1 See Hynes, William J. and Doty, William G., Mythical Trickster Figures: Contours, Contexts, and Criticisms (Tuscaloosa, 1993)Google Scholar.

2 This typology is drawn from ibid., 32-45.

3 Douglas, Mary, “The Social Control of Cognition: Some Factors in Joke Perception,“ Man 3, no. 3 (September 1968): 365 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Ibid. On the Bakhtinian carnival, see Bakhtin, Mikhail, Rabelais and His World, trans. Izwolsky, Helene (Bloomington, 1984), 94 Google Scholar.

5 But note that confidence men were also a preoccupation of twentieth-century German literature, notably the Dadaists in the 1920s: see Serner, Walter, Lezte Lockerung: Ein Handbrevier für Hochstapler und solche die es werden wollen (1927; Munich, 1984)Google Scholar. Probably the most famous of all literary studies of confidence men is Thomas Mann's Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man (first published in 1926 as Bekennlnisse des HochslapleisFelix Krull: Der Memoiren erster Te.il).

6 Greenway, John, Literature among the Primitives (Hatboro, 1964)Google Scholar, cited in Hynes and Doty, Mythical TricltsterFigures, 18.

7 A number of scholarly monographs focus on this literature, starting with Kulmann, Susan, Knave, Fool, and Genius: The Confidence Man as He Appears in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction (Chapel Hill, 1974)Google Scholar. One of the most useful is Lindberg, Gary, The Confidence Man in American Literature (New York, 1982)Google Scholar. On real-life confidence men in America, see Maurer, David W., The Big Con (Indianapolis, 1940)Google Scholar and Nash, Jay Robert, Hustkrs and Con Men: An Anecdotal History of the Confidence Man and His Games (New York, 1976)Google Scholar.

8 The traditional Russian words for trickster and his trickery were plut and plulovstvo. These had become archaic by the early Soviet period, when the terms most frequently used in the press for real-life tricksters were moshennik, zhulik, and aferist.

9 N. V. Gogol“s play Revizorwas written in 1835 and first performed in St. Petersburg the next year.

10 On samozvantsy, see Ingerflom, Claudio Sergio, “Les représentations collectives du pouvoir et l“imposture’ dans la Russie des XVIIIe-XXe siecles,” in Boureau, Alain and Ingerflom, Claudio Sergio, ed., La royauté sacrée dans le monde chrétien (Paris, 1992)Google Scholar.

11 Korolenko, V. G., “Sovremennaia samozvanshchina” (1896), in his Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 9 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1914), 3:271–368 Google Scholar.

12 Kuprin, A. I., “Kievskie tipy: Vor” (1895), in his Sobranie sochinenii v deviati tomakh (Moscow, 1964), 9:38 Google Scholar.

13 On Savin's career, see Shcheglov, Iu. K., “Kommentarii k romanu ‘Zolotoi telenok,'“ in Il'f, I. and Petrov, E., Zolotoi telenok: Roman (Moscow, 1995), 447–49Google Scholar. In Il'f and Petrov's Zolotoi telenok, Ostap Bender acknowledges Savin as a worthy precursor as a confidence man, though one whose ploys were less suited to Soviet circumstances: “Take Kornet Savin, for example: an outstanding confidence man [aferisi]. He would have come to Koreiko disguised as a Bulgarian tsar, made a scene with the house administrator, and spoilt the whole thing.” Il'f and Petrov, Zolotoi telenok, 107.

