and both consistently referred to Jews in the third person. 60 But of course the most sensitive “nationality” of all was Lenin’s. In 1924 Lenin’s sister Anna discovered that their maternal grandfather, Aleksandr Dmitrievich Blank, had been born Srul (Israel), the son of Moshko Itskovich Blank, in the shtetl of Starokonstantinov in Volynia. When Kamenev found out, he said, “I’ve always thought so,” to which Bukharin allegedly replied: “Who cares what you think? The question is, what are we going to do?” What “they,” or rather, the Party through the Lenin Institute, did was proclaim this fact “inappropriate for publication” and decree that it be “kept secret.” In 1932 and again in 1934, Anna Ilinichna begged Stalin to reconsider, claiming that her discovery was, on the one hand, an important scientific confirmation of the “exceptional ability of the Semitic tribe” and “the extraordinarily beneficial influence of its blood on the offspring of mixed marriages”; and, on the other, a potent weapon against anti-Semitism “owing to the prestige and love that Ilich enjoys among the masses.” Lenin’s own Jewishness, she argued, was the best proof of the accuracy of his view that the Jewish nation possessed a peculiar “ ‘tenacity’ in struggle” and a highly revolutionary disposition. “Generally speaking,” she concluded, “I do not understand what reasons we, as Communists, may have for concealing this fact. Logically, this does not follow from the recognition of the full equality of all nationalities.” Stalin’s response was an order to “keep absolutely quiet.” Anna Ilinichna did. The enemies of the regime were deprived of additional anti-Semitic ammunition. 61 Another way of dealing with the overrepresentation of Jews at the top of Soviet society was to move some of them to the bottom—or rather, to turn the Jews into a “normal” nationality by providing the Mercurian head with an Apollonian body. In the 1920s and early 1930s, Soviet nationality policy consisted in the vigorous promotion of ethnic diversity, ethnic autonomy, and ethnoterritorial institutional consolidation. According to the Party orthodoxy (as formulated by Lenin and Stalin before the revolution), the injustices of the tsarist “prisonhouse of nations” could be overcome only through sensitivity, tact, and various forms of “affirmative action” (to use an apt anachronism). The formerly oppressed peoples felt strongly about their cultural peculiarities because of their history of oppression. The end of that oppression and a pointed promotion of national peculiarities would inevitably lead to the disappearance of national mistrust and—as a consequence—of undue preoccupation with national peculiarities. As Stalin put it back in 1913, “a minority is discontented . . . because it does not have the right to use its native language. Allow it to use its native language and the discontent will pass by itself.” The