18
po
toppled the government of the czar long before Lenin arrived from
exile.  But now, inspired by his oratory, hordes of common men and
women rushed into the elaborate homes and well-stocked stores of the
better off, snatching their food, fur coats and furniture.
The new ideology did not solve Russia's problems, nor did the
theft of clothing from the closets of the well-heeled substantially enrich
the masses.  The war which the Bolsheviks had promised to end
dragged on.  The short supplies of food became more intense.  Iron and
coal production ground to a virtual standstill.27  To make matters
worse, Russia was plunged into a bloody civil war.  In that internal
battle, more than 14 million Russians were killed.  Over five million
simply starved to death.28  Others were shot by neighbors whipped to a
murderous frenzy.
The peasants had been promised the greatest fruits of the new
order's redistribution of resources, and were told that they would
receive the land expropriated from the landlords.  But, as Yevgeny
Yevtushenko wrote in the official Soviet Writers Union Weekly
Literaturnaya Gazeta, "The promised gates of paradise proved to be a
trap."29  Years later, the land the peasants had been assured would be
theirs was taken firmly from them by the Revolutionary authorities
under Stalin.  Those who objected did not fare well.  According to the
Russian government's History of the USSR, "in some regions 15-20
percent of the peasants were deported; for every kulak [relatively
well-to-do peasant] deported three or four middle or poor peasants
were arrested."  Peasants were packed into unheated cattle cars and
sent to distant mountain locations.  They lay half-naked on the frigid
floors of railway stations along the route, dying of typhoid and simple
starvation.  In all, nearly fifteen  million of them were killed.
Aleksandr M. Nekrich, a longtime member of Russia's USSR Academy
of Sciences Institute of History, calls the result "the first socialist
genocide."30
But under the new ideology, power and resources HAD shifted.
They had slid from the old propertied classes to a new elite.  The new
  wer.  And that's exactly what happened.  The enraged populace had
<<  <  GO  >  >>