14 V. Shklovskii, “'Zolotoi telenok’ i staryi plutovskii roman,” Literaturnaia gazeta, 30 April 1934, 3.

15 For Russian antecedents, Erenburg's, Il'ia “Khulio Khurenito” (1922), in Erenburg, I., Sobranie sochinenii v 9-i tomakh (Moscow, 1962-67), vol. 1 Google Scholar, and Kaverin's, V. “Konets khazy” (1924), in his Sobranie sochinenii v dvukh tomakh, (Moscow, 1994), 2:5–86 Google Scholar. Il'f and Petrov's epithet, ‘Velikii kombinator,” recalls Erenburg's “velikii provokator” for Julio Juienito. It has also been suggested that the protagonist of the short novel Syn Chicherina by Sven (Il'ia Kremlev), published in the satirical journal Begemot in 1926, was a prototype for Ostap Bender, but this has been denied by Kremlev himself, who asserts that he and Il'f and Petrov were simply responding to the same real-life phenomenon of proliferating samozvanstvo in the early 1920s: Kremlev, Il'ia, Vliteraturnom slroiu: Vospominaniia (Moscow, 1968), 189–90Google Scholar. For Yiddish antecedents, see Olga Litvak, “The Literary Response to Conscription: Individuality and Authority in the Russian-Jewish Enlightenment” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1999), 32.

16 On the vagaries of Il'f and Petrov's standing with the regime and the intelligentsia and their high standing with the public, see Kurdiumov, A. A., V kraiu nepuganykh idiotov: Kniga ob Il'fe i Petrove (Paris, 1983)Google Scholar. For statistics on library borrowing in the early 1930s showing the high demand for Il'f and Petrov's works, see Vulis, A., I. Il'f, E. Petrov: Ocherk tvorchestva (Moscow, 1960)Google Scholar, 4«1, citing Pravda, 7 June 1934. On the crowds of ordinary people coming to pay their final respects to Ilia Il'f when he died in 1937, see reminiscences of Ardov, M. in Sbornik vospominanii obi. Il'fe iE. Petrove (Moscow, 1963)Google Scholar.

17 Even hostile critics of Il'f and Petrov's work remark on the speed with which various of Bender's aphorisms entered popular speech. For examples, see Beliavin, V. P. and Butenko, I. A., Zhivaia reck': Slovar’ razgovornykh vyrazhenii (Moscow, 1994), 21 Google Scholar, 61, 85, 134. (Thanks to Stephen Lovell for bringing these to my attention.)

18 Alexopoulos, Golfo, “Portrait of a Con Artist as a Soviet Man,” Slavic Review 57, no. 4 (Winter 1998): 774–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The topic of imposture is skirted though not directly broached in Getty's, J. Arch Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933-38 (Cambridge, Eng., 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which emphasizes the party's concern about fraudulent membership and misuse of party cards. Among the examples of misuses Getty cites are the criminal in Odessa who used a false party card to rob the State Bank. Lacking precise data on the point, Getty speculated that “it would not be surprising to discover that [party] cards commanded a high price” on the black market (32). Archival evidence now makes clear that this was indeed the case, and that the black-market trade in party cards and other identification documents was huge.

19 This argument is developed in my article, “Making a Self for the Times: Impersonation and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia,” Kritika 2, no. 3 (2001): 469-87.

20 According to Paustovskii, this stood for Osobyi prodovol'stvennyi gubernskii komitet.

21 Paustovskii, Konstantin, “Povest’ o zhizni: Bremia bol'shikh ozhidaniia,” in Paustovskii, , Sobranie sochinenii v deviati tomakh (Moscow, 1981-86), 5:6–23 Google Scholar.

22 Ibid., 5:22-23. The title of the chapter is “Predki Ostapa Bendera.“

23 The postwar Harvard Interview Project provides a lot of information on this. See, for example, Russian Research Center, Harvard University, Project on the Soviet Social System: Interview Records, “A” Schedule Protocols, #167, 13:12-13; #358, 19:18; #432, 21:19; #87, 30:3; #338, 33:3, 19-20; #527, 27:29. One source gives the going rate for false passports in rural Mordovia in 1935 as 50 to 80 rubles: Izvestiia, 15 May 1935, 3.

24 See Ugolovnyi kodeks RSFSR redaktsii 1926 g. s postateino-sistematizirovannymi materialami, sost. S. S. Astarkhanov i dr. (Moscow, 1927) and Ugolovnyi kodeks. S izmeneniiami na 1 iiunia 1937 g. (Moscow, 1937). RaUier surprisingly, even impersonation of an official was not a crime. The only type of impersonation specifically mentioned was practicing as a medical doctor without the proper qualifications (art. 180).

