Going underground has been a successful tactic, where the structure and leadership are opaque but actions are still clear. We also just exist in a world of surveillance which has made the lessons from the Bolsheviks in this case almost irrelevant. Lenin sat on a train with someone hunting him and wasn't caught. You gotta get 7 surgeries and wait 5 years to possibly pull that trick that he did by just not having known photographs spread far and wide.

Honestly they didn't live in the type of functional surveillance states that we live in. More than just technologies and techniques which have vastly improved as well as coordination the ability to hunt down enemies of the state there's also the fact the states they were in were not as shall we say functional or solid as ours. They were weakened states in some internal disarray.

For this reason I think unfortunately revolution is pretty much hopeless and impossible in the imperial core until external conditions such as the collapse of imperialism and the US dollars and an overall weakening of the US state takes place and weaken these systems of surveillance and control and oppression. Until that happens, until they start rotting, things no longer working and not being repaired for weeks type of situation they're just too strong. That or we'd need way more than the 10-20% of society that usually sides with a revolution, like 50% and at least 30% willing to take violent and coordinated action and I don't see that in the US near-term so I think rot is the more likely to come and weaken and blind them and eventually in that decay room for things happening is found.

The Bolsheviks developed out of "The Russian Social Democratic Labor Party," and organization where Lenin had a prominent position - because explicitly communist parties were illegal and repressed, so for a time everyone just called themselves social democrats. As for Lenin, he was a bit like Luthen from Andor, he kept his circles tight and did what he could to rigorously vet their ideology.

Something similar happened in China, though not by choice - the Long March was so deadly that those few who survived it proved that they were genuinely committed to the cause. The fact that Deng Xiaoping was there from the start is part of why Mao was indecisive about him, purging him and then letting him back in several times.

I believe there's sometimes been a strategy of having a nonthreatening, public facing organization, which aids and provides cover for a more radical, underground group. I don't have a source for that, but that's how I've heard American communists functioned before they were stamped out.

I don't think there's a party that won that wasn't working from an underground, explicitly illegal position.