I don't know the details of the Communist Revolution there. To me it seems like sometimes revolution is going to happen, and its future leaders see the revolution coming and claim it as their own. If you see it coming and get out in front then you can claim its yours even if its not, like surfing a wave. You cannot create the wave yourself. I think the communists named the revolution, tried to define it; but it was a revolt wasn't it? It was people wanting something to happen, unhappy about the way things were. I don't think that the communists caused there to be a revolution. Maybe I'm wrong? If there had been no communists defining it what would it have been? It would have been something else, but there still would have been a revolution.
The Tsar himself was probably the greatest "cause" of the Revolutions, both in 1905 and in 1917. Granted, there were numerous factions at work of various political stripes. The Bolsheviks were only one of many, although they were known agitators and targeted by the Okhrana.
An excellent read detailing the background and events leading up to the 1917 Revolutions is Robert Massie's
Nicholas and Alexandra. The war had been going badly for them. Large sections of their country were under German occupation, and troops were deserting in the tens of thousands. Morale was bad. The workers on the homefront were disgruntled. Strikes and work stoppages were crippling the economy, including vital food transports to major cities.
Nicholas was often described as weak and vacillating, and from Massie's account, one gets the sense that the Tsar and Tsaritsa had just "given up" by early 1917. The Tsaritsa was no doubt still in mourning over Rasputin, and Nicholas didn't know what to do. They were losing the war, the country was falling apart around them, and they were just sitting there. The capital city was starving, and even the Tsarist troops couldn't turn the blind eye to the suffering of the people. They sympathized with the people, and with the help of the Duma, the Tsar was compelled to abdicate.
It seemed to be more of a spontaneous mutiny than any kind of planned revolution.
The Tsar might have been able to remain if he acted sooner and more decisively, instead of just sitting there like a moron. He lost the respect of his troops, the respect of his generals; their position was untenable. That was the first Revolution of 1917, which the Bolsheviks had very little to do with. Lenin was still in exile.
The Duma was a legally elected parliament and the basic governmental infrastructure still remained. In the absence of a Tsar, the Duma established a Provisional Government to run things until they could hold an election for a constituent assembly. I think they envisioned having a parliamentary system similar to the British, and some even favored the idea of retaining the Tsar as a figurehead, just like with the Royal Family in Britain.
Another aspect of what was going on was that the Russian Imperial Army was becoming somewhat "democratized." The officers had lost control, and individual military units were voting on who their commanders would be and what course they would take. Every barracks would have nightly political meetings where they would hotly debate issues and what course they were going to take. Not all of them were socialist revolutionaries, but they were certainly there. Most of them didn't really go along with the Bolsheviks, but they weren't all that enthusiastic about protecting the Kerensky-led Provisional Government.
Meanwhile, Lenin and the other Bolshevik leaders came back to St. Petersburg and started agitating and calling for Russians to "finish the Revolution." The Bolsheviks attempted an uprising in July, 1917, which failed. Kerensky was able to hold on to power. The war was still going badly for the Russians, but it was felt that with the Americans now in the war, the tide might have turned in their favor. Britain, France, and the US pressured Kerensky to remain in the war, but many Russians had suffered too much and wanted out. Lenin promised peace.
After the Bolshevik-led uprising was put down, Kerensky faced a threat from the right-wing, General Kornilov. Kornilov wasn't too happy with Kerensky or his government for a variety of reasons. If he had gained power, he probably would have crushed the Bolsheviks. This meant that the Bolsheviks actually had a stake in helping to defend the Kerensky regime, so they made a deal in which Kerensky gave weapons to the Red Guards in St. Petersburg to help defend against Kornilov's attempted coup.
After the coup was put down, Kerensky politely asked the Red Guards to return the weapons they borrowed, and the Red Guards politely refused. Lenin had to escape to Finland temporarily, but given the situation in St. Petersburg and all of Russia at that point, along with the precarious position of the Kerensky regime, he decided that this was the "golden moment" to seize power. This is what happened on November 7:
But in actuality, the Bolshevik Revolution was more a seizure of power and toppling of the unpopular Kerensky government, but that in no way gave them immediate control of the whole country. There were still a lot of Tsarist officers around and other factions who weren't too keen on the Bolsheviks. At the outset, the Bolsheviks had control of some core territory including St. Petersburg and Moscow, but most of the rest of the country was out of their hands. They also had large numbers of German forces occupying much of the country, and they were still technically at war with Germany, although they eventually negotiated the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (which is an interesting story in itself).
In the ensuing Russian Civil War, there were again numerous factions at work, including interventionist forces from various Allied countries, along with the Germans and many others fighting against the Bolsheviks. There was even a Czech legion stuck somewhere in Siberia when the Revolution broke out, and part of the Allied pretext for the intervention was to save the Czechs. They also fought on the side of the "White" forces in the Civil War.
The Bolsheviks did manage to eventually prevail in the Civil War, which might be considered the actual "revolution." I've read that Trotsky's oratory and persuasive abilities were credited in getting many Russians to join the Red Army and fight for the Bolsheviks. The Whites were associated with the Tsar, who was still widely hated in Russia. The Allied intervention also became a liability, since the Bolsheviks could then say they were defending Mother Russia against foreign invaders. They pointed out the sins and flaws of the French and British Empires, along with US capitalism, racism, and imperialism - and they were fighting on the same side as the Germans. That really, really looks bad, when you think of it - and the Reds were able to point all this out and gain even more recruits in the process.
So, I would say that they did win over a lot of Russians, at least in that crucial period. They did have to fight tooth and nail to get to the position they achieved, so it wasn't as if they just snuck into it. The people had their eyes open, they were free to pick sides, and enough people ultimately picked the Red side that they ended up winning the war.
Afterwards, in those early years when Lenin's government was in power, it started to get better, and there was a sense of hope and freedom that the Russians had not seen under the Tsar. Lenin's New Economic Policy had more free market elements to it, and it seemed they wanted to build socialism more slowly and incrementally at first. Unfortunately, Lenin died in 1924, which led to a struggle for power within the Bolshevik leadership.
