sense to conceptually consistent Soviet Marxists, and almost no sense whatsoever at the time of the most intense industrializing drive ever attempted by any state and the most resolute assault on the Apollonian countryside ever undertaken by any urban civilization. 65 Thus the brunt of the struggle against the “wave of anti-Semitism” had to be borne by those responsible for agitation and propaganda. In August 1926, the Central Committee’s Agitprop conducted a special meeting on the subject, and in December 1927 Stalin launched a massive public campaign against anti- Semitism by declaring to the delegates of the Fifteenth Party Congress, “This evil has to be combated with utmost ruthlessness, comrades.” For the next four years, the Party sponsored countless formal appeals, celebrity speeches, mass rallies, newspaper exposés, and show trials aimed at eradicating the evil. In 1927–32, Soviet publishing houses produced fifty-six books against anti- Semitism, and at the height of the campaign in 1928–early 1930s, articles on the subject appeared in the Moscow and Leningrad newspapers almost daily. The campaign fizzled out in 1932, but as late as 1935 the newly dismissed commandant of the Moscow Kremlin R. A. Peterson had to apologize to the Party Control Commission for saying that one way to combat anti-Semitism was not to hire Jews. On May 22, 1935, the secretary of the Writer’s Union A. S. Shcherbakov wrote to the Central Committee secretaries Stalin, Andreev, and Ezhov, recommending that the poet Pavel Vasiliev be punished for an anti- Semitic brawl. On May 24 Pravda published an article condemning Vasiliev for anti-Semitic “hooliganism,” and within days he was arrested and sentenced to three years in a labor camp. And on May 17–23, 1936, the federal public prosecutor A. Ia. Vyshinsky was assigned to a widely publicized murder case (the first one of his career and presumably a dress rehearsal for the first “Moscow Trial,” which was to take place within a few months). Konstantin Semenchuk, the head of the polar station on Wrangel Island, and Stepan Startsev, his dog-sled driver, were accused of murdering the expedition’s doctor, Nikolai Lvovich Vulfson, and planning to kill his wife, Gita Borisovna Feldman. Anti- Semitism was one alleged motive; Vulfson’s and Feldman’s selfless defense of state property and Soviet nationality policy was another. No evidence was presented; none was needed (according to Vyshinsky, who proclaimed cui prodest , “who benefits,” to be his main legal principle); and none existed (according to Arkady Vaksberg, who claims to have seen the file). Both defendants were shot. 66 The campaign against anti-Semitism was part of the Great Transformation policy of vigorous “indigenization” and “internationalism.” Between 1928 and