The draconian categorization of the aristocracy as 'former people' was indicative of what the Bolshies had in store for the approximate 1.9 million members of what they called the' bourgeois'. The 1.5% of the population that were aristocrats, nobility, landlords and civil servants of the Russian Empire were unmercifully destroyed by the Soviets. Lenin said that revolution "is the incredibly complicated and painful process of the death of the old order and the birth of the new social order". In this instance, the death of the old order was not figurative, but quite literal. Half of the bourgeois escaped; the rest perished.
The Russian empire under the hapless Nicholas II was on a downhill slope that steepened after the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 and the revolts at home in 1905. The perpetual suppression of the poor exploded in violence, and between early 1908 and mid-1910, there were 20,000 acts of terrorism in Russia. Seven hundred officials and three thousand citizens died. Clearly, the fabric of state was torn long before the war, which led to four-and a-half million casualties. After the February Revolution, the mobs began to sack the homes of the rich and indiscriminately punish and execute them. When the Reds took over in October, the attacks became systematic and, with all caution thrown to the wind, the peasants joined in. During the three-year Civil War (1918-21), there were an additional 10 million deaths. Private property, particularly the financial and real estate assets of the wealthy, was confiscated by the state. Because of loyalty to the Empire, almost everyone had all of their assets at home and not in any European safe-havens. Those who survived were deprived of any citizenship rights, and many wound up in the burgeoning Gulag. Stalin's first five-year plan and his later show trials were the final straws. The history of Russia in the last century is an appalling spectacle of violence and atrocious governance, of which this is a modest chapter.
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