25 Kremlev, literaturnom slroiu, 189-90.

26 Il'f and Petrov, Zolotoi telenok, 20; Kremlev, literaturnom slroiu, 189; Bulgakov's “Lzhedmitrii Lunacharskii,” cited in Shcheglov, “Kommentarii, k romanu Zolotoi telenok,“ 352. Of these samozvantsy stories, Il'f and Petrov's are presented as fiction, Kremlev's was published as fiction but later described as essentially a report from real life, and Bulgakov's feuilleton belongs to a nonfictional genre (though he is now best known as a writer of fiction). In terms of style and content there is little difference between the three. Almost certainly all three were originally inspired by newspaper reports—but the newspaper reports themselves were written byjournalists who were increasingly likely to have read similar stories in satirical fiction.

27 Shcheglov, “Kommentarii, k romanu Zolotoi telenok,” 352. Another reported “reallife“ case from the mid-1920s involved an impersonator of Faizull Khodzhaev, chairman of the Uzbek Central Executive Committee, who toured southern cities including Ialta, Novorossiisk, and Poltava and “collected money from the trusting chairmen of the city soviet executive committee” (ibid.).

28 Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF), f. 5446, op. 54, dd. 25, 33, 44,57, 68,81,101,127 (covering the years 1945-52). Judging by the content of the letters, some were written in the spirit of the confidence trick, but others came from distressed or disturbed people who had lost their families and formed an emotional bond at a distance with a political leader, usually seen as a father figure. Stalin himself received similar letters: see, for example, the one from a sixteen-year-old boy asking permission to take Stalin's name, to which Stalin in 1924 wrote an astonishingly warm reply: “I have no objections to your taking the name of Stalin; on the contrary, I will be very glad, as that circumstance will give me the chance to have a younger brother (I never had any brothers).” Istochnik, 1996.no. 2 (21):156-59.

29 Il'f and Petrov, Zolotoi telenok, 18-29.

30 Alexopoulos, “Portrait,” 779. Apparently such benefits were revoked in the mid- 19308, provoking an angry reaction. See report of the deputy head of the West Siberian NKVD, 14 February 1936, in Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Novosibirskoi oblasti, f. 47, op. 5, d. 206,11. 119-21.

31 On Meskhi's unmasking and trial (primarily for sexual offenses rather than his earlier false claims), see Izvestiia, 10July 1935, 4, and 22July 1935, 4.

32 Krasnaiagazeta (Leningrad), 6 May 1936, 4; Izvestiia, 11 January 1936, 6.

33 Izvestiia, 15 March 1935, 4.

34 See Osokina, E. A., lerarkhiia potrebleniia: O zhizni liudei v usloviiakh stalinskogo mubzheniia 1928-1935gg. (Moscow, 1993), 63–107 Google Scholar.

35 Sheinin, Lev, Zapiski sledovatelia (Moscow, 1965), 76–80 Google Scholar.

36 The Cheliuskin expedition to the Arctic in 1933-34 and the dramatic rescue of the Cheliuskinites was a topic of enormous public interest: see McCannon, John, Red Arctic: Polar Exploration and the Myth of the North in the Soviet Union 1932-1939 (Oxford, 1998), 61–68 Google Scholar.

37 hvestiia, 5 February 1936, 6.

38 Witkin, Zara, An American Engineer in Stalin's Russia: The Memoirs of Zara Witkin, 1932-1934, ed. Gelb, Michael (Berkeley, 1991), 211–12Google Scholar. The journalists were A. N. Garri (identified only as “Garry” in the Witkin book), who wrote for Izvestiia, and Bel'skii of the satirical journal Krokodil. Garri was deputy head of the foreign department of Izvestiia in the late 1920s and early 1930s (thanks to Matthew E. Lenoe for this information).

39 Alexopoulos, “Portrait,” 780.

40 Glavprofobr was the department of the People's Commissariat of Education in charge of technical education.

41 Izvestiia, 12 January 1936, 4. This trick was successfully carried out in Azovo- Chernomor and Tashkent but led to the conman's apprehension in laroslavl'.

