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ejectees from that glorious empire, or descendents of ejectees.
The first fled with those members of her family that could. Her families house was occupied by White forces, and the ever merciful Red troops burned it down in retaliation for being occupied. The family members that weren't sent away at the first opportunity (her and her older brother), she later found out, were killed by the Red Army. Parents, her younger brother/sister (small kids), and aunt.
The second was born in the diaspora. Her grandparents weren't poor in 1917, and her parents were college educated. Therefore they weren't allowed to hold any decent jobs: discrimination against people because of their parents or education was the norm. The middle class was not proletarian. They left under Lenin after their first child--my prof--was born. Soviet medicine was wonderful; the newly trained Soviet staff went to put the silver nitrate drops in her eyes (to kill some STD or other), but confused silver nitrate and nitric acid. She was blinded, but since she was scum because her parents had been educated, nobody cared. She was kind enough to never suggest that the proletarian nurse hadn't done it based on the officially encouraged class hatred. She eventually got two PhDs, and taught at least 6 classes per semester. But she was bourgeois scum.
The third was Jewish and was therefore told what to study and what he'd be in life. He left much later, in the 70s. A couple of times he hinted that his family had it very, very rough for the 50 years before he left, but would stop short and change the subject. Jews. Soviet Union.
Finally, a current prof's family history reads like a horror novel: exile to Siberia by one regime (where the family did ok); caught on the wrong side in the civil war, so he fled to Harbin, China, lest the Red Army summarily execute him and his entire family (new rulers, same oppression). Twenty years later, the Japanese own the place, and the family's daughter winds up married to a Japanese solder, sent back to Japan during the "real" war; fortunately she wasn't nuked. Of course, had the family escaped being executed by the Red Army and the official discrimination under Lenin, Stalin's raskulachivanie would have impoverished them and the various "purges" probably would have killed them.
The civil war was bloody. The expurgated version became the official Soviet edition, but it's largely cleaned up: the generation after the revolution couldn't stomach it. At the time the bloodletting was a good thing (revolutionaries frequently love to have great quantities of blood spilled), and it wasn't a secret.
Looking at the history of the Soviet Union, I don't think the Whites would have done any worse.
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