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Before the Revolution, guns were in abundant supply in major Russian cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg. Newspapers advertised Brownings, Nagants, Mausers, and other models of handgun which were as popular as they were affordable: A brand new Mauser would set you back 45 or so rubles, so there were also plenty of cheaper secondhand guns floating around; to put this into perspective, a janitor’s average monthly salary in Moscow was 40 rubles.

A common ploy among liberals confronted with facts about Bolshevik brutality is to grudgingly acknowledge repression under the Communists, but then to say "At least they were an improvement over the Czars."

While it's true that 19th Century Russian Czars were autocrats, it's also true that as long as you didn't directly challenge their authority, they really didn't care how people lived their lives. This is in contrast to Bolsheviks, who wanted to control every aspect of your life and every thought in your head.

The fact that the Czars allowed their subjects to keep and bear arms while the Bolsheviks did not says a lot. What says even more is the fact that the Bolsheviks imprisoned and executed more civilians for "political crimes" in 1918 than the Czars had over the previous half-century of their rule.