the German acceptance of “moral and material” responsibility for the Holocaust and reviving Vasily Shulgin’s arguments about Jewish “collective guilt” in the wake of the revolution, he calls on the Jews to “repent” for their role in the “Cheka executions, the drowning of the barges with the condemned in the White and Caspian Seas, collectivization, Ukrainian famine—in all the vile acts of the Soviet regime.” Like most attempts to apply the Christian concept of individual sin to nationalist demands for inherited tribal responsibility, Solzhenitsyn’s appeal envisions no ultimate absolution, no procedure for moral adjudication among competing claims, and no call on his own kinsmen to accept open-ended responsibility for the acts that any number of non-Russian peoples—or their self- appointed representatives—may consider both vile and ethnically Russian. 216 Both of these approaches—Hodl’s victimhood under Stalinism and Hodl’s moral responsibility for it—are quite marginal, however. Most accounts of twentieth- century Russian history are like most accounts of twentieth-century Jewish history in that they have nothing to say about Hodl. As Mikhail Agursky told his mother, she should have lived her life differently. Agursky’s mother seemed to agree—and so did Hope Ulanovskaia, my grandmother, and most of their relatives and fellow countrymen. Oblivion in many languages seems to be their punishment. The Jews who remain in the Russian Federation (230,000, or 0.16 percent of the population, according to the 2002 census, or about half as many as in 1994) face the choice of all Mercurian minorities in Apollonian nation-states. One option is assimilation, made possible not only by the adherence of most ethnic Jews to the Pushkin faith but also by the conversion of a growing number of ethnic Russians to universal Mercurianism. More and more Russian Jews (the absolute majority) marry non-Jews, strongly identify with Russia as a country, and show no interest in perpetuating their Jewishness in any sense whatever. According to a 1995 poll, 16 percent of Russia’s ethnic Jews considered themselves religious: of those, 24 percent professed Judaism, 31 percent Orthodox Christianity, and the remaining 45 percent nothing in particular (beyond generic monotheism). At the same time, surveys of public opinion in the Russian Federation as a whole suggest that the majority of non-Jewish Russians have a favorable opinion of Jews and Israel, are neutral or positive about their close relatives’ marrying Jews, would welcome Jews as neighbors or colleagues, and oppose discrimination in employment and college admissions. The younger the respondents, the more positive toward Jews or ethnicity-blind they tend to be. (By comparison, both traditional and recently acquired Russian hostility toward Gypsies, Muslims, and peoples of the Caucasus remains quite