The Czar and members of his family were executed by the Bolsheviks and their bodies destroyed. Here is an eyewitness account by Leonid Krassin, a member of the early Bolshevik government, as related by his wife, Lubov Krassin: ... we went through a period of so-called “Terror”.... About six hundred to seven hundred persons were shot in Moscow and Petrograd, nine-tenths of them having been arrested quite at random or merely as suspect of belonging to the Right Wing of the S. R.’s [Socialist Revolutionaries, a Russian revolutionary party], or else of being counter-revolutionaries. In the provinces this developed into a series of revolting incidents such as arrests, executions en masse, and wholesale eviction of bourgeois and educated people from their houses, leaving them homeless. The test of loyalty was often to what class the individual belonged, the extent of his education, how he was dressed, how much food he had in his house. If his pantry was too well stocked or his clothes too new, he might be accused of being an exploiter and sent before an execution squad. This was an example of the dictatorship of the proletariat in action. This was a first step toward what Marx proclaimed as the “final” and “perfect” state of society, which is as visionary now as it was then. Millions of Russians found themselves gripped by a tyranny incomparably worse than that of the Czar. Oddly, despite the predictions of Marx, communism seized power in a country where Marx would least have expected it. Marx had prophesied that the revolution was destined to occur in a highly industrialized nation. Russia was industrially backward. During the years 1917-20 the Bolsheviks were forced to fight for survival, first against the German army, then in a war with Poland. Also, the White Russians, a vigorous anti-Bolshevik group, assembled powerful military forces. A bitter White-Red civil war raged. Lenin’s answer was a policy of “war communism.” Most industry was nationalized. Trade and commerce were officially abolished. The government undertook to distribute manufactured articles to the people. In agricultural regions food supplies were openly confiscated. Poor peasants were assembled in committees to spy on their richer neighbors who might be hiding grain. The setting of class against class was an established tactic of communism. By 1921, when the last “enemies” had been driven from Russia, the nation was a shambles. The Bolsheviks, trying to adapt Marxist theory to a nation predominantly rural, had compounded confusion. Industrial production was down, peasants were in open revolt. Private incentive had been ruined. By 1922 famine raged, with tens of millions of people starving or on a semistarvation diet. Some estimates place the loss of life at five million. This was Russia’s introduction to communism.