How much of the socialist/anti capitalist/ anti colonialist/ anti Tsarist sentiment were influenced by the French Revolution? In what ways were the grievance of the revolutionist the same in each case?
When the bolsheviks took the Winter Palace in 1917, they did it while they were singing the Marselleise. October Revolution protagonists and the same Lenin did really feel they were the legitimate holders of the French Revolution legacy. Although Trotsky rejected to use the 1789 myth since he considered the historical development of Russia had been different from the French one, he often compared Lenin with Robespierre. Marxist historians like Albert Mathiez contributed to strengthen the link between the two periods, but the Soviet Union eventually remarked that the essence of the Russian revolutionary process had been the worker component, not the bourgeois.
If you want more information, feel free to check a couple of papers: "Marxist Historians and the Question of Class in the French Revolution", by Amariglio and Norton, and " The Perils of Historical Analogy: Leon Trotsky on the French Revolution", by Bergman.