The middle class helped spark the revolution hoping that the proletariat would come around eventually.
The fact that the article, and many of the commenters here are mentioning this again makes me wonder if socialist movements have always been primarily middle class movements.
That resulted in several decades of false starts by what Krein would call the Russian "secondary elite", in the form of the Narodniks, in the 1870s and 1880s. They had almost zero experience with the real "narod", only an idealized mental picture, and when they moved out of the big cities into the countryside (where the majority of the poor, Russia being vastly unindustrialised, lived), most of them got homesick and went back again.
At a time where the majority of people in Georgia got 4 years of part time schooling at best he spent over 10 years in education.
However, the poor person in the city is unlikely to vote at all, and the poor person in the country is likely to vote against their own economic interests in favor of perceived social narratives. As long this remains true, I wouldn't hold my breath on a working class awakening anytime soon.