1897). The First Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) was convened in 1898 in Minsk, at the initiative and under the protection of the Bund activists. At the party’s Second Congress in 1903 (which included the Bund delegates), Jews made up at least 37 percent of the delegates, and at the last (Fifth) congress of the united RSDLP in 1907, about one-third of the delegates were Jews, including 11.4 percent of the Bolsheviks and 22.7 percent of the Mensheviks (and five out of the eight top Menshevik leaders). According to the Provisional Government’s commissar for the liquidation of tsarist political police abroad, S. G. Svatikov, at least 99 (62.3 percent) of the 159 political émigrés who returned to Russia through Germany in 1917 in “sealed trains” were Jews. The first group of 29 that arrived with Lenin included 17 Jews (58.6 percent). At the Sixth (Bolshevik) party Congress of July–August 1917, which had a larger representation of grassroots domestic organizations, the Jewish share was about 16 percent overall, and 23.7 percent in the Central Committee. 72 Only in German-dominated Latvia, where nationalist resentment, workers’ strikes, and a peasant war coalesced into a single movement under the aegis of the Bolsheviks, did the proportion of revolutionaries in the total population sometimes exceed the Jewish mark. (Antistate activism among Poles, Armenians, and Georgians was not as high but still substantially higher than among Russians because of the way national and social movements reinforced each other.) The Jewish reinforcement was of a different kind: similar to the Russian intelligentsia variety but much more widespread and uncompromising, it consisted in the simultaneous rejection of parental authority and autocratic paternalism. Most Jewish rebels did not fight the state in order to become free Jews; they fought the state in order to become free from Jewishness—and thus Free. Their radicalism was not strengthened by their nationality; it was strengthened by their struggle against their nationality. Latvian or Polish socialists might embrace universalism, proletarian internationalism, and the vision of a future cosmopolitan harmony without ceasing to be Latvian or Polish. For many Jewish socialists, being an internationalist meant not being Jewish at all. 73 The Russian Social Democrats, too, were fighting a lonely fight. Having rejected the Russian state as the prison-house of nations, declared war on Russian industrialization as both too brutal and too slow, given up on the Russian “people” as too backward or not backward enough, and placed their bets on a world revolution manufactured in Germany, they were perfectly “self- hating” in the Chaadaev tradition of the Russian intelligentsia. And yet, in most