ABSTRACT
War, revolution, and civil war shattered Russian society. They not only dramatically transformed the accustomed ways of public life but also revealed depths of cruelty, savagery, depravity, misery, and sheer horror that had not seemed possible. Whatever the idea or picture of a harmonious, idyllic, and cooperative society many may have held on the eves of 1914 and 1917, it was destroyed by the behavior of all classes. True, one had also witnessed instances of heroism, self-abnegation, devotion, and love-but these acts seemed exceptional and isolated islands in the midst of the swirling sea of human suffering and misery. The Horsemen of the Apocalypse had not spared anything that educated society had known before 1914. At the end of the years of horror, a regime had imposed itself that was brutally contemptuous of everything held dear and sacred in the past, and that stopped at nothing to retain its grip on the country and its inhabitants. The Bolsheviks, so it seemed, were bent upon implanting what was most ugly and despicable, and doing so in a most offensive and beastly manner.
