For one thing, the violence after October was articulated and legitimized by a new language of class, and class conflict, which had been developed by the socialist parties during 1917. The old and deferential forms of address for the members of the propertied classes (gospodin and barin) were phased out of use. They soon became a form of abuse, or of sarcastic mocking, for those who had lost their title and wealth. These were the ‘former people’ (byvshchie liudi), as the Bolsheviks came to call them. The proliferation of egalitarian forms of address — ‘comrade’ (for party members and workers) and ‘citizen’ (for all others) — seemed to signify a new republican equality, although of course, in reality, the comrades, to adapt George Orwell’s phrase, were rather more equal than the others. The word ‘comrade’ (tovarishch) had long had connotations of brotherhood and solidarity among the most class-conscious industrial workers. It became a badge of proletarian pride, a sign to distinguish and unite the avenging army of the poor in the class war against the rich. This new language of class awakened a sense of dignity and power in the once downtrodden. It was soon reflected in a greater assertiveness in the dress and body-language of the lower classes. Servicemen and workers tilted back their caps and unbuttoned their tunics in a show of cocky defiance. They went around with a pistol sticking out visibly from their belts and behaved in a generally aggressive manner. They spoke rudely to their ‘social betters’, refused to give up their tram-seats to women, and sat in the theatre, smoking and drinking, with their feet up on the chairs in front of them.
In the minds of the ordinary people, who had never read their Marx, class divisions were based much more on emotion than objective social criteria. The popular term burzhooi, for example, had no set class connotations, despite its obvious derivation from the word ‘bourgeois’. It was used as a general form of abuse against employers, officers, landowners, priests, merchants, Jews, students, professionals or anyone else well dressed, foreign looking or seemingly well-to-do. Hungry workers condemned the peasants as burzhoois because they were thought to be hoarding foodstuffs; while peasants — who often confused the word with barzhui (the owners of a barge) and birzhye (from the word for the Stock Exchange, birzh) — likewise condemned the workers, and all townsmen in general, because they were thought to be hoarding manufactured goods. The burzhoois, in other words, were not so much a class as a set of popular scapegoats, or internal enemies, who could be redefined almost at will to account for the breakdown of the market, the hardships of the war and the general inequalities of society. Villagers often described the burzhooi as a ‘hidden’ and ‘crafty’ enemy of the peasants who was to blame for all their problems: he could be a townsman, a trader or an official. In urban food queues, where endless theories of sabotage were spun to explain the shortage of bread, the words burzhooi, ‘speculator’, ‘German’ and ‘Jew’ were virtually synonymous. This was a society at war with itself — only everyone thought they were fighting the burzhooi.64
The socialist press encouraged such popular attitudes by depicting the burzhoois as ‘enemies of the people’. The best-selling pamphlet of 1917 — which did more than any other publication to shape the political and class consciousness of the mass of the ordinary people — was Spiders and Flies by Wilhelm (not to be confused with Karl) Liebknecht. Several million copies of it were sold in more than twenty different editions sponsored by all the major socialist parties. Spiders and Flies divided Russia into two warring species:
The spiders are the masters, the money-grubbers, the exploiters, the gentry, the wealthy, and the priests, pimps and parasites of all types! … The flies are the unhappy workers, who must obey all those laws the capitalist happens to think up — must obey, for the poor man has not even a crumb of bread.fn11
The rich and educated, by being labelled burzhooi, were automatically vilified as antisocial. ‘The burzhooi’, wrote one socialist pamphleteer, ‘is someone who thinks only of himself, of his belly. It is someone who is aloof, who is ready to grab anyone by the throat if it involves his money or food.’ As the social crisis deepened, the burzhoois were increasingly condemned as ‘parasites’ and ‘bloodsuckers’, and violent calls for their downfall were heard with growing regularity, not just from the extreme leftwing parties but also from the streets, the factories and the barracks. ‘We should exterminate all the burzhooi’, proclaimed one factory worker in January 1918, ‘so that the honest Russian people will be able to live more easily.’65
