[WS:] That was the whole point. We are talking about counterfactual to history, so "what if" depends what we focus on, what we think is important. Of course, we cannot prove any of those "what it" outcomes, but their value lies in examining broad possibilities and less salient factors. One of those less salient factors was the mobilization of the demobilized WW1 military for the political cause. The Bolsheviks did it and won the revolution. The Italian fascists did it and successfully grabbed power. Ditto for Spanish fascists. Another factor was the effect of the Russian revolution on the West which was full of different possibilities - from scaring the living shit out of the bourgeoisie, to the suffocating effect of the Comintern, and to the perceived "example effect" how to implement radical changes which was not such a good example - as I argued.
In any case, the whole point of this exercise is to show that history is not a nomothetic science as economists and even some sociologists treat it. It is more like a chess game - there are some rules and regularities, but it is not possible to predict the outcome of any given game from outcomes of previous games.
Wojtek