I may be getting into the territory of conspiracy theories here, but I thought this was a good subreddit to ask my question.
Part of my high school education was under a Russian school system where History of Russia was mandatory. The system taught us that the Russian Revolutions of 1917 were the culmination of regular Russian folk, feeling dissatisfied with centuries of unfair treatment, decided to take matters into their own hands and build a just society. Whether it was just or not is another issue. I am thinking there is an alternate, truer explanation to the whole series of events. What if a small group of people led by Lenin decided to overthrow the government and decided to wash the minds of Russian people? This would include spreading various propaganda and control the whole information systems of the time. And rewrite history saying that this was what the Russian people wanted. What if in reality, the masses, the Russian people were completely fine living under the old regime?
I won't give a comprehensive answer, particularly because trying to determine the causes and popularity of the Russian Revolution is something I wouldn't be able to sufficiently cover within the remit of this post.
In part, it's correct to see Lenin as leading a small group of revolutionaries; this was a key facet of his Bolshevik ideology - that in order to enact a Marxist regime, it was necessary to create a revolutionary core to bring about a revolution and to establish soviets in its wake. In this regard, the Revolution was indeed the result of a relatively small revolutionary core; indeed, the Bolsheviks were not the only party of the left, and there was a very significant Menshevik core (which to Lenin had by participating in Russian government by sitting in the Duma had become incorrigbly corrupted by its liberal and capitalistic nature). This new regime, unsurprisingly, sought to present itself as legitimate and enacted propaganda to say so; such a move is characteristic of practically any new regime, particularly one as precarious as Lenin's, and should not be taken as meaning there was unanimous popular resistance. However, there was, of course, significant resistance - the civil war into which Russia was plunged after the Bolshevik rising (the so called "reds" against the "whites") is ample evidence of this.
However, there was also considerable discontent among the Russian people. Previous uprisings had characterised the prewar period; in the most significant of these, that of 1906, the popular pressure forced the Tsar to create the Duma, which he subsequently closed for being too radical, eventually restructuring it as primarily controlled by the wealthy classes. These were popular movements, not specifically bolshevik or Leninist ones; to understand the Russian Revolution, it is thus important to understand this popular imperative as well as the work of Lenin's "revolutionary core".