heart of the Soviet state) until the breakup of the USSR, but the special relationship between the Jews and the Soviet state had come to an end—or rather, the unique symbiosis in pursuit of world revolution had given way to a unique antagonism over two competing and incommensurate nationalisms. The Russian and Jewish Revolutions died the way they were born—together. The postwar Soviet state began to apply its traditional affirmative action policies favoring “titular” nationalities to the Russians in the Russian Republic (mostly by engaging in covert and cautious negative action with regard to the Jews). At the same time, and partly for that very reason (as well as for the many reasons provided by Hitler, Stalin, and the founding of Israel), the Jewish members of the Soviet elite began assuming that “Jewish origins” stood for a common fate, not simply a remote past. Everyone was listening to the “call of blood”—and hearing different languages. This development coincided with a general parting of the ways between the Party-state and the professional elite it had created. Ever since the revolution, upward mobility through education had been one of the most consistent and apparently successful policies of the Soviet regime. For a party representing consciousness amid spontaneity and urban modernity amid rural backwardness, the “enlightenment of the masses” coupled with breakneck technological modernization had been the only way to correct History’s mistake (of staging the socialist revolution in a precapitalist country) and bring about both socialism-as- abundance and socialism-as-equality. Between 1928 and 1960, the number of Soviet college students had grown by 1,257 percent (from 176,600 to 2,396,100); the number of college-educated professionals by 1,422 percent (from 233,000 to 3,545,200); and the number of scientific personnel by 1,065 percent (from 30,400 in 1930 to 354,200). Most of the members of the new “Soviet intelligentsia” were beneficiaries of class-based affirmative action and—outside ethnic Russia—its various ethnic substitutes. Their healthy roots were supposed to ensure the unity of scientific knowledge and Party Truth—and, for a while, they did. 178 After Stalin’s death, however, things began to fall apart. The demise and posthumous damnation of the only infallible symbol of both Truth and Knowledge suggested the possibility of their separate existence; the Cold War on Earth and in outer space seemed to push scientific knowledge ever further from Party Truth; and the gradual reinterpretation of socialism as a generous welfare state and bountiful consumer society tended to invite unwelcome comparisons with a revamped postindustrial capitalism (which seemed better on both scores). The viability of Soviet modernity depended on the success of Soviet