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Okay, so, there's a bunch of stuff there.

First, I'd point out that a country can be a major power regardless of culture or the like, and we were talking about its military capability.

Even before we get into specifics here, I don't think that it's terribly controversial to say that Imperial Russia was considered to be a major power.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_power

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_medieval_great_powers

Grand Duchy of Moscow (1500)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_modern_great_powers

• Tsardom of Russia and Russian Empire (1547–1917)

• Russian Empire and Soviet Union The Russian Empire as a state, existed from 1721 until it was declared a republic 1 September 1917. The Russian Empire was the successor to the Tsardom of Russia and the predecessor of the Soviet Union. It was one of the largest empires in world history, surpassed in landmass only by the British and Mongolian empires: at one point in 1866, it stretched from Northern Europe across Asia and into North America.

At the beginning of the 19th century the Russian Empire extended from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Black Sea on the south, from the Baltic Sea on the west to the Pacific Ocean on the east. With 125.6 million subjects registered by the 1897 census, it had the third largest population of the world at the time, after Qing China and the British Empire. Like all empires it represented a large disparity in economic, ethnic, and religious positions. Its government, ruled by the Emperor, was one of the last absolute monarchies in Europe. Prior to the outbreak of World War I in August 1914 Russia was one of the five major Great Powers of Europe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superpower

In 1944, during World War II, the term was first applied to the United States, the British Empire, and the Soviet Union. During the Cold War, the British Empire dissolved, leaving the United States and the Soviet Union to dominate world affairs. At the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States became, and remains, the world's sole superpower, a position sometimes referred to as that of a "hyperpower". 

The first Soviet nuclear test was in 1949. That stuff is all prior to that.

It was a provincial backwater without culture or industry

Was Russia relatively-economically-undeveloped compared to the other major powers in, say, the 19th century? Sure, I think that that's fair to say. The primary sector played a major role. But...that doesn't make a country or empire not a military power other then the extent to which it inhibits military capability. First, industrialization is a relatively-modern phenomenon; the Industrial Revolution only happened a couple of centuries ago. Prior to that, nobody had undergone that transition. But there were certainly powerful entities prior to that. And second, a lot of major powers, even if they had a fair bit of industrial capacity, also had a lot of areas that weren't all that developed. Like, okay, take the Brits. Parts of the UK were at the forefront of industrialization, were where the Industrial Revolution started. But...the UK also isn't the whole British Empire. The British Raj in what is now India wasn't terribly-industrialized either.

The revolution didn't succeed because the country was well managed or capable.

The communist revolution in Russia? I don't disagree -- I think it'd be fair to say that the revolution succeeded in significant part because people were unhappy with how the country was being managed.

But I don't think that one can say "The Russian Empire was pretty crippled during the Russian Civil War, ergo the Russian Empire never had influence on the region or world".

Saying that a political entity is a major power doesn't entail that it be an ideal country. It just means that it has significant influence around the world. It means that other countries need to care significantly about whether that country might intervene in a given situation.