If the Bolsheviks had popular appeal in 1917, it was in their promise to end all privilege and replace the unjust social order with a republic of equals. The utopian vision of a universal socialist state was fundamental to the popular idealism of the revolution. One peasant-worker, for example, wrote to the All-Russian Peasant Soviet in May 1917: ‘All the people, whether rich or poor, should be provided for; every person should receive his fair and equal ration from a committee so that there is enough for everyone. Not only food but work and living space should be equally divided by committees; everything should be declared public property.’ The rejection of all superordinate forms of authority (judges, officers, priests, squires, employers, and so on) was the main driving force of the social revolution. By giving institutional form to this war on privilege, the Bolsheviks were able to draw on the revolutionary energies of those numerous elements from the poor who derived pleasure from seeing the rich and mighty destroyed, regardless of whether it brought about any improvement in their own lot. If Soviet power could do little to relieve the misery of the poor, it could at least make the lives of the rich still more miserable than their own — and this was a cause of considerable psychological satisfaction. After 1918, as the revolution’s ideals became tarnished and the people became more and more impoverished, the Bolshevik regime was increasingly inclined to base its appeal almost exclusively on these vulgar pleasures of revenge. In an editorial to mark the start of 1919, Pravda proudly proclaimed:
Where are the wealthy, the fashionable ladies, the expensive restaurants and private mansions, the beautiful entrances, the lying newspapers, all the corrupted ‘golden life’? All swept away. You can no longer see on the street a rich barin [gentleman] in a fur coat reading the Russkie vedomosti [a liberal newspaper closed down after October 1917]. There is no Russkie vedomosti, no fur coat for the barin; he is living in the Ukraine or the Kuban, or else he is exhausted and grown thin from living on a third-class ration; he no longer even has the appearance of a barin.63
This plebeian war on privilege was in part an extension of the violence and destruction which Gorky had condemned in the wake of the February Revolution. There was the same hatred and mistrust of the propertied classes, the same cruel desire for retribution, and the same urge to destroy the old civilization. To the propertied classes, it all seemed part of the same revolutionary storm. They compared the violence of 1917 to the Pugachevshchina, the anarchic wave of peasant destruction — ‘senseless and merciless’, as Pushkin had described it — which had haunted Russia since the eighteenth century. They talked of the ‘dark’ and ‘savage’ instincts of the people, which the Bolsheviks had inflamed, just as their predecessors had talked in the nineteenth century of Pugachev’s followers. Yet such crude and value-laden stereotypes probably tell us more about those who used them than they do about those they were meant to describe. It was, in other words, only the social pretensions of those who saw themselves as ‘civilized’ and ‘respectable’ which defined the violence of the crowd as ‘anarchic’, ‘dark’ and ‘savage.’ If one looks at the violence in its own terms, there are important distinctions between the war against privilege after October and earlier forms of violence against the propertied classes.