42 6-aia Vsekazakskaia konferentsiia VKP(b) 15-23 noiabria 1927 goda: Stenograficheskii otchet (Kzyl-Orda, 1927), 57-58. Mukharovskii, who must have been slightly crazy, also at various times claimed to be the son of a German general, the nephew of a police boss in Vienna, and to have worked for the Cheka.

43 Alexopoulos, “Portrait,” 780.

44 See, for example, Izvestiia, 28 April 1936, 4; Krasnyi Krym (Simferopol’), 28 August 1937, 4. A similar technique was used by a gang in Saratov, except that the thieves claimed to be conducting house searches on behalf of the criminal investigation department and the tax office: Kommunist (Saratov), 3 October 1935, 4.

45 Sovetskaia iustitsiia, 1937, no. 4:50.

46 Il'f and Petrov, Zolotoi telenok, 255-69. For a real-life example of a conman posing as a correspondent oflzvestiia, see kvestiia, 12 April 1936, 4.

47 See Il'f, I. and Petrov, E., Dvenadtsat’ stul'ev (Moscow, 1995), 350–64Google Scholar.

48 hvestiia, 2 February 1936, 4.

49 On praktiki and their importance in Soviet industry, see Bailes, Kendall E., Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin: Origins of the Soviet Technical Intelligentsia, 1917- 1941 (Princeton, 1978)Google Scholar.

50 Alexopoulos, “Portrait,” 783-84.

51 Cited in Fitzpatrick, Sheila, Everyday Stalinism (New York, 1999), 132 Google Scholar and 132-38.

52 On the Turkish connection, Odesskii, M. and Fel'dman, D. write in their commentary in Il'ia Il'f and Petrov, Evgenii, Dvenadtsat’ stul'ev: Pervyi polnyi variant (Moscow, 1997), 467 Google Scholar: “The reference to the father's Turkish citizenship would not have been understood by contemporaries as an unambiguous indication of the hero's ethnic identity. More likely they saw a hint that Bender's father lived in a southern Russian port city, most likely Odessa, where many merchants, usually Jews, took Turkish citizenship so that their children could avoid die various forms of legal discrimination associated with their confessional affiliation, and at the same time acquire grounds for release from military conscription.“ Both the novels’ authors came from Odessa, a city famous as a center both of Jewish culture and Jewish crime, although only Il'f was Jewish. Kurdiumov, V kraiu nejmganykh idiotov, 59. Rachel Rubin writes that Bender is “probably a Jew,” noting that “some critics refer outright to Bender as a Jew or a half-Jew, and some skirt the issue.” Rachel Rubi\i, Jewish Gangsters of Modem Literature (Urbana, 2000), 47 and 154n78.

53 Kaverin, “Konets khazy,” 36 (“I studied to be a rabbi“).

54 See Friedberg, Maurice, “Jewish Themes in Soviet Russian Literature,” in Kochan, Lionel, ed., The Jews in Soviet Russia since 1917 (London, 1970), 196 Google Scholar.

55 Alexopoulos, “Portrait,” 779.

56 The same is true of the stories in Sheinin's Zapiski skdovatelia, many of which were originally published in newspapers. It is quite possible that in the 1920s and 1930s journalists tended to avoid giving identifiably Jewish names in their reports of conmen in order not to reinforce anti-Semitic stereotypes.

57 For example, GARF, f. 8131, op. 37, dd. 4570 (1948) and 3874 (1947).

58 In this connection it is interesting to note that a law was drafted in 1945 to establish a badge that university graduates could wear on their chests like a military medal: GARF, f. 7523, op. 65, d. 381,11. 3-4.

59 For examples of engineers, see hvestiia, 11 February 1953, 1 (editorial); 18 February 1953, 2-3; 25 March 1953, 2; for physicians, see Pravda, 7 February 1953, 2; and for other specialists, see Trud, 25 February 1953, 2.

