revolutionary duty. We are procuring grain for our socialist Fatherland. For the Five-Year Plan.” For Kopelev, and for most Jewish and non-Jewish members of the new Soviet intelligentsia, it was a time of revolutionary enthusiasm, self- sacrificial work, genuine comraderie, and messianic expectation. It was the eagerly anticipated reenactment of the civil war that provided those who had missed the revolution with their own “rebellious youth”—a youth that was meant to last forever (and, in many cases, did). 36 Finally, there were the members of the Moscow and Leningrad elite born in the 1920s, when the erstwhile revolutionaries got around to starting their own families. Children of the new regime—Hodl’s children—they were the first postrevolutionary generation, the first fully Soviet generation, the first generation that did not rebel against their parents (because their parents had done it once and for all). Most of them grew up in downtown Moscow and Leningrad and went to the best Soviet schools (usually housed in former gymnasia or aristocratic mansions). The proportion of Jews among them was particularly high, probably higher than among previous cohorts. As Tsafrira Meromskaia wrote, using the sarcasm and categories of another age, Our school was in the center of the city [Moscow], where the privileged classes of the classless society lived, so the children were of a certain kind too. As for the national composition of the student body, the “Jewish lobby” was absolutely dominant. All those Nina Millers, Liusia Pevzners, Busia Frumsons, Rita Pinsons, as well as Boria Fuks and company, overshadowed in every way the occasional Ivan Mukhin or Natasha Dugina. This elite studied with brilliance and ease, setting the tone for all activities without exception. 37 They went to theaters, read the nineteenth-century classics, and spent summers at dachas or on the Black Sea in ways that recalled those nineteenth- century classics. Many of them had peasant nannies who, in later memoirs, would become faithful reflections of the old revolutionaries’ peasant nannies (and ultimately of Pushkin’s Arina, the immortal prototype of all peasant nannies). Inna Gaister, whose father was an immigrant from the Pale and a prominent theorist of collectivization, was raised by Natasha Sidorina from the village of Karaulovo outside of Riazan. Raisa Orlova (who lived on Gorky Street not far from Meromskaia and the Bagritskys, and across the river from Gaister’s “House of Government”) had a nanny who liked an occasional shot of vodka and worshiped her good-natured and simple-hearted peasant God.