world of terrorist conspiracies, reading circles, Party conferences, and Siberian exile. A few of them would remain active “builders of socialism” into the 1930s, but all would be forever “old” by virtue of being the living progenitors and dutiful memoirists of the socialist revolution. Some—like Natan Altman, El Lissitzky, and David Shterenberg—joined the revolution through the back door of the avant-garde and went on to paint its facade during the early years of poster messianism, and then again during Stalin’s Great Transformation. Some, like “Hope” Ulanovskaia, Eduard Bagritsky, or Babel’s Elijah Bratslavsky, renounced their parents to become children of the civil war. Their revolution stood for the cavalry attacks, bandits’ bullets, and campfire brotherhood of the last and decisive battle against the old “world of violence” (to quote the “Internationale”). The most faithful chronicler of that generation and the author of two of its greatest anthems—“Granada” (about a Ukrainian boy who died for the happiness of poor peasants in faraway Spain) and “Kakhovka” (about “our girl in a trench coat” who walked through a burning town to “the machine gun’s even roll”)—was Mikhail Svetlov (Sheinkman). As a little Jewish boy in Ekaterinoslav, he used to be frightened of his rabbi’s morbid tales—but not anymore. Now I wear a leather jacket, Now I’m tall—and the rabbi is small. He is ready—“if necessary”—to burn down the old temple, and he looks forward to a fiery apocalypse “when the old rabbi dies under the collapsed wall of his synagogue.” The death of the rabbi signals the birth of the Bolshevik. The red flag overhead, The flashing bayonet, The armored car. This was the dawn of the holy day The Bolshevik was born. . . . . . . . . . I stand before my Republic, I have come from the distant South. I have placed all my weakness—truly— Under arrest.