https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_events_of_the_20th_century#The_Russian_Revolution_and_Communism
Footnote 19: https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1169&context=honorsprojects
The whole section of the Wiki article is regurgitated bad history, but citing a literal rando is low even for Wikipedia
I'm 100% sure that Wikipedia editors of contentious topics know what they want to write and then just go to Google Scholar to source their idea. Heaps of the references are terrible.
That's clearly what happened here. There's no way they happened to know this undergraduate thesis.
It doesn't really surprise me, because up until late undergrad, the structure of most of my writing assignments was that you would choose a topic/thesis first, assume it's correct, and find evidence to support it. If you realized you were actually full of shit, then you had to start over and do extra work and thus you were rewarded for doubling down on your original idea even if the data was against you.