Westernizers was the Russian avant-garde of the early twentieth century. Most of the original avant-garde artists had been strongly antiliberal (and in some cases aggressively Bolshevik), but their late Soviet followers interpreted their work as the ultimate expression of individual creative freedom (and thus the natural antipode, as well as victim, of socialist realism). The latter-day iconoclasts were even more heavily Jewish than their models: according to Igor Golomstock’s survey of Soviet “unofficial” artists, “a figure of 50 percent would be too low rather than too high.” From the “Decembrist” generation of the Thaw artists, led by the monumental Ernst Neizvestny, to Oscar Rabin’s “Lianozovo” chroniclers of Soviet dreariness, to the chief iconographers of late Soviet irony (Erik Bulatov, Ilya Kabakov, Vitaly Komar, and Aleksandr Melamid), most of the pathfinders and pioneers were ethnic Jews. 190 Russia being Russia, however, the truest prophets had to be poets. With the Pushkin religion taken for granted and shared with the regime, the particular patron saints of the anti-Soviet intelligentsia were two women (Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva) and two ethnic Jews (Boris Pasternak and Osip Mandelstam). All four were worshiped as the lone guardians of Truth and Knowledge, martyred—out of impotent jealousy—by the demonic Party-state. Their only legitimate successor, anointed by Akhmatova before her death and canonized in his lifetime as the divine voice of the resurrected intelligentsia, was Joseph Brodsky, the son of a Soviet naval officer and the grandson of a Petersburg book publisher and a Pale of Settlement sewing-machine salesman. The death of communism proved the undoing of Hodl’s life. Some members of her generation who had survived into the 1960s and 1970s were still living their dream (in “Old Bolsheviks’ Homes”) or waiting for it to come true (in the land of “actually existing socialism”), but most seemed to agree that the dream had been a chimera. The author of one of the most influential samizdat exposés of Stalinism was Evgeny Gnedin, the onetime head of the Press Department of the People’s Commissariat for External Affairs and the son of Parvus, who had formulated the theory of “permanent revolution” and persuaded the German government to let Lenin travel to Russia in April 1917. An even better-known camp memoir belonged to Evgenia Ginzburg, who, in the mid-1930s, had been the chair of the Department of the History of Leninism at the University of Kazan and the head of the Culture Department at the Red Tataria newspaper. The “inquisitor” who had sent her to prison was Abram Beilin, whose eyes, according to Ginzburg, “shone with a subdued, sardonic joy at the expense of his fellow creatures,” and who “exercised his Talmudic subtlety in polishing up the definition of my ‘crimes.’ ” Beilin, too, was later arrested, reduced to driving an