Larin went much further. He did say that the Jews were far from being “preeminent, overabundant, dominant, and so on” among Soviet leaders, even though they had “spilled more blood [“than the workers of other nationalities”] in the struggle for freedom, for the liberation of our country from landowners and capitalists, from tsarism.” Larin’s main point, however, was to explain why the Jews were, indeed, overrepresented (about 19 percent of the total in 1929) “in the apparatus of public organizations,” including “both elected and appointed members of trade union boards, provincial administrations, Party committees, and similar organs.” The reason, he suggested, was that “the Jewish worker, because of the peculiarity of his past life and because of the additional oppression and persecution he had to endure for many years under tsarism, has developed a large number of special traits that equip him for active roles in revolutionary and public work. The exceptional development of the special psychological makeup necessary for leadership roles has made Jewish revolutionary workers more capable of gaining prominence in public life than the average Russian worker, who lived under very different conditions.” There were three main reasons for this, according to Larin. First, the economic “struggle for survival’ in overcrowded shtetls had created unusually active, resilient, and determined individuals. “In other words, the conditions of everyday life produced in urban Jews a peculiar, exceptional energy. When such individuals became factory workers, underground revolutionaries, or, upon arrival in Moscow after the revolution, employees in our institutions, they moved up very quickly because of this energy—especially because the bulk of our Russian workers were of peasant origin and thus hardly capable of systematic activity.” The second reason for the Jewish preeminence was a strong sense of solidarity among them. Because of discrimination against Jewish workers under the old regime, “there developed, among this segment of the Jewish people, an unusually strong sense of solidarity and a predisposition toward mutual help and support. This exceptionally strong solidarity was very useful in both revolutionary struggle and Party work, and is generally one of the fundamental class virtues of the proletariat. . . . Consequently, within the revolutionary movement, Jewish workers were bound to move up into the revolutionary apparatus at a much higher rate than was their share of the proletariat as a whole.” The third advantage that the Jews had over the Russians, according to Larin, was their generally higher level of culture ( kul’-turnost’ ). Because education had always been the main path to Jewish emancipation and because of the long