One of the cliches in Soviet studies is that a Marxist revolution occurred in 1917 in the one country that Marx held was least likely to have a proletarian revolution. In addition to maintaining some Russophobic sentiments that were common for German men of their background, neither Marx nor his collaborator Engels felt that socioeconomic conditions had advanced enough within the Russian Empire to warrant faith in a Russian Revolution that would occur independently from Western European developments. Although both men maintained contact with various Russian intellectuals and populists, their radical energies were much more focused upon Western Europe. Early Marxists would also toy with the prospects of a revolution based upon the Russian peasantry's sense of collective ownership, but for the first generation of post-Marx Marxists like Ferdinand Lassalle or August Bebel, Russian events were distant and relatively unimportant.

Yet Marxism came to Russia even if Western Europeans felt that the country's socioeconomic development was not yet ripe for a revolution. This was not surprising in hindsight. Russia had a long tradition of intellectual radicalism that predated back to the Decemberists of the 1820s. Marx's Russian contemporary and fellow exile, Alexander Herzen synthesized a good deal of Russian radical thought ranging from utopian socialists to anarchists and narodnoki. Mikhail Bakunin's anarchism likewise managed to exert exert a transnational hold on various intellectuals. While these two thinkers were not Marxists, they were a reflection of a growing and more sophisticated radical political tradition within tsardom. The reactionary politics of the Romanovs only encouraged this trend as the autocracy treated any independent political thought as potentially subversive and the state structure of the Empire was not conducive for wider political participation by a growing strata of educated Russians. Russia had its own indigenous Marxists by the 1880s with figures like Georgi Plekhanov articulating a Marxist plan for Russia. Marxism fell on very fertile ground in Russia among its intellectuals and others of educated society disaffected with the trajectory of Russian sociopolitical development.

To what extent that Marxism was popular among the masses of Russia's peasantry and growing proletariat is a more difficult question to answer. Populism and other forms of agrarian communalism did enjoy a great deal of popularity among the peasantry as well as cultural luminaries like Tolstoi. The Russian working-classes likewise did show support for trade unionism and other types of reformism typical of the Second International. By 1900, radical opinion in Russia was giving into centrifugal tendencies and splitting. The main Russian Marxist party, the RSDLP, likewise split between the Mensheviks and the Bolshevik wings. Although the divisions between the two wings were not as sharp as post-1917 thinking maintained, the split centered around the proper role of Marxists in Russia: whether a Marxist party should encourage a bourgeois revolution to pave the way for a true proletarian revolution or should a vanguard party try and move the historical-materialist timetable ahead. But for all of the splintering in Russian radicalism, the autocracy was really unable to master modern politics and created systemic blockages in the political system that only encouraged radicalism.

It is not too much of a stretch to say that if Marx did not exist it would have been necessary for Russians to invent him. The Tsarist political order and state were too archaic and reactionary to defuse or tame these revolutionary sentiments. Moreover, Marxism's political philosophy managed to tick off enough boxes among educated and politically-minded Russians to be quite tempting. Its positivist embrace of scientific development was attractive to young members of the Russia's small middling classes. Likewise, Marxism's promise of communism after revolution appealed to both Romantics and populists who had valorized the peasant commune as an ideal for humanity. The chiliastic vision of global revolution also gave form to various anarchists' politics. While Marxism did not create the conditions for a revolution in Russia, the political philosophy did help give revolutionary sentiments form when it did arrive in 1917.

In response to a deleted comment

The Naked Communist by Cleon Skousen is a rather poor source to understand the origin and evolution of Marxism in Russia. The book adapts a conspiratorial tone and really ignores all evidence that does not support notions of Marxism as an intellectual bacillus. Skousen contends that Marx wormed his way into Russia via a guileless Bakunin whose translation of Kapital planted "seeds which would ultimately bring the first nation in the modern world under a Communist dictatorship."

Bakunin's translation did have an impact upon Russian intellectual thought, but this was only one of several avenues available for Marx to come into Russia. The language barrier was not much of a barrier since most educated Russians of this period would have had literacy in either French or German, which were the languages commonly used among Russian literati. Moreover, to claim that Marx died obscure and forgotten completely ignores the rich Marxist tradition of countries like Germany and France. Marxists like Lasalle and Jaurès may not have the same hold on public memory as Marx or Lenin, but they were not nobodies.