So, the classical Marxist doctrine is that history proceeds through certain stages. Marx spoke about pre Neolithic human kind as "primitive communism" ("original communism" might be a more appropriate term), which transformed into slave societies with the rise of agriculture and cities. These long-lasting slave societies eventually fell apart into "feudal" societies like we see in medieval Europe, which eventually would develop into capitalist societies, which would eventually develop into socialist and communist societies (I say "develop;" Marx believed that the changes happen for a long time "underneath the surface" so to speak before a dramatic break – revolution – ushered in the new era with great violence). The point is that this development happened because of the internal "contradictions" of each system, that eventually led them to metamorphose into another system. Most Marxists today do not hold such a linear view of history.

With this in mind, look at early 20th century Russia. People at the time were still calling it "feudal" or "semi-feudal," it was not industrialized like Germany, the UK, or the U.S., and it was largely illiterate. The thought that a society could go from "feudal" to "socialist" without going through the capitalist phase that allowed the means of production to develop to the technological state needed for socialism to work seemed to contradict classical and orthodox Marxist theory, and we see Bolshevik theorists making attempts to reconcile this (the most famous is no doubt Trotsky's theory of Permanent Revolution).

It is true that the Bolsheviks – or at least Lenin – disregarded this analysis ultimately, and decided to "intervene in history" so-to-speak, to go for creating a socialist state out of a "feudal" state. Some socialist intellectuals, like the astronomer Anton Pannekoek in his classic Lenin as Philosopher, have used this as an argument that Lenin and the Bolsheviks were a bourgeois deviation from a more authentic Marxist analysis. Here's an excerpt (note that he is arguing for exactly the thesis the OP is asking about):

In Russia, however, matters were different. Here the fight against Czarism was analogous to the former fight against absolutism in Europe. In Russia too church and religion were the strongest supports of the system of government: they held the rural masses, engaged in primitive agrarian production, in complete ignorance and superstition. The struggle against religion was here a prime social necessity. Since in Russia there was no significant bourgeoisie that as a future ruling class could take up the fight, the task fell to the intelligentsia during scores of years it waged a strenuous fight for enlightenment of the masses against Czarism. Among the Western bourgeoisie, now reactionary and anti-materialist, it could find no support whatever in this struggle. It had to appeal to the socialist workers, who alone sympathised with it, and it took over their acknowledged theory, Marxism. Thus it came about that even intellectuals who were spokesmen of the first rudiments of a Russian bourgeoisie, such as Peter Struve and Tugan Baranovski, presented themselves as Marxists. They had nothing in common with the proletarian Marxism of the West: what they learned from Marx was the doctrine of social development with capitalism as the next phase. A power for revolution came up in Russia for the first time when the workers took up the fight, first by strikes only, then in combination with political demands. Now the intellectuals found a revolutionary class to join up with, in order to become its spokesmen in a socialist party.

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Others have noted that Marx's vision of history as laid out in his famous Theses on Feuerbach is not strictly determinist, but points out the dialectical (there's that word that Marxists love) relationship between how humans "make their own destiny" but not "in circumstances of their choosing" (actually those lines are from the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, but the point is the same). So other Marxist thinkers (like Zizek) have defended Lenin on the grounds that he actually understood Marx's theory of history better than his critics, and dared to intervene rather than be a passive observer. Thus, part of the reason why Lenin is such a legend. Here is Zizek on exactly that point:

The Mensheviks relied on the all-embracing foundation of the positive logic of historical development; while the Bolsheviks (Lenin, at least) were aware that "The big Other doesn't exist" – a political intervention proper does not occur within the co-ordinates of some underlying global matrix, since what it achieves is precisely the 'reshuffling' of this very matrix.

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