[LoisHunt]

Maybe the slaves would have been better off? I don't know and not really appropriate for comparison. The Russian peasants could not have been worse off than they were under the Russian nobility. Like slavery and organized crime, the system was run on the fear and threat of physical violence reinforced by actual violence up to and including murder.

[LaBelleDameSansMerci]

"...Like slavery and organized crime, the system was run on the fear and threat of physical violence reinforced by actual violence up to and including murder....

Actually, this is demonstrably untrue. (Although any long-lasting system can be so characterized by interestedparties. Observe the treament our Founding Fathers are getting on campus.) However, Lenin's urban/proletarian vanguard believed it to be true and they went out into the countryside to raise the consciousness of the former serfs and peasants of just how horrible the system had been.

They returned a while later to the safe confines of the city--worn down by the stubborness of the rural hayseeds; their block-headed refusal to abandon their ways. Lenin, being an eminently practical progressive, determined that the "Forces of History" required these bumpkins to be gotten out of the way. And they were.

Something the nasty Tsarist system never managed to figure out how to do. It just wasn't progressive enough--as you point out......