intelligentsia members; and when someone was being beaten up in a dark alley for wearing glasses or having an upper-class accent, the insults “Jew” and “ intelligent ” were likely to be used interchangeably. In May 1964, the head of the KGB, V. Semichastnyi, reported to the Central Committee of the Party that the trial of the poet Joseph Brodsky had greatly agitated the “creative intelligentsia,” and that the most active agitators came from the “creative intelligentsia of the Jewish nationality” (even though neither the trial nor the protests—nor, indeed, Brodsky’s poetry—had anything to do with the “Jewish question”). In 1969, at a scholarly conference, Mikhail Agursky told two young colleagues, Yuri Gurevich and Yuri Gastev, a “semipolitical joke.” After he left, “the vigilant Gurevich” asked Gastev: “Who was that guy? What does he mean by telling jokes like that? Do you know him?” “Yes, I do,” said Gastev firmly. “Since when?” “Since this morning.” “And you trust him?” “Just look at his nose!”—said Gastev by way of concluding the polemic. 187 Swann had come a long way. In the semipolitical jokes themselves, the Jew “Rabinovich” emerged as the ultimate symbol of the brutally oppressed but irrepressibly ironic Homo sovieticus . Or rather, traditional shtetl humor reemerged as the voice of the Soviet intelligentsia. A political instructor asks Rabinovich: “Who is your father?” “The Soviet Union.” “Good. And who is your mother?” “The Communist Party.” “Excellent. And what is your fondest wish?” “To become an orphan.” This joke was about all Soviets, of course, but it fit Rabinovich especially well because, in his case, the first two answers seemed just as truthful as the last one. As Victor Zaslavsky and Robert J. Brym wrote in their pioneering book