percent in grades eight through ten. Among university students, their proportion (in 1939) was 17.1 percent, and among university graduates 23.9 percent. Three percent of all Soviet nurses and 19.6 percent of all physicians in 1939 were Jews. In Leningrad, Jews constituted 14.4 percent of all store clerks and 30.9 percent of all store managers. In the Soviet Army in 1926, the proportion of Jews in military academies (8.8 percent) was almost twice their share of Soviet commanders (4.6 percent) and four times their share of all servicemen (2.1 percent). In the Russian Republic in 1939, Jews made up 1.8 percent of all schoolteachers and 14.1 percent of all researchers and university professors (the corresponding figures for Belorussia and Ukraine were 12.3 and 32.7 percent; and 8 and 28.6 percent). 29 It was at the very top of the Moscow and Leningrad cultural elite that the Jewish presence was particularly strong and—by definition—visible. Jews stood out among avant-garde artists (Natan Altman, Marc Chagall, Naum Gabo, Moisei Ginzburg, El Lissitzky, Anton Pevsner, David Shterenberg); formalist theorists (Osip Brik, Boris Eikhenbaum, Roman Jakobson, Boris Kushner, Viktor Shklovsky, Yuri Tynianov); “proletarian” polemicists (Leopold Averbakh, Yakov Elsberg, Aleksandr Isbakh, Vladimir Kirshon, Grigory Lelevich, Yuri Libedinsky); innovative moviemakers (Fridrikh Ermler, Iosif Kheifits, Grigorii Kozintsev, Grigorii Roshal, Leonid Trauberg, Dziga Vertov, Aleksandr Zarkhi); and Komsomol poets (Eduard Bagritsky, Aleksandr Bezymensky, Mikhail Golodnyi, Mikhail Svetlov, Iosif Utkin). Jews were prominent among the most exuberant crusaders against “bourgeois” habits during the Great Transformation; the most disciplined advocates of socialist realism during the “Great Retreat” (from revolutionary internationalism); and the most passionate prophets of faith, hope, and combat during the Great Patriotic War against the Nazis (some of them were the same people). When the Society of Militant Materialist Dialecticians was founded in 1929, 53.8 percent of the founding members (7 out of 13) were Jews; and when the Communist Academy held its plenary session in June 1930, Jews constituted one-half (23) of all the elected full and corresponding members. At the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934, Jews made up 19.4 percent of all delegates (behind the Russians with 34.5 percent and ahead of the Georgians with 4.8 percent and the Ukrainians with 4.3 percent), and 32.6 percent of the Moscow delegation. Between 1935 and 1940, 34.8 percent of all new members of the Moscow branch of the Writers’ Union were Jews (85 out of 244). Most of the popular Soviet mass songs were written and performed by immigrants from the former Pale of Settlement, and when the time came to identify the victorious