In the 1870's a now-obscure Russian radical writer named Pyotr Tkachev
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyotr_Tkachev made the following statement:
"It is Russia's backwardness which is her great fortune, at least from the revolutionary point of view. In the West the social order is based on a wide support of the middle class. In Russia this class is just coming into existence. What holds things together in our country? Just the state, i.e., the policy and the army. What is needed to make this state fall into fragments? Not much: two or three military defeats ... some peasant uprisings .. .
open revolt in the capital. "
https://books.google.com/books?id=dN5V8WX5WP0C&pg=PA85
This looks ridiculous today--after all, it's been almost seven years since Russia celebrated the 400th anniversary of Romanov rule--and even in Tkachev's time he and his fellow hotheads were denounced as "green high school students" by Engels. But does anyone actually see this prophecy coming true? It would take a pretty stupid Tsar to lead Russia into a war sufficiently disastrous to give this prophecy even the slightest chance of being fulfilled.
(Maybe we should be glad it didn't come true, in spite of the Tsars' faults. After all, Tkachev, "while in general he remained skeptical of individual terrorist heroics... foresaw and approved without any qualms the use of
mass terror by the victorious revolutionaries: 'The Russian revolution like any other revolution will not be able to dispense with the hanging and shooting of policemen, prosecutors, merchants, and priests.'"
https://books.google.com/books?id=6JtYDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT285)