Asklemmy

If you think of history as often involving opposing material and social forces, then patterns will emerge. We are constrained by the material in what actions we can take to resolve a major conflict in interests, often escalating to, for example, war. So war has happened repeatedly. That's not quite history repeating itself so much as a consequence of historically common conditions.

Under this way of thinking, you could expect conditions that are even more similar to one another to lead to similar outcomes - though not necessarily identical. For example, the revolution in Russia that led to the first sustained socialist revolution had precedent in similar conditions jn the few decades prior, and for the same basic reasons (driving material forces): a rising but weak bourgeoisie, unpopular war foisted on the population, frustrations at capitalist oppression at home, and various unpopular domestic policies that were a holdover from monarchist ways of thinkinh that liberalism had made unpopular. During the prior revolution, the masses (and representative organizations) were too idealistic and believed establishing a Duma and some reforms would address these problems. They were wrong: the Tsar simply reversed most of the policy concessions once the people went home and were no longer organized, dragged his feet on the Duma, and eventually established one that was purely representative of ruling class interests. At the same time, the Tsar went after the organizations that had participated in the failed revolution, banning them and jailing their members.

And when similar conditions occurred and people became again colocated and agitated by these conditions, those organizations were back in force, grew rapidly, and learned their lessons. The group that won, the communists, correctly identified that even the current offered concessions were similarly false and that the defeat of the Tsarist-bourgeois ruling class required them to be fully deposed and that the time to do so was ripe.

So, the similar conditions led to a similar culmination (mass action, strikes, etc) but had a different outcome due to their differences (learning the lessons of the previous failure).