24 Between 1928 and 1939, the number of university students in the Soviet Union increased more than fivefold (from 167,000 to 888,000). The Jews could not quite keep up—not only because there was a limit on how many students a small ethnic group (1.8 percent of the population) could provide, but also because many of them were not eligible for the preparatory “workers’ departments” that the regime was using as an important tool of upward mobility, and because various “affirmative action” programs in the non-Russian republics included preferential admissions for “indigenous” nationalities, as a result of which, for example, the Jewish share of all university students in Ukraine fell from 47.4 percent in 1923/24 to 23.3 percent in 1929/30. Still, Jewish performance was second to none. In the ten years between 1929 and 1939, the number of Jewish university students quadrupled from 22,518 to 98,216 (11.1 percent of the total). In 1939, Jews made up 17.1 percent of all university students in Moscow, 19 percent in Leningrad, 24.6 percent in Kharkov, and 35.6 percent in Kiev. The share of college graduates among Jews (6 percent) was ten times the rate for the general population (0.6 percent) and three times the rate for the urban population (2 percent). Jews constituted 15.5 percent of all Soviet