First let me say that I think Fyodor Petrovich is correct to state that the French nobility were not the social class that suffered most during the revolutionary terror. As I recall, that class was the peasantry. The same was true of the October Revolution in the long run.
In my reply 3 ,I referred to 'hundreds' of aristocrats but I was just being conservative. Thousands of individuals would have been more like it. Also, iin Russia, even with its system of "tchin", and elsewhere where there was an aristocracy, the term 'aristocracy' doesn't lend itself to a precise definition. It's often equated,including by me, with other terms, namely 'nobility' or even ' gentry', though the latter in English has a connotation of "bourgeoisness(wd?) lacking in most conceptions of aristocracy. The OED is surprisingly unhelpful in distinguishing between the"aristocracy' and the "nobility" in a political sense.
Here reading a lot of English literature stands one in good stead... Going by Regency and Victorian writers, I would say that there is a definite distinction between the aristocracy and the gentry. Both social strata belong to the nobility, but the aristocracy represent the oldest, most established and esteemed families; they are usually titled and usually very large landowners, thus wealthy as well. Whereas yes, the gentry is more on the cusp of the upper middle class, middling to small landowners to clergy with no real land to speak of at all.
But for the purpose of answering Rusmila's topic question, the simple answer is : As soon as the Bolsheviks could; the destruction of inherited (or unworked-for) privilege was a precondition of a proletarian state. The aristocrats were the easiest targets and the first to be targeted for destruction. But by Stalin's time, that definition was diluted (or expanded) to mean any peasant farmer with a little cultivated land and a couple of pigs, a horse or two, or a few sheep or the occasional field hired hand to help with the harvest.
It's actually my impression that Lenin hated the intelligentsia, the bourgeoisie, and the peasantry as much if not more than the nobility. He saw them all as exploiters of the working class. He infamously referred to the intelligentsia as "s**t" and railed against merchants and grain-hoarding peasants as "insects" worthy only of being stamped out. He was basically just full of hate, much like Hitler.
For me it's difficult to sort out local actions against "class enemies" (necessarily, in Lenin's view, "counter-revolutionaries") from Lenin's own directives from on high. There doesn't seem to have been any real order to the process, until the early 1920s, when it's obvious that, for example, a lot of nobles got rounded up on the orders of the central government and pushed into the recently established concentration camps. During the civil war, of course, many "class enemies" were simply rounded up and shot out of hand, in the spirit of bloodthirsty reprisal. But again, these victims were not only nobles, they were also and no doubt more preponderantly merchants and better-off peasants.
I think the war on the peasantry during collectivization under Stalin was not by any stretch of the imagination a "dilution" of previous class warfare, on the contrary, as you term it, it was an "expansion," indeed, a major
intensification of it. The peasantry suffered far more than the nobility under the communists because they were more than 80 percent of the population; moreover, in 1917 most of them weren't literate, much less educated and politically astute. After all, almost all of the nobility who could afford it, and even many who couldn't, got out of revolutionary Russia when the going was good. The vast majority of the peasantry had little choice but to stay and suffer the consequences.