exceptional. They were Number One according to every measure of Soviet modernity except for the most reassuring one: a proto-nation-state complete with its own culture-producing institutions. But there is an even more important difference between the late twentieth- century American and late Soviet strategies for dealing with ethnically defined inequality. Affirmative action always implies negative (relative to strict meritocracy) action toward those not targeted for preferential promotion. In the Soviet Union, unlike the United States, the negative action was focused and deliberate, albeit publicly unacknowledged. Some elite institutions were closed to ethnic Jews; others employed numerus clausus ; yet others limited professional advancement, publication opportunities, or access to benefits. Wherever one found oneself on Soviet territory or in the Soviet status hierarchy, Jewish nationality was a stamp of (undeserved) social advantage, political unreliability, and tribal difference. The “passport Jew” was a universal target of official discrimination without a Soviet home to go back to, a formal punishment to appeal against, or a communal ethnolinguistic culture to hide behind. There were no clear discriminatory procedures—just makeshift arrangements formulated in secret and applied selectively and unevenly across economic branches, academic disciplines, and administrative units. Some second-tier institutions left open to the Jews gained professional prominence for that very reason; some projects were too important to be deprived of skilled participants; some managers were well-connected enough to be able to protect their employees; and some ethnic Jews changed their names or edited their biographies. The anti-Jewish discrimination was relatively small-scale (the difference, for the most part, was between best and second-best) and not very successful (the enormous achievement gap between the Jews and everyone else was narrowing very slowly), but its secrecy, inconsistency, and concentration on elite positions made it all the more frustrating. This “negative action” was as obvious to everyone concerned as it was contrary to post-Khrushchev public rhetoric, which extolled professional meritocracy tempered ever so slightly by tactful assistance to those who lagged behind. Even more remarkably, it was accompanied by a deafening public silence about all things Jewish. Histories of Lithuanian or Belorussian cities were not supposed to name those cities’ principal inhabitants; World War II museums never referred to the Jewish genocide; and when Kornei Chukovsky asked to be allowed to publish a children’s Bible, he was granted permission on condition that the Jews were never mentioned (he refused the commission). The world chess champion Tigran Petrosian was an Armenian; the world chess champion Mikhail Tal was “from