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You're in luck — I have just been diving back into the revolutions of 1917 to try to write an answer about the Kornilov affair, so a lot of this is fresh in my mind.

The Uncertainty Principle

This is one of those things that serious, respected historians with years of experience can disagree on, and disagree they do. In addition, since the collapse of the USSR, the opening of Soviet archives, and the independence of the former sister republics, the kinds of questions asked in the field of Soviet history have changed. Questions about the imperial nature of the USSR and about the roles of non-Russian and otherwise minoritized Soviet citizens have both become much easier to research than previously, and much more seemingly relevant than questions about Bolshevik legitimacy and/or inevitability.

So the answer that the field as a whole seems to have settled on is a cautious "maybe", and I'm not sure we'll get a more definitive one any time soon. However, I can certainly give a summary of what those serious, respected historians have had to say on the issue so far, and I can of course share some of my own thoughts on the topic. I have to admit I'm going to be a little Americentric, for which I apologize.

Before I start naming names, though, I feel like I can't help but say, at least once, that the Russian Revolutions of 1917 were incredible complicated and contingent events. I've been trying to write an answer recently about the events of August 1917 alone, and it's already stretched out to nearly two comments and has me desperately confused. There are several structural factors at play: growing national wealth, industrialization, urbanization, the creation of a migrant semi-proletariat, the backdrop of a primarily agrarian society, political repression and autocracy, radicalization among all classes. Add on top of that the personal idiosyncrasies and personalities of Kerensky, Lvov, Kornilov, Trotsky, Lenin, Chernov, of course Nicholas II himself, and dozens of others, and you get a very confusing picture indeed.

An Elegant Question For a Less Civilized Age

The first major study of the Russian revolution approaching some kind of historical perspective would probably have to be William Henry Chamberlin's The Russian Revolution, 1917–1921, published in 1935. Chamberlin was pretty representative of the early trends in the historiography of the Revolution, which is to say a sort of balanced, cautious positivity. (To be fair, though word of the 1930-1933 famines had reached the west, news of the political purges of 1937 had not, in part because they had yet to happen). To Chamberlin, the October Revolution was the legitimate rise to power of a popular and widely representative political party, even if violent in its methods and consequences and not truly democratic in its representativeness. Chamberlin, I'd say, was closer to being right than you might think — but methodologically very limited and narrowly focused on the political.

For the next few decades, your question was probably the main question of the study of the revolution. Soviet historians, rather naturally, tended to argue that the revolution had been inevitable, caused by the total backwardness of the old regime, and popular, enjoying a wide base of support. It was around the 1940s and 1950s that a "totalitarian" school of thought emerged in the American historiography in direct, liberal Cold-Warriorish response to that Soviet idea, and to the now very widely publicized stories of Soviet human rights abuses.

For example, James Billington never wrote a book solely on the 1917 revolution, but he's in line with the broader totalitarian-school consensus when he says, in The Icon and the Axe (1966), that the Bolsheviks seized power in an anti-democratic coup that reverted all of the progress of the February revolution and very soon repressed whatever moderate popular support the Bolsheviks had enjoyed. Adam Ulam, meanwhile, essentially argued in his Lenin and the Bolsheviks (1965) that Lenin had been the driving force behind the events of October 1917, and that whatever belief he and his followers had ever had in democracy was not reflected in their seizure of power and entirely abandoned shortly thereafter.

Finally, Some Good F***ing Historiography

However, it was around the time of those two books that an opposing school of thought had begun to emerge in the study of Soviet history. This "revisionist" school objected to the portrayal of the Soviet Union as an Arendtian totalitarian state with no room for dissent and all-encompassing, mind-controlling party organs. Instead, for the revisionists, the Soviet Union was best understood as a weak state lashing out at bogeymen for lack of more subtle methods, where in-fighting was common and the reach of the state into private life was, at least in the world of everyday social interaction, weak at best.

(This is also the time of the eminent but somewhat idiosyncratic historians E. H. Carr, Isaac Deutscher, and Eric Hobsbawm, whom I don't really feel right calling revisionists, but who nonetheless as Marxists tended to take positive views of the October Revolution.)

You can probably begin to imagine how the revisionists approached the October Revolution, but I'm still going to give a summary. Perhaps the key revisionist — or at least my favorite — is Sheila Fitzpatrick, and her absolutely wonderful The Russian Revolution (original 1982, 2nd ed. 1994) handles the revolution a little differently. Rather than take a political angle, the revisionists and Fitzpatrick took a more social and structural view of the revolution. (That's perhaps why I like them so much; before them, historians had positive or negative views of the Bolsheviks, but all built on a somewhat narrow political understanding. The revisionists opened up the field to social, cultural, post-colonial perspectives — all kinds of cool stuff.)

For Fitzpatrick, at least at the moment of the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks were nothing like the conspiratorial vanguard party that Lenin claimed to want to organize in What Is to Be Done?, but a mass party representing a real and understandable, if admittedly less-than-responsible, anger and desire for change on the part of the urban proletariat. Benefitting from the Provisional Government's discrediting in the Kornilov affair of August 1917, the Bolsheviks led an "insurrection," to be sure, but one with broad popular support and participation.

Totalitarian approaches to the Soviet Union and to the events of 1917 didn't just disappear from the academic scene, though, as exemplified by Richard Pipes. Pipes was quite conservative. He advised the Reagan administration on its Soviet policy, he was that conservative. But he was primarily an academic historian. He was around in the 1960s, but his big work on the 1917 revolution was published in 1991 and took a very negative view of it — even more strongly than many of the earlier Cold Warriors of the totalitarian school's heyday. For Pipes, the whole thing was a sinister coup that basically undid any progress since the end of autocracy. Beyond that, Pipes argued, the entire revolutionary project was alien and doomed to failure by nature. In order to hold that position, though, Pipes had to leave out a lot of material, and even beyond my political opposition to him, he was just factually wrong about a lot of characterizations.

Revising the Revision

Though Pipes was an absolute stick in the mud, and his positions untenable in a lot of ways, there were some younger and more interesting historians out there who also took issue with revisionist approaches to the USSR and 1917. Most famous among them is probably Orlando Figes. (Stephen Kotkin and J. Arch Getty are probably more representative of a "post-revisionist" school, but they write more about Stalinism than the 1917 revolution.) Figes' A People's Tragedy (1996) might just be the best and most comprehensive single volume on the Revolution yet written (much as it pains me to say it, because Figes himself is a bit of a jerk and the quality of his history has really dropped off since).

With the USSR itself gone, Figes' book tried to take a step back from the intensity of the earlier debate and portrays the revolution as a failure of impossible ideals, not a story of good ideas hamstrung by an insurmountable societal foundation or an intentional plot of bad faith. That is, for Figes, the October Revolution was both somewhat popularly supported, and a coup that contradicted that popular support. Still a political position, but one that tried to clothe itself in humanism and a pretense to being apolitical, basically.