60 In fact, a diploma is about the only document he apparently did not bother to forge—see Alexopoulos, “Portrait,” 778.

61 On the practice of petition writing, see Fitzpatrick, Sheila, “Supplicants and Citizens: Public Letter-Writing in Soviet Russia in the 1930s,” Slavic Review 55, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 78–105 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

62 GARF, f. 8131, op. 37, d. 3874, 1. 404. On the growth of bribe taking during the war and in the postwar period, prevalent even injudicial organs, the procuracy, and the militia, see the 1946 memo accompanying a new draft law against bribes in GARF, f. 8131, op. 37, d. 2825,11. 140-44.

63 On prewar practices, see Fitzpatrick, Sheila, “Blal in Stalin's Time,” in Lovell, Stephen, Ledeneva, Alena, Rogachevskii, Andrei, eds., Bribery and Blal in Russia: Negotiating Reciprocity from the Middle Ages to the 1990s (London, 2000), 166–82Google Scholar.

64 VI. Mass and Mikh. Chervinskii, “The Irreplaceable,” Krokodil, 1952, no. 9:3 (emphasis present in the original).

65 hvestiia, 31 January 1953, 1. Like many conmen, this one (Zakharkin) was perepatetic. He had earlier successfully carried out the same scam in Kazan’ and Tomsk.

66 Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv noveishei istorii (RGANI, formerly TsKhSD), f. 5, op. 15, d. 437, 11. 221-24. For another swindler falsely claiming to be a veteran, see hvestiia, 30 January 1953, 2.

67 GARF, f. 9401 (“Osobaia papka I. V. Stalina“), op. 2, d. 170,11. 65-69, 77-79. Report signed by Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs S. I. Serov to Stalin, Molotov, Zhdanov. For another report on the same case, see GARF, f. 8131, op. 37, d. 3874,11. 60-61.

68 The People's Commissariat of Heavy Machinery evidently deserves credit for seeing through Vaisman, since it was there that he was arrested. GARF, f. 9401, op. 2, d. 170, 1.65.

69 GARF, f. 9401, op. 2, d. 170,1. 67.

70 These are not further identified. Presumably they were either goods sent under Lendlease or donations from some American charitable source, which in the usual manner of Soviet bureaucracy had entered the funds of “soft” money and goods at the disposal of various enterprises and institutions.

71 Stephen Lovell, “Reciprocity and the Soviet Cultural Revolution: The Literary Perspective,” in Lovell, Ledeneva, Rogachevskii, eds., Bribery and Mat, 154.

72 He was identified as “thief and conman [vor-aferist] Vaisman Veniamin Borukhovich, aka Trakhtenberg, aka Rabinovich, aka Oslon, aka Zilbershtein, Jewish by nationality, 33 years old, born in the city of Zhitomir.” GARF, f. 9401, op. 2, d. 170, 1. 65.

73 For hostility in Central Asia, see Kostyrchenko, G., V plenu u krasnogo faraona. Politicheskie presledovaniia evreev v SSSR v poslednee stalinskoe desiatiletie (Moscow, 1994) ,15 Google Scholar. See the letter to Stalin (October 1945) from a group ofjews in Kiev who linked a recent “pogrom” in Kiev with the earlier German occupation of the city, ibid., 53.

74 On discourses concerningjews and conscription in the imperial period, see Litvak, “Literary Response to Conscription.” On “Tashkent partisans,” see Weiner, Amir, Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution (Princeton, 2001), 221–22Google Scholar.

75 Tsentr khraneniia dokumentatsii noveishei istorii Samarskoi oblasti (TsKhDNISO), f. 714, op. 1, d. 1780, 1. 39. These comments come from the Samara obkom's reports on popular reactions to the announcement of the Doctors’ Plot in the first months of 1953.

76 RGANI, f. 6, op. 6, d. 1574, 1. 6. This 1951 censure was not a public document. Thus, unlike condemnations of anti-Semitism in the press of the early 1950s, it cannot be dismissed as a propaganda ploy to confuse foreign critics.

