[American Greatness] The purges began shortly after the revolution. For all its haste and ill-preparedness, the success of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, led by the perpetually temperamental Vladimir Lenin and fueled by a fierce devotion to Marxism, quickly gave rise to the vast and unimaginably harsh Soviet labor camp system that would come to be known as the "gulag." As the leader of the newly established Russian Soviet Republic, Lenin wasted no time in ordering the establishment of decrees calling for the severe punishment of anyone deemed a "class enemy" to the new Soviet Republic. From the perspective of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, class enemies were those who had opposed the Marxist Bolshevik Revolution and often consisted of individuals the Bolsheviks contemptuously regarded as privileged in their social class. These so-called class enemies, a term which eventually became synonymous with the "bourgeoisie," ostensibly posed a threat to the proletariat-ruled, Marxist utopia Lenin was promising to the masses.
Thus, lists were made, and the unfortunate bourgeoisie who found themselves on these lists were stripped of their rights and their property, sent to the gulag, and executed by the millions during Lenin’s purges and Stalin’s Great Terror. To be clear, Lenin’s goal was not to eradicate the bourgeoisie entirely. Rather, he hoped to deconstruct the existing cadre of class enemies via extreme wealth redistribution and ultimately rebuild as the Bourgeoisie 2.0. The Marxists believed their moral superiority bestowed upon them the responsibility to identify and remove privilege from one class while simultaneously shifting privilege to those in the less fortunate classes.
As author Daniel Orlovsky writes in Russia: A History, " . . . the ’exploiters’ were deprived of civil rights and legally classified as the ’disenfranchised’ (lishentsy). They had no right to work, but could be mobilized for menial labour or public works." But how, under the bleak rule of Communism, could so many be considered privileged enough to deserve such a fate? The answer of course was that the bourgeoisie nomenclature was inherently vague, by design, and the gulag did not differentiate between its political prisoners of one social class or another. If you were there, you were an enemy of the state.
In her Pulitzer Prize-winning historical account of the Soviet gulag system, author Anne Applebaum writes: