I find this one of history’s greatest “what ifs”; of course hindsight is 20/20, but it seems like the bolsheviks truly had no basis of power until the unbelievably war weary Russian people saw that they were the only political party calling for peace. Maybe Karensky would’ve formed a democracy, maybe he would’ve been a military dictator, or maybe the SRs, the most popular party through this period, would’ve won in a democratic system and gotten a chance to try out agrarian socialism on a large scale.