Knowledge and Truth, ended with the final defeat of the Bolsheviks, exposed as purveyors of the “Big Lie.” The Party, unlike the intelligentsia, proved incapable of reproducing itself. The Soviet Union was a regime that served one generation —or rather, thanks to Stalin, one and a half. The original revolutionaries were killed off in the prime of life; their heirs moved up after the Great Terror, reached maturity during World War II, suffered a mild midlife crisis under Khrushchev (who attempted to force the whole country to relive his First-Five- Year-Plan youth), grew senile with Brezhnev, and finally breathed their last along with K. U. Chernenko, who died of emphysema in 1985. Marshal Nedelin did not have to suffer the indignity of infirmity: he was killed during a missile test in 1960, at the age of fifty-eight. Academician Sakharov, who was almost twenty years younger, went on to become the patron saint of the anti-Soviet Westernizers and a member of the last Soviet parliament. He died in 1989, days short of finishing his draft of a new Soviet constitution and less than two years before the fall of the Soviet Union. In 1963, Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Allilueva, had written about Sakharov’s generation (those born in the early 1920s): “They are the best of the best. . . . They are our future Decembrists, they are going to teach us all how to live. They are going to say their word yet—I am sure of that.” 181 She was right, of course: the innocent beneficiaries of Stalin’s “happy childhood,” proud veterans of the Great Patriotic War, melancholy bards of Khrushchev’s “Thaw,” and standard-bearers of Gorbachev’s perestroika, they were the ones who transformed the new Soviet “specialists” (white-collar professionals of proletarian background) into the old Russian intelligentsia (lone guardians of Truth and Knowledge). They were, indeed, the Decembrists of the growing anti-Party sentiment, and they “woke up” the various bolsheviks and mensheviks of the “New Russia” that followed. And a great many of them were Jews. The Jews were prominent among Soviet inventors, scientists, engineers, and craftsmen—especially at the top, among the hereditary members of the cultural elite most likely to be frustrated by the Party monopoly on decision making and the Party officials’ social and cultural provincialism. But they had their own reasons to be frustrated too. Intelligentsia members (“foreigners at home”) are strangers by definition. The Jewish intelligentsia members of the late Soviet period were doubly strangers because the newly ethnicized state was suspicious of them on account of their “blood,” and they were suspicious of the newly ethnicized state for the same reason. The distrust was mutual, but the relationship was asymmetrical. In pursuit of