who was being targeted, had been conducted in secret and had gone almost totally unnoticed by the elite (because they had involved the shipment of mostly rural people from one borderland to another). The anti-Jewish campaign was both public and relatively clear about its objectives. It was directed at some of the most vital and articulate elements of the Soviet state—and it contradicted some of that state’s most fundamental official values. As Lina Kaminskaia, a college student, active Komsomol member, and daughter of a former employee of the Commissariat of Aviation Industry, said in 1952, “Our country’s policy on the national question is incorrect. After the war, the country was hit by a wave of anti-Semitism, which is an expression of fascist ideology. . . . My point of view is the result of what I have been hearing and seeing. . . . Everything I say is based on a firm conviction. My opinion is shared by all my close friends from among the intelligentsia: doctors, engineers, lawyers, students.” 148 Kaminskaia was expelled from both the university and the Komsomol, but it does appear that her views were widely shared by members of the Soviet intelligentsia well beyond her circle of friends. As the prominent film director M. I. Romm wrote to Stalin several years earlier, Examining my feelings, I realized that for the past few months I have been forced to recall my Jewish origins quite frequently, even though I had never thought about them during the previous twenty-five years of Soviet rule because I was born in Irkutsk, raised in Moscow, speak only Russian, and have always felt completely Russian. So, if even people like me are beginning to wonder, the situation in our movie industry must be very alarming indeed, especially if one remembers that we are fighting against fascism, which has anti-Semitism emblazoned on its banner. 149 For the first time since the revolution, the ethnically Jewish members of the Soviet elite were being attacked directly and unequivocally—not because of some “alien elements” in their midst, as in 1937–38, but because they were ethnically Jewish. (My ethnically Russian father, who graduated from Moscow State University in 1949, could enroll in any graduate school he wished because his Jewish peers, a majority of the applicants, were not welcome. His “gentry origins” were no longer a factor; his “indigenous” nationality was.) For the first time, Soviet citizens of all nations were being told that the internal enemies were not people who belonged to certain fluid social groups or elusive secret societies, but people who were certified members of a particular