then Lenin’s mother should be ashamed of hers. Nations are families too: It cannot be otherwise. All of us, whether we like it or not, reinforce this link every day of our lives. Some miserable Russian exile in a seedy bistro may be “proud” of Russian vodka before some French lowlife. Did he make that vodka himself?! No, he did not, and neither did his father, his grandfather, his distant relative, or even some acquaintance of his; this vodka was invented by Russians about whom this “proud” individual knows absolutely nothing. So what is he proud of? “What do you mean? Because I am Russian, too, by God!” This says it all, and the French lowlife does not question the Russian’s right to be proud of “la vodka,” because he agrees: every Russian has the right to be proud of anything done by any other Russian. What does this mean? This means that all Russians, whether they like it or not, are connected to each other by a thread that is invisible but strong, because this thread has a universal sanction and recognition . 116 The miserable exile is proud of vodka. Others are proud of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Rachmaninoff. “They are proud, and have every right to be.” But if membership in a nation confers pride, it must, by the same token, impose responsibility. Being proud of Tolstoy, according to Shulgin, means sharing the blame for Rasputin and Bolshevism. Shulgin’s list of Russian crimes did not go beyond those two, which seems to mean that Russians had no one but themselves to apologize to. Not so with the Jews. Since most of the victims of the Red Terror were Russians, and many of the top perpetrators (especially in his native Kiev in 1919) were Jews, all Jews owed all Russians a formal mea culpa. As Shulgin wrote in his newspaper Kievlianin on October 8, 1919, in the middle of a brutal pogrom (and thus not without a touch of blackmail), Will they understand what they need to do now? Will all those Jews who contributed to the catastrophe be publicly cursed in all the Jewish synagogues? Will the bulk of the Jewish population renounce the creators of the “new” world with the same passion with which it assaulted the old? Will the Jews, beating themselves on the chest and covering their heads with ashes, repent publicly for the fateful role that the sons of Israel played in the Bolshevik frenzy? 117