77 Kostyrchenko, Vplena, 124, 154, 162-64.

78 TASS communiqué, “Podlye shpiony i ubiitsy pod maskoi professorov-vrachei,“ Pravda, 13 January 1953, 1.

79 Krainiaia rasseiannost', nevnimatel'nost'. Ushakov, D. N., ed., Tolkovyi slovar’ russkogo iazyka, vol. 3 (Moscow, 1939)Google Scholar. Rotozeistvo seems to be primarily a Soviet-era term, though it had not figured particularly prominently in the many earlier antibureaucratic campaigns of the Soviet era. Dal', who includes only the verb form, rotozeit'/rotozeinichat’ (listed under rot) defined its meaning as “zevat', glazet', glazopialit', gliadet', popustu, khlopat', glazami, glupo zasmatrivat'sia na vse vstrechnoe.” Dal', Vladimir, Tolkovyi slovar’ zhivogo velikorusskogn iazyka, vol. 4 (orig. published 1882; Moscow, 1980)Google Scholar.

80 See editorial “Pokonchit’ s rotozeistvom v nashikh riadakh,” Pravda, 18 January 1953, 1.

81 See Pravda, 1 February 1953, 2,: G. Vladimirov and R. Ianson, “Pod kryshkom rotozeev” (reprinted from Sovetskaia Latviia). On patronage and official criticism of the phenomenon, see Fitzpatrick, Sheila, Everyday Stalinism (New York, 1999), 109–14Google Scholar and 195-96. For a striking example of regional protektsiia and semeistvennost’ and their unmasking, see Harris, James R., The Great Urals: Regionalism and the Evolution of the Soviet System (Ithaca, 1999), 146–90Google Scholar.

82 This generalization is based on a reading of Pravda, Izvestiia, Trud, Vecherniaia Moskva, Krymskaia pravda (Simferopol’), and Molot (Rostov on Don) for the first three months of 1953. It should be pointed out, however, that there were exceptions. Not absolutely every “rotozei” article cited ajewish protagonist (see, for example, the feuilleton in Izvestiia, 30 January 1953, 2, which has no Jewish referent), though most did. Central Asians also made appearances as swindlers duping hapless bureaucrats (e.g., in the Izvestiia editorial “Watchfully Guard and Multiply Socialist Property,” 11 February 1953, 1, where two of the examples of swindlers cited are Jewish, one Central Asian). While almost all the newspapers 1 consulted ran their anti-rotozeistvo campaign as part of the broader anti-Semitic campaign, Vecherniaia Moskva seems to have been an honorable exception (it covered the theme, but without any apparent anti-Semitic overtones). The regional newspaper Krymskaia pravda ran a series of virulently anti-Semitic “rotozei” stories, but, interestingly enough, these stories appeared during the temporary absence of the regular editor and disappeared once he resumed his post.

83 Krymskaia pravda, 8 January 1953, 3; ibid., 8 February 1953, 2; Izvesliia, 30 January 1953, 2; Pravda, 1 February 1953, 2; Molot, 26 February 1953, 3; Izvesliia, 25 March 1953, 2; ibid., 11 February 1953, 1.

84 Krymskaia pravda, 18 February 1953, 3.

85 Izvestiia, 18 February 1953, 2-3.

86 N. Kozev, “O revoliutsionnoi bditel'nosti,” Pravda, 6 February 1953, 3. But note that there is some ambiguity in this message. Of Kozev's two main examples of persons who had become spies, one, S. D. Gurevich, was ajewish intellectual and former Trotskyist with a “Menshevik-Bundist” background who was recruited to serve foreign intelligence agencies “through his anti-soviet, Trotskyist and nationalist views.” The other, an artisan from Vilnius who bore the non-Jewish name K. F. Romanov, fell prey to foreign intelligence because of his “criminal past“—embezzlement, reliance on “protectors” to escape justice. Romanov's crimes were typical of the swindlers featured in the rotozei campaign, who, as we have seen, usually had Jewish names.

