I've read a lot of books about Imperial Russia & Soviet Russia, Russian history was my thing for a while. This book just concentrates on a few families of the nobility and how their lives were affected post 1917. The section I had just read when I made the above comment was about the period 1918 - 1921 when an estimated 10 million people died in the civil wars between the Whites & the Reds and the terror that was inflicted on ALL the people that didn't back the Bolsheviks.

Uhmmmmmmm..... I think not

I agree - while not only for the few more or less hereditary wealthy (i.e. nobles, upper military & church) but also the "common people" things got rather worse with the civil wars and the ensueing communist rule, the fact enough people felt the latter were a solution points to the way how things were before that. In other words: Nothing comes from nothing; had the powerful been exploiting the poor less mercilessly, maybe the communists hadn't risen to power. It surely wasn't like "everything quite okay round there before the bloody commies landed in an UFO"... Insofar, it may be even more appropiate to see the czar embodied by Darth Vader than Lenin et al.

The book is called "Former People - The last days of the Russian Aristocracy" by Douglas Smith. It looks at the post 1917 Russia from the point of view of a few noble families.

And I live in Balkans and feel the American democracy every day. And I support you: If Americans were rational they would prefer the Darth Vader also!