Although political violence was central during the Greek Interwar period, it is rarely analyzed as a dynamic encounter between state repression, revolutionary violence, and the social activism of subordinate classes. The story of Michalis Bezentakos— a young communist who was arrested for the deadly shooting of police officer Georgios Gyftodimopoulos in Drapetsona in August 1931, spectacularly escaped from Syndagma Prison, and fled to the Soviet Union— was not a simple "criminal case." It offers snapshots of a low-intensity civil war already underway at the heart of the Second Greek Republic. Cracks in the social fabric of the era and fragments of a shared European experience of the 20th century. The case fueled conspiracy theories about Soviet subversion, triggered a Greek "Red Panic," and reignited social fears of communism and broader working-class struggles. It led to mass arrests, staged testimonies, torture, political persecutions—but also left behind something more enduring: a living legend that survived through oral memory, song, and revolutionary mythology. The "Bezentakos" became a Brechtian, satirical, and festive revolutionary song of cultural resistance and workers' pride against the hostile state. Bezentakos, renamed Georgi Bentas, fled to Moscow, got married, and had a daughter— only to fall, a few years later, victim to Stalinist purges. From Drapetsona to the dark underground of the NKVD, his journey sketches one of the most dramatic intersections of Greek and Soviet history, examining the common elements of Soviet and Greek social panic. The book "When the Bourgeois Were Afraid..." reads the Bezentakos case as a condensation of a civil war before the Civil War; as a scene where Great History intersects with an individual's fate and social panic takes shape, face, and name.