The October 1917 hurricane meant a clean sweep of the old forms of Russian life. It is now a truism to state that the revolution not only transformed political, social, and economic relations, but profoundly affected religion, science, and art as well. The thoroughness and the speed with which the destruction of the old took place may not have been intentional. One may suppose that Lenin and his aides were prepared for the gradational tempo of an evolutionary process. What accelerated and deepened this process was the refusal of the old to give way to, or to merge with the new, and its sullen resistance, both passive and active. Military Communism, with all its drastic levelling, was the direct consequence of counter-revolutionary risings and foreign intervention. By the same token, the “sabotage of the intelligentsia,” as the Bolsheviks branded the refusal of sundry experts to cooperate with them, caused a swift change in the intellectual and artistic aspects of the country. The change was sharply felt in the plastic arts and in the arts of verbal expression — literature and the stage.