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Many of the commentators on Jewish Bolsheviks noted the “transformation” of Jews after the Bolshevik Revolution. In the words of a Jewish commentator, G. A. Landau, “cruelty, sadism, and violence had seemed alien to a nation so far removed from physical activity.” And another Jewish commentator, Ia. A. Bromberg, noted that:
the formerly oppressed lover of liberty had turned into a tyrant of “unheard-of-despotic arbitrariness”…. The convinced and unconditional opponent of the death penalty not just for political crimes but for the most heinous offenses, who could not, as it were, watch a chicken being killed, has been transformed outwardly into a leather-clad person with a revolver and, in fact, lost all human likeness. ...
After the Revolution, ... there was active suppression of any remnants of the older order and their descendants. ... The mass murder of peasants and nationalists was combined with the systematic exclusion of the previously existing non-Jewish middle class. The wife of a Leningrad University professor noted, “in all the institutions, only workers and Israelites are admitted; the life of the intelligentsia is very hard”.