percent of all corporate founders and 19.3 percent of corporate managers (by far the greatest rate of overrepresentation among all ethnic groups). Many of Russia’s most important academic institutions (including the Academy of Sciences) and professional associations (from doctors to geographers) were originally staffed by Germans and functioned primarily in German until about the middle of the nineteenth century and in some cases much later. 13 Employed as Mercurians, they were, predictably enough, represented as such. Whereas much of Russian folklore recalled the battles against various steppe nomads (usually known as “Tatars”), the most important strangers of nineteenth- century high culture were, by a large margin, German: not those residing in Germany and producing books, goods, and songs to be imitated and surpassed, but the internal foreigners who served Russia and the Russians as teachers, tailors, doctors, scholars, governors, and coffin makers. And so they were, mutatis mutandis, head to the Russian heart, mind to the Russian soul, consciousness to Russian spontaneity. They stood for calculation, efficiency, and discipline; cleanliness, fastidiousness, and sobriety; pushiness, tactlessness, and energy; sentimentality, love of family, and unmanliness (or absurdly exaggerated manliness). They were the plenipotentiary ambassadors from the Modern Age, the homines rationalistici artificiales to be dreaded, admired, or ridiculed as the occasion demanded. In two of the most productive juxtapositions of Russian high culture, Tolstoy’s somnolent Kutuzov restores true peace by ignoring the deadly expertise of his German war counselors, while Goncharov’s bedridden Oblomov preserves a false peace by surrendering his life’s love (and ultimately life itself) to the cheerfully industrious Stolz. Kutuzov and Oblomov are one and the same person, of course—as are Stolz and the German generals. Neither set is complete, indeed conceivable, without its mirror image. The modern Russian state and the Russian national mythology of the nineteenth century were built around this opposition and forever discussed in its terms. Perhaps paradoxically in light of what would happen in the twentieth century, Germans were, occupationally and conceptually, the Jews of ethnic Russia (as well as much of Eastern Europe). Or rather, the Russian Germans were to Russia what the German Jews were to Germany—only much more so. So fundamental were the German Mercurians to Russia’s view of itself that both their existence and their complete and abrupt disappearance have been routinely taken for granted. The absence of Mercurians seems as natural and permanent as their presence seems artificial and temporary. 14