And from where did the land-owning class obtain the land appropriated from them in 1917, pray tell?
The Russian state first started with a small group of Viking princes in the area of Kiev and expanded to rule an area that used to be home to a wide variety of empires, states, kingdoms, and tribes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_russia#Kievan_Rus.27
And that's exactly how the Communists, in turn, came to own it.