Modern Age stood for the transformation—by means of a more or less spontaneous universal patricide—of a city that was symmetrical, bountiful, and wicked into a city that was symmetrical, bountiful, and radiant. There were going to be no tribes under communism, of course, but there was no getting away from the fact that, in the Russian tradition, the symmetrical city, good or bad, was a German creature, and that the Jews, in the words of one of Gorky’s correspondents, were “a German auxiliary mechanism.” 85 What truly made a Bolshevik was not adherence to a particular dogma but an eager and unequivocal preference for Stolz over Oblomov—except that by the early twentieth century the iconic Stolz might very well be Jewish, not German (or he might be both, one being an auxiliary mechanism of the other). Germans still loomed larger than anybody else, but the Jews had their own special claim on urban virtue. As A. Lunacharsky summed up the story, Jews lived everywhere as strangers, but they introduced their urban commercial skills into the different countries of their diaspora and thus became the ferment of capitalist development in countries with lower, circumscribed, peasant culture. This is the reason why the Jews, according to the best students of human development, contributed to an extraordinary degree to progress, but this is also the reason why they drew upon themselves the terrible fury of, first, the lowly peasants, whom the Jews had exploited as traders, usurers, etc., and, second, of the bourgeoisie, which had emerged from the same peasantry. 86 Lenin was not particularly interested in Jewish history. For him, what capitalism did was “replace the thick-skulled, boorish, inert, and bearishly savage Russian or Ukrainian peasant with a mobile proletarian.” Proletarians had no motherland, of course, and there was no such thing as a “national culture,” but if one had to think of mobile proletarians in ethnic terms (as the Bund “philistines” were forcing one to), then the Jews—unlike the Russians and Ukrainians—were very good candidates because of the “great, universally progressive traits in Jewish culture: its internationalism and its responsiveness to the advanced movements of the age (the percentage of Jews in democratic and proletarian movements is everywhere higher than the percentage of Jews in the total population).” All advanced Jews supported assimilation, according to Lenin, but it is also true that many of the “great leaders of democracy and socialism” came from “the best representatives of the Jewish world.” Lenin himself did, through his maternal grandfather, although he probably did not know it. When his sister, Anna, found out, she wrote to Stalin that she was not