be arrested were ethnic Russians, but as the “doctors’ plot” thickened, the campaign against “murderers in white robes” became fused with the assault on “Jewish nationalism.” The most alien of nationalities had merged with the most lethal of professions. 145 Stalin’s attack on the Jews was similar to numerous other attempts to rid the Soviet Union of variously defined groups associated with the pre-Soviet past or the anti-Soviet present. While filling out his personnel form, Viktor Shtrum, in Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate , comes to Line No. 5, “nationality,” and writes “Jew.” He had no way of knowing what filling in Line No. 5 would soon mean for hundreds of thousands of people who called themselves Kalmyks, Balkars, Chechens, Crimean Tatars, Jews. . . . He did not know that . . . in a few years many people would be filling in Line No. 5 with the same feeling of doom with which, in past decades, the children of Cossack officers, noblemen, factory owners, and priests had filled in Line No. 6 [“social origin”]. 146 There were some differences too. Possibly as a consequence of Stalin’s death in March 1953, the attack on the Jews was on a much less massive scale and was much less lethal than the treatment of the other ethnic groups on Grossman’s list (and many others not on the list), the “national operations” of 1937–38, or the persecution of various “socially alien” categories during the Red Terror and then again in the 1930s. It was also much less consistent than the discrimination against “the children of Cossack officers, noblemen, factory owners, and priests” had been in the 1920s and early 1930s. But this was a matter of degree; what was particularly unusual about the anti-Jewish campaign of the late 1940s–early 1950s was that it combined a focus on the professional elite with a consistently ethnic and pointedly public selection criterion. 147 The targets of the violent cleansing campaigns against “the bourgeoisie” and the “kulaks” had not thought of themselves as belonging to “bourgeois” or “kulak” communities. The victims of the antielite terror of 1937–38 had had no idea why they were being condemned. The majority of those arrested as part of Ezhov’s “national operations” had not known about the existence of such operations and had had no way of separating their “cases” from those of other victims. Even the wholesale ethnic deportations, which had left no doubt about