seven of them (Protection of Government Officials, Counterintelligence, Secret- Political, Special [surveillance in the army], Foreign Intelligence, Records, and Prisons) were run by immigrants from the former Pale of Settlement. Foreign service was an almost exclusively Jewish specialty (as was spying for the Soviet Union in Western Europe and especially in the United States). The Gulag, or Main Labor Camp Administration, was headed by ethnic Jews from 1930, when it was formed, until late November 1938, when the Great Terror was mostly over. As Babel (himself a onetime secret police employee, a friend of some prominent executioners, and ultimately a confessed “terrorist” and “spy”) described one of his characters, one nicknamed A-Jew-and-a-Half, “Tartakovsky has the soul of a murderer, but he is one of us, he is our flesh and blood.” 71 There was, of course, no separate Jewish interest that these people had in common—any more than the German officials and professionals in imperial Russia had had a special German interest. On the contrary, all these groups made perfect policemen and plenipotentiaries precisely because of their Mercurian training and their uniquely Mercurian rootlessness. The rise of the nation-state had made internal strangeness impossible (the very traits that had signified loyalty now suggested treason), but the Soviet Union was neither an Apollonian empire nor a nation-state, and Soviet Jews were no ordinary Mercurians. Before the mid-1930s, the USSR was a relentlessly universalist Centaur state that aspired to a perfect combination of Mercurianism and Apollonianism (with a temporary emphasis on the former, given Russia’s excess of the latter). The Jews played a central role in this endeavor both because they were traditional Mercurians and because they were so eager to become Apollonians. Their parents provided them with the skills necessary for success in Soviet society; their rebellion against their parents made them unusually consistent at Soviet internationalism. Jews were relatively numerous in the chambers of power because of their Jewish energy and education, and because of their singular commitment to socialism (Jewish non-Jewishness). Apollonized Mercurians did better than Mercurianized Apollonians. In any case, in early 1937 Hodl the Muscovite would not have been allowed to correspond with her sisters, but she probably would have been living in elite housing in downtown Moscow (not far from Meromskaia, Gaister, Orlova, Markish, and so many others), with access to special stores, a house in the country (dacha), and a live-in peasant nanny or maid (the Markishes had both). At least once a year, she would have traveled to a Black Sea sanatorium or a mineral spa in the Caucasus. If Hodl had written her memoirs in the 1930s, they would have been about