87 TsKhDNISO, f. 714, op. 1, d. 1780, 1. 40; RGANI, f. 5, op. 15, d. 407, 1. 104.

88 This generalization is based on the reports in TsKhDNISO, f. 714, op. 1, d. 1780, and RGANI, f. 5, op. 15, d. 407,11. 2-112.

89 RGANI, f. 5, op. 15, d. 407,11. 62, 99.

90 Strictly speaking, the fate of Vaisman is unknown, as none of the available archival sources give us the end of his story.

91 The first signs of trouble, however, had occurred a year or even two years earlier: in December 1946, the publishing house was asked to “carefully review” works, including those of Il'f and Petrov, slated for republication in the series “Selected Works of Soviet Literature.“ “Resolution of the Secretariat of the Union of Soviet Writers of the USSR, 15 November 1948,” fstochnik, 1997, no. 5:90. And, in December 1947, the Central Committee's Agitprop Department recommended that the same publishing house drop the two Il'f and Petrov novels from the series, a recommendation that was apparently ignored. Memo of 14 December 1948, signed by D. Shepilov et al., Istochnik, 1997, no. 5:92.

92 Kurdiumov, Vkraiu nepuganykh idiotov, 265.

93 The Union of Soviet Writers’ condemnation was issued in the same month (November 1948) that the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was closed down.

94 “Prikliucheniia obez'iany” was described in the Orgburo of the Central Committee's resolution “O zhurnalakh ‘Zvezda’ i ‘Leningrad'“( 14 August 1946) as “a vulgar lampoon on Soviet everyday life and Soviet people. Zoshchenko … slanderously represents Soviet people as primitive, uncultured, and stupid, with philistine tastes and morals.” Babichenko, D. L., comp., “Literalurnyi front“: Istorii politicheskoi tsenzury 1932-1946 gg. Sbornik dokumentov (Moscow, 1994), 221 Google Scholar.

95 Istochnik, 1997, no. 5:92. The substance of this critique was reproduced in an article “Ser'eznye oshibki izdatel'stva ‘Sovetskii pisatel','” published in Literaturnaiagazeta, 9 February 1949.

96 Kurdiumov, V krain nepuganykh idiotov, 33.

97 Calculated from Knizhnaia letopis’ (Moscow), 1994 and 1995 (some issues are missing from the 1994 set). The most notable new editions of the 1990s were the “first complete editions” of Dvenatsat’ stul'ev and Zolotoi telenok, ed. and with commentary by M. Odesskii and D. Fel'dman (Moscow, 1997 and 2000), published by “Vagrius,” and the “Panorama” editions of the two books with extensive commentaries by Iu. K. Shcheglov (Moscow, 1995).

98 See Vaksberg, Arkady, Stalin against the Jews, trans. Bouis, Antonina W. (New York, 1994), 285–86Google Scholar. But note that swindlers were not the target of this campaign, which was primarily directed against professional black-market operators, especially currency speculators.

99 See, for example, the article by O. Mikhailov in Literalurnaia gazeta, 14 August 1968, discussed in Kurdiumov, Vkraiu nepuganykh idiotov, 20-21.

100 Bender described himself as an “ideinyi borets za denezhnye znaki“: Il'f and Petrov, Zolotoi telenok, 135.

101 The journalistic preoccupation with conmen is particularly marked in Izvestiia in the mid-1930s under Nikolai Bukharin's editorship.

102 See, for example, Bender's list of indispensable Soviet words and phrases and draft of a leading article and a feuilleton, among other genres, in Il'f and Petrov, Zolotoi telenok, 264-67. While in prison, Gromov wrote a play that he sent to State Prosecutor Vyshinskii, who passed it on to Lev Sheinin (a figure already familiar to us in the trickster connection), who in turn sent it to the Union of Soviet Writers for evaluation. Alexopoulos, “Portrait,” 785-88.

103 See Bender's statement that “I am a neuropathologist, I am a psychiatrist. I study the souls of my patients.” Il'f and Petrov, Zolotoi telenok, 59.

104 See his statement to this effect, Il'f and Petrov, Zolotoi telenok, 25.