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This article describes a marvelous example of survivorship bias (or in this case "winners write history") coupled with classic Christensen disruption:

"The legal institutions of Tsarist Russia were mortally wounded by the collapse of Tsarism; in contrast, the illegal underground survived intact, possessed of a nationwide scope and plausible claims to mass support and legitimacy. The socialist underground was much more a product of Russian history than of ideological machinations."

Remember this the next time you read an article about how such and such a company succeeded. The things in the article are (perhaps) true, but are hardly complete and never take into account the luck and randomness of the situation.

A lot of history, including business is a "just so story". We push the boundaries and hope we catch a break.

Indeed. For such an essay to not discuss how the disastrous Menshevik decision to continue the war fatally weakened them and their positions ... well, you don't have weigh Marxist minutia so much if you consider things like that, or the much greater ruthlessness of the Bolsheviks.

(I've lately taken up detailed study of WWI, it's really critical to understanding what followed. And a lot of the superficial histories get a lot wrong, e.g. the "hidebound" British Royal Navy launched seaplane air raids on German Zeppelin hangers (!) on January 19-20 of 1915, rather early in the war....)