"Friendly" groups were, by order of precedence, first the "real working proletariat," (an arbitrary concept to use in a country where an overwhelming majority of the some three million workers stemmed from rural peasantry), then farm laborers and poor peasants enemies - the bourgeoisie, the landowners, popes and "kulaks," the latter being defined as "exploiting farmers," in a Marxist "class struggle" approach, which could not account for the complexities of a rural world that was largely ignored and despised for what was perceived as its "Asian backwardness" by the new Bolshevik power. Indeed, from the very start, the new regime classified and categorized the population by distinguishing between friend and foe. "Mass terror" then became the instrument of a social hygiene policy aimed to eliminate groups defined as "enemies" from the new society under construction. Far more than simply channeling social violence, "mass terror" spread and developed as a determined, theorized and asserted policy, without any inhibition whatsoever, as an act of regeneration of the entire social body. Most crucial to Lenin was succeeding to channel these different forms of violence under Party control in order to direct all violence at "class enemies," who were already being described as "enemies of the people" (Council of People's Commissars Decree, November 28, 1917).
At this time, the Bolsheviks, who were but a small minority in the country, encouraged all forms of social violence - violence on the part of soldiers deserting the decomposing Czarist army by the millions, violence of the peasant uprisings which broke out in the chaos of the autumn of 1917, violence of a displaced and famished urban proletariat. The call for "mass terror" reappeared shortly after the Bolsheviks took power in October 1917.
Lenin began developing this concept in 1905 when he explained that the proletariat and the poor farming communities should resort to "mass terror" when facing Czarist regime violence during the revolutionary events of 1905-1906. It is nevertheless undeniable that the Bolsheviks theorized violence to a far greater extent as "mass terror," a central concept in Lenin's works. As in any civil war, it is particularly difficult to distinguish between military operations as such and "collateral" violence - to use this anachronistic term in the context of the events of those years: civilian massacres, hostage takings, deportations of populations collectively considered as "enemies." In these multiform conflicts, no single side had a monopoly over violence. The revolutions of 1917 in the Russian Empire led to extremely violent civil wars in 1918.
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