... the ruling class was distinctly the feudal aristocracy rather than the emerging capitalist class. The existence of isolated capitalist development doesn't detract from this fact, it was an absolutist state in the form of an absolute monarchy.
Tahir: I think you need to find out more about absolutism - it does not simply refer to the unfettered rule of the aristocracy and monarchy together. The absolutist state is a form of state that emerged during the transition to capitalism and tended to involve an alliance of the autocracy with the emergent bourgeoisie, whereby the bourgeoisie would obtain some relief from medieval lawlessnes and the depredations of the aristocracy by appeal to the monarch.
Lenin's (and later Stalin's) government was revolutionary in nature, its historic mission was the transition from feudalism to capitalism ... your assertion that it was a transition "from one stage of capitalism to another" appears to be at odds with the fact that Russia wasn't capitalist to begin with. (If you continue to assert it was already capitalist, when did the transition to capitalist rule take place?)
Tahir: I always begin to weary when the debate becomes one about classification. There was an underdeveloped form of capitalism that existed - Lenin had already written about The Development of Capitalism in Russia, although I haven't read that work - and it existed alongside the feudal system. The bourgeoisie had not taken power, hence my point about no democratic revolution, but that doesn't mean that they didn't exist and didn't have influence.
It is also at odds with logic in that it is essentially asserting that the transition was from capitalism to capitalism. Which wouldn't be a transition at all of course, yet most surely some form of transition took place.
Tahir: There had been no bourgeois revolution, therefore the country was trapped in an intermediate phase - loads of Russian literature from the 19th century consisted of handwringing over this state of affairs - try Turgenev, for example (not a bad read actually). Incidentally since we are on the topic of logic, if there had been no capitalism in Russia there would have been no proletariat. Are you willing to go so far as to say that?
Let me say again I have no desire to say that Russia was completely capitalist or completely feudal - both would be wrong and a waste of time. There are much more interesting questions related to all this. One of them is the question of why it is that communist parties of the Leninist type only emerged strongly in the countries that had been under some form of absolutism and had very little influence in those countries that had completed a bourgeois democratic revolution, such as England, France and the US. This is because the Leninist Party is the party of development for backward regions; its violence is the violence of a frustrated society that needs to break out of the absolutist straightjacket and catch up with the other (envied) nations. It has no other function, and that is why it is already disappearing into the mists of history in most parts of the world.