margins, and spurred on by (sometimes negotiable) legal restrictions, they were —as elsewhere—better at being “Jewish” than most of their new-minted and still somewhat reluctant competitors. In purely economic terms, their most effective strategy was “vertical integration,” whereby Jewish firms “fed” each other within a particular line, sometimes covering the entire spectrum from the manufacturer to the consumer. Jewish craftsmen produced for Jewish industrialists, who sold to Jewish purchasing agents, who worked for Jewish wholesalers, who distributed to Jewish retail outlets, who employed Jewish traveling salesmen (the latter practice was introduced in the sugar industry by “Brodsky himself”). In many cases, including such Jewish specialties as the marketing of sugar, timber, grain, and fish, the integrated cycle did not include production and often ended with export, but the principle was the same. 27 Vertical integration is a very common Mercurian practice, used to great effect by many “middleman minorities” in a variety of locations. In late imperial Russia, where state-run industrialization did battle with a largely unreformed rural economy, experienced Mercurians were in a particularly strong position to benefit from the coming of capitalism. The official view was doubtless correct even though it was official: in a world of universal mobility, urbanity, and marginality, most Russian peasants and their descendants (who embodied the “Orthodoxy” and “nationality” parts of the autocracy’s doctrine as well as the “nation” of intelligentsia nationalism) were at an obvious disadvantage compared to all literate service nomads and especially the Jews, who were by far the most numerous, cohesive, exclusive, and urban of Russia’s Mercurians. By the outbreak of the Great War, the tsar’s Jewish subjects were well on their way to replacing the Germans as Russia’s model moderns (the way they had done in much of East-Central Europe). If not for the relentless official restrictions (and the fierce competitiveness and cultural prominence of the Old Believer dissenters), early twentieth-century Russia would probably have resembled Hungary, where the business elite was almost entirely Jewish. The same was true of the other pillar of the modern state, the professionals. Between 1853 and 1886, the number of all gymnasium students in the Russian Empire grew sixfold. During the same period, the number of Jewish gymnasium students increased by a factor of almost 50 (from 159, or 1.3 percent of the total, to 7,562, or 10.9 percent). By the late 1870s, they made up 19 percent of the total gymnasium population in the Pale of Settlement, and about one-third in the Odessa school district. As the Odessa writer Perets Smolenskin wrote in the early 1870s, “All the schools are filled with Jewish students from end to end, and, to be honest, the Jews are always at the head of the class.” When the first