The Russian Civil War (Where the new government was, in fact, surrounded by enemies on all sides, many of them receiving foreign support) was a more relevant formative experience for the policies of the Bolsheviks.

Once their actual enemies were dealt with, they, of course, spent the next three decades finding largely (but not entirely) imagined ones. The Russian Civil War 'ended' in 1922, but died with Stalin, in 1953.

This doesn’t give the Communists anywhere near enough credit for their own depravity or the energy and vigor they put into the suffering of their enemies. I do not recall the Tsarist regime using rape (in order of seniority) as a weapon of terror, or pouring molten lead down the throats of anyone like the Communists did to priests, or rolling Tsarist officers down hills in barrels studded with nails on the inside.

The Communists made the Tsarist regime look like rank amateurs in terror, they weren’t even trying in comparison

>The Communists made the Tsarist regime look like rank amateurs in terror, they weren’t even trying in comparison

There is a certain danger in this sort of thinking which seeks to compare levels of terror quantitatively with disregard to their qualitative effects and purposes. The Bolsheviks are guilty of many evils, but not for the same reasons or purposes as the Tsar. Remember that Tsarist Russia didn't only operate on cases of immediate violence, it used structural ones too. Structural violence is well understood today.

The brutality under the Bolsheviks was on a different scale than what occurred under the Tsar. According to the Gulag Archipelago, during the 1905-07 anti-socialist purges, fewer people were killed in one year than were killed in single days in the mass executions that took place in the USSR in 1937-38.

Another source on the comparative brutality of the CHEKA:

https://etd.ohiolink.edu/!etd.send_file?accession=ohiou13987...

>>As great as the Okhrana’s reputation may have inflated to, however, its repressiveness never equaled that of the Cheka or later apparatuses. Okhrana agents, for example, did not determine or carry out execution orders, nor did they engage in systematic torture; in contrast, the Cheka’s brutality is often exemplified in s actions during the ‘Red Terror’, during which five hundred perceived enemies were executed in just one day.18

The brutality of the Bolsheviks mirrored exactly the inhumanity of the Marxist ideology which animated them. Marxism was utterly hostile to propertied classes. The crude narrative generalized huge populations of people as victimizers, based on a single superficial dimension - their possession of property, and condemned them all to any punishment the proletariat deemed fit.

The class warfare ideology of Marxism was premised on highly prejudicial assumptions about wealthy classes that rationalized extreme class-based bigotry. The dehumanization and bigotry enabled a level of inhumanity/brutality that didn't occur under the more traditional/humanistic Czarist state.