Somebody: That doesn't explain much in itself. You could name any number of countries in the 20th century that had starving populations that didn't turn to socialist revolutions. If all it took was a high level of undernutrition, then all of Sub-Saharan Africa would have gone red after de-colonization. And Afghanistan, with it's brew of civil war, anti-colonial struggle, and dire poverty would be next - except that it already had it's farce of a socialist regime after the Saur Revolution.
What made the October Revolution possible was the additional factor of socialist and anarchist ideology that had been stewing in the country through the second half of the 19th century. That's the other takeaway we can take from Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, who both felt the need to respond in their peculiar ways to that growing class consciousness. It took about the same amount of time, say a half century, for socialism to percolate down to the masses of soldiers and peasants in China as well. Problem is, socialism is a dead letter for the masses today, whether in New York, Bangkok, Warsaw, or Lagos.