Armstrong, all through the nineteenth century the Russian Germans “carried about half the burden of imperial foreign relations. Equally indicative is the fact that even in 1915 (during the World War I anti-Germanism), 16 of the 53 top officials in the Minindel [Ministry of Foreign Affairs] had German names.” As one of them wrote in 1870, “we watched the success of Russia’s European policy attentively, for nearly all our emissaries in all the principal countries were diplomats whom we knew on a first-name basis.” In 1869 in St. Petersburg, 20 percent of all the officials in the Police Department of the Ministry of the Interior were listed as Germans. In the 1880s, the Russian Germans (1.4 percent of the population) made up 62 percent of the high officials in the Ministry of Posts and Commerce and 46 percent in the War Ministry. And when they were not elite members themselves, they served the native landowning elite as tutors, housekeepers, and accountants. The German estate manager was the central Russian version of the Pale of Settlement’s Jewish leaseholder. 12 Not all praetorian guards—or “imperial Mamelukes,” as one Slavophile called the Russian Germans—are Mercurians (as opposed to foreign mercenaries), and of course not all Mercurians serve as Mamelukes (even though most are qualified because the main eligibility requirement is demonstrable strangeness and internal coherence). The German barons in the Baltic provinces were not Mercurians, and neither were the German merchants in the German city of Riga or the many German farmers imported into the Russian interior. There is no doubt, however, that “the Germans” most urban Russians knew were quintessential Mercurian middlemen and service providers: artisans, entrepreneurs, and professionals. In 1869, 21 percent of all St. Petersburg Germans were involved in metalwork; 14 percent were watchmakers, jewelers, and other skilled craftsmen; and another 10–11 percent were bakers, tailors, and shoemakers. In the same year, Germans (who made up about 6.8 percent of the city’s population) accounted for 37 percent of St. Petersburg’s watchmakers, 25 percent of bakers, 24 percent of the owners of textile mills, 23 percent of the owners of metal shops and factories, 37.8 percent of industrial managers, 30.8 percent of engineers, 34.3 percent of doctors, 24.5 percent of schoolteachers, and 29 percent of tutors. German women made up 20.3 percent of “midlevel” medical personnel (doctor’s assistants, pharmacists, nurses), 26.5 percent of schoolteachers, 23.8 percent of matrons and governesses, and 38.7 percent of music teachers. In 1905, German subjects of the Russian tsar accounted for 15.4 percent of corporate managers in Moscow, 16.1 percent in Warsaw, 21.9 percent in Odessa, 47.1 percent in Lodz, and 61.9 percent in Riga. In 1900, in the empire as a whole, the Russian Germans (1.4 percent of the population) made up 20.1