charges and 36.3 percent of all those executed were the targets of “national operations.” Eighty-one percent of all those arrested in connection with the “Greek operation” were executed. In the Finnish and Polish operations, the execution rates were 80 and 79.4 percent. 98 The Jews did not seem to have an alternative home. Unlike the Afghans, Bulgarians, Chinese, Estonians, Finns, Germans, Greeks, Iranians, Koreans, Macedonians, Poles, and Romanians, they were not seen as naturally attractive to foreign spies or congenitally weak as loyal Soviets. In 1939, Soviet publishing houses produced fourteen different titles by Sholem Aleichem on the occasion of his eightieth birthday; the State Museum of Ethnography in Leningrad organized the exhibition Jews in Tsarist Russia and the USSR ; and the director of the State Jewish Theater, Solomon Mikhoels, received the Lenin Order, the title “People’s Artist of the USSR,” and a place on the Moscow City Soviet. Most Soviet Jews were not directly affected by the Great Terror, and of those who were, most suffered as members of the political elite. Because the people promoted to replace them tended to be former peasants and blue-collar workers, the Jewish share in the Party and state apparatus dropped precipitously after 1938. Because the cultural and professional elite was not hit as hard and experienced no significant turnover, the Jewish preeminence among top professionals remained intact. 99 And then two things happened. In the second half of the 1930s, following the establishment of High Stalinism and especially during the Great Patriotic War, the Soviet state—now manned by newly promoted ethnic Russians of peasant and proletarian origins—began to think of itself as the legitimate heir to the Russian imperial state and Russian cultural tradition. At the same time, following the rise of Nazism and especially during the Great Patriotic War, more and more Soviet intelligentsia members—now branded inescapably with biological ethnicity—began to think of themselves as Jews. The Soviet Union was neither a nation-state nor a colonial empire nor a United States of interchangeable citizens. It was a large section of the world that consisted of numerous territorially rooted nationalities endowed with autonomous institutions and held together by the internationalist ideology of world revolution and a cosmopolitan bureaucracy of Party and police officials. It was designed that way and claimed to remain so until its collapse in 1991, but in fact both the ideology and the bureaucracy began to change after about 1932 as a