Jewish tradition of literacy and urban life, “tens of thousands of Jewish laboring youth used to spend long years, night in night out, bent over their books, in an attempt to break out of the narrow circle of restrictions. It rarely worked . . . , but the higher cultural level acquired in this manner went on to benefit the revolutionary struggle.” 68 There was nothing inherently wrong with Jewish excellence, according to Party ideologues (Jewish or not), but it did offend against the principle of full national equality and led to the growth of anti-Semitism. Larin’s remedies were the same as Yaroslavsky’s and everyone else’s: Jewish normalization (especially through agricultural settlement), non-Jewish modernization (especially through education), and a concerted campaign of consciousness-raising among non-Jews on the subject of Jewish excellence (to the effect that it did not exist or existed for good but temporary reasons). The most remarkable thing about these remedies was that two of them worked as intended. The Jewish normalization project was a failure, but the combination of the public assault on anti-Semitism and the dramatic expansion of educational and employment opportunities for hundreds of thousands of Apollonians during the First Five-Year Plan seem to have borne fruit. It is possible, of course, that the problem was not widespread in the first place: in Izmozik’s study of intercepted mail, only 0.9 percent of all letters opened by the Leningrad secret police between March 1925 and January 1926 (67 out of 7,335) contained negative comments about Jews. It is also quite probable that, especially in the former Pale, both traditional anti-Semitism and the new resentment over Jewish prominence in the Soviet state simmered just below the surface, occasionally glimpsed despite official prohibitions and camouflage. What does seem striking, in any case, is that virtually all memoirists writing about Moscow and Leningrad intelligentsia life in the 1930s seem to agree that there was no anti-Jewish hostility and generally very few manifestations of ethnic ranking or labeling. Allowing for a degree of nostalgic wishful thinking and for the fact that most of these memoirists are elite members writing about elite institutions, it seems fair to conclude that the new-minted, self-confident, optimistic, and passionately patriotic Soviet intelligentsia of the 1930s included a very substantial proportion of ethnic Jews and a remarkably small number of their detractors. The prominent philosopher Vitaly Rubin went to a top Moscow school. More than half of his classmates were Jewish. Understandably, the Jewish question did not arise there. Not only did it not arise in the form of anti-Semitism; it did not arise at all. All the Jews knew