report to the Central Committee secretariat, “The sense that the Soviet regime patronizes the Jews, that it is ‘the Jewish government,’ that the Jews cause unemployment, housing shortages, college admissions problems, price rises, and commercial speculation—this sense is instilled in the workers by all the hostile elements. . . . If it does not encounter resistance, the wave of anti-Semitism threatens to become, in the very near future, a serious political question.” 58 The Party did offer some resistance, and the wave of anti-Semitism never became a serious political question (as far as the Party was concerned). One method of dealing with the threat was surveillance and repression. Most of the letters read by the secret police (in 1925, approximately fifteen hundred a month by the Leningrad Political Control Office alone) were accompanied by “memoranda” that included the names of the sender and addressee as well as excerpts relevant to the work of specific OGPU departments. All the letters quoted above (except the Anisimov one, which comes from a different source) were passed on to the Counterrevolution Department (KRO) or the Secret- Operational Department (SOCh) of the OGPU for further action. In March 1925, seven Russian nationalists were shot for advocating the toppling of the “Communist-Jewish” regime and the deportation of all Soviet Jews to Palestine (among other things). 59 In another—inconsistent, uncoordinated, and more or less individual— strategy, prominent officials of Jewish descent took care to avoid undue prominence or to play down their Jewish descent. Trotsky claimed to have refused the post of commissar of internal affairs for fear of providing the enemies of the regime with additional anti-Semitic ammunition, and Molotov recalled that after Lenin’s death, the ethnic Russian Rykov was chosen over the more competent Kamenev as the new head of the Soviet government (Sovnarkom) because “in those days Jews occupied many leading positions even though they made up a small percentage of the country’s population.” Neither Trotsky nor Kamenev considered themselves Jews in any sense other than the narrowly genealogical (“ethnic”) one, but of course it was the narrowly genealogical sense that was dominant (and, after the introduction of the passport system in 1933, more or less compulsory) in Soviet “nationality policy.” When in 1931 Molotov requested information on the ethnic breakdown of the members of the Central Executive Committee of the third convocation, both Trotsky and Kamenev were included on the list of those who did not fill out the delegates’ questionnaire but whose nationality was “common knowledge.” The nationality of Emelian Yaroslavsky (Gubelman) and Yuri Larin (Lurie) was less well known; both were leading Soviet spokesmen on the question of anti-Semitism,