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    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

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