January 1940. The first head of the interrogation team investigating Babel’s “espionage activity” was a Jewish fugitive from backwardness. 101 For many young Jews during the civil war, Pushkin Street became “the road” to the world revolution (or to combat against counterrevolution and sabotage, as the case might be). It seemed to be an inexorable, uninterrupted, and universal path of liberation, along which, “Locked in step, / Marched a yellow-faced Chinaman / And a Hebrew with a pale countenance” (as Iosif Utkin, another officially canonized Young Communist poet, put it). The journey was arduous, but the goal was never in doubt—for right there, by their side, was “the poet of the political department” leading the Bolsheviks “to where the shrapnel and the grenades whiz by.” As Bagritsky wrote in 1924, I took revenge for Pushkin by the Black Sea, I carried Pushkin in the Urals through the woods, I crawled with Pushkin in the shallow, muddy trenches, Lice-eaten, starving, barefoot, and cold! My heart would pound wildly with elation, The flame of freedom would rise high within my breast, When, to the song of bullets and machine guns, I’d feel inspired to recite his ringing lines! The years roll on along their narrow road, New songs keep boiling up within my heart. The spring’s in bloom—and Pushkin, now avenged, Is with us still, singing of liberty. 102 The revolutions of 1917 did not have much to do with either Pushkin or the Jews. But the civil war that followed did. Most of the fighting took place in and around the old Pale of Settlement, where ethnic Russians were a minority and Jews made up a large proportion of the urban population. For Polish and Ukrainian nationalists and assorted peasant (“Green”) armies, the Jews represented the old Mercurian foe, the new capitalist city, the expansion of Russian high culture, and, of course, Bolshevism (which represented all of the above insofar as it was the religion of the modern city, ethnically Social Democratic but for the time being Russian-speaking). For the Whites, whose movement was hijacked early on by Russian ethnic nationalists and imperial