When Lenin stepped off the train in his return to Russia in April 1917, he was probably the only person in Russia who thought Russia would be run by socialists

When Lenin stepped off the train in his return to Russia in April 1917, he was probably the only person in Russia who thought Russia would be run by socialists within a year - the other Bolsheviks certainly didn't. They were working to support Kerensky. Russia's economy was about the size of Brazil's at the time, and he said socialists would go into a holding action in Russia while the real socialist revolution happened to the west. From the perspective of its inception, there was no failure in the Soviet Union, the failure was in the revolution in Germany.