Why did the Russian Revolution suceed and the German Revolution fail?

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

I don't really think it has anything to do with the kind of social forces described or peculiarities of the agrarian classes in Russia relative to other countries. Instead, it had everything to do with opportunity. For the Germans, World War I was over when the Revolution occurred. For the Russians, the war was ongoing and the only ones promising peace were the Bolsheviks. That is what gave them the opportunity to seize power and once they had it, the ruthless leadership provided by Lenin and others is what  enabled them to hold power in the industrial bastions and expand outward from there.

Also Russia had rapidly industrialized before the war and many of its largest cities had massive industrial sectors that provided easy bases from which Bolsheviks could recruit and then dominate said cities and then from there use those to dominate the surrounding countryside. There is this notion that Russia was a stagnant agrarian backwater until the Soviets industrialized it. Of course this is the narrative that the likes of Stalin would insist upon, but it ignores the very industrialization that occurred during the Second Wave Industrial Revolution (late 19th century to early 20th century), which made a Lenin or a Stalin possible.

Certainly a large percentage of the population lived in rural areas still, but this is a country with one of the largest populations in the world at the time. It was still a top ten largest industrial power.

People make the same mistake with regards to the Civil War in the United States when talking about the agrarian South versus the Industrialized North. They fail to consider the population differential that those percentages applied to, a matter that I routinely bring up in such discussions.
Some approximate numbers for that by comparison:

22 Million x 40% =  ~9 million
9 Million x 80% = ~ 7 million.

A similar situation could be applied to Russian and so while a vast percentage of the country is rural, you are still talking cities with millions of people and millions of industrial workers, possibly more than many Western European countries simply because of the sheer size of the population to which those low percentages are applied.