in relation to the 1920s (Stalinism in the 1930s was a different matter), it is not obvious that Soviet society was more violent than its tsarist predecessor. Historians often fail to convey how ingrained violence was in late-imperial Russia, evinced in colonial conquest, police repression, counter-insurgency, terrorism by left and right, and anti-Jewish pogroms, extending, too, into more everyday forms of violence, such as practices of samosud (‘self-judgement’), meted out by peasant communities on those who transgressed their norms, to the flogging of prisoners, to beatings in the workplace, child abuse, and wife-beating. At least some of these violent practices diminished under the Soviet regime. Any judgement on this matter, however, depends on how violence—a notoriously slippery and easily expandable concept—is defined. ... The Bolshevik Revolution certainly did not remove poverty and exploitation: indeed it would be decades before the material conditions of life in general surpassed those of the tsarist regime. But we should pause before accepting the view that the Russian Revolution initiated a cycle of escalating violence that inevitably culminated in the gulag.

— Russia in revolution by S. A. Smith