were Jews (in fact, probably 14). The first two VtsIK chairmen (heads of the Soviet state) were Kamenev and Sverdlov. Sverdlov was also the Party’s chief administrator (head of the Secretariat). The first Bolshevik bosses of Moscow and Petrograd were Kamenev and Zinoviev. Zinoviev was also the chairman of the Communist International. The first Bolshevik commandants of the Winter Palace and the Moscow Kremlin were Grigorii Isakovich Chudnovsky and Emelian Yaroslavsky (Minei Izraelevich Gubelman). Yaroslavsky was also the chairman of the League of the Militant Godless. The heads of the Soviet delegation at the Brest-Litovsk negotiations were Adolf Ioffe and Trotsky. Trotsky was the face of the Red Army. 106 When, in March 1919, the Petrograd Soviet, headed by Zinoviev, launched a competition for the best portrait of “a hero of our age,” the suggested list of heroes included Lenin, Lunacharsky, Karl Liebknecht, and four Bolsheviks raised in Jewish families: Trotsky, Uritsky (the head of Petrograd’s secret police, assassinated in August 1918), V. Volodarsky (Moisei Goldstein, Petrograd’s chief censor as the commissar of print, propaganda, and agitation, assassinated in June 1918), and Zinoviev himself. 107 The Jewish share of the Party’s Central Committee in 1919–21 remained steady at about one-fourth. In 1918, about 54 percent of all Petrograd Party officials described as “leading” were Jews, as were 45 percent of city and provincial Party officials and 36 percent of the Northern District commissars. Three out of five members of the presidium of the Petrograd trade union council in 1919, and 13 out of 36 members of the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet in 1920 were Jews. In 1923 in Moscow, Jews made up 29 percent of the Party’s “leading cadres” and 45 percent of the provincial social security administration. Their share in the city Party organization (13.5 percent) was three times their share in the general population. Almost half of them were under twenty-five years old (43.8 percent of men and 51.1 percent of women); 25.4 percent of all female Bolsheviks in Moscow were of Jewish background. According to the historian of Leningrad Jewry Mikhail Beizer (and not accounting for pseudonyms), It may have seemed to the general population that the Jewish participation in Party and Soviet organs was even more substantial because Jewish names were constantly popping up in newspapers. Jews spoke relatively more often than others at rallies, conferences, and meetings of all kinds. Here, for example, is the agenda of the Tenth City Conference of the Young Communist League (Komsomol), held in Petrograd on January 5th,