Maugham’s other close colleague and source of inside information was the ruthless terrorist and underground man, Boris Savinkov. He had assassinated V. K. de Plehve, the reactionary Tsarist minister of the interior, in July 1904. In February 1905, Savinkov also blew up the Grand Duke Sergius, uncle of the Tsar. During Kerensky’s regime Savinkov — who had first fought the Tsarists, then the Bolsheviks — was minister of war and governor-general of Petrograd.

Through Sasha and Savinkov, Maugham saw a good deal of Kerensky and was astonished by his meteoric rise to fame and power. He thought Kerensky was a man of speech, not action, a leader whose vanity did not permit disagreement and whose colleagues were no more than toadies. Poorly educated and uncultured, without imagination or magnetism, he lacked physical and intellectual strength. He looked strangely haunted and nervous, completely exhausted, unable to act and crushed by the burden of power. When Lenin was in hiding in Petrograd, Kerensky supposedly knew where he was but didn’t dare to arrest him.

In his secret dispatches to London, Maugham stressed that it was impossible to combat German espionage and that the Bolsheviks would inevitably win: “Our agent reported the situation in Russia was entirely out of hand, and that no propaganda or organised support undertaken by the Allies could possibly stem the rising tide of Bolshevism.” During their personal meetings, Kerensky seemed bitter, desperate and defeated. He asked Maugham why The Times was so hostile to Russia, why the British kept their incompetent ambassador to Russia and why they had failed to send the promised military aid.

Maugham, the secret agent of a democratic government, had always refused to treat with the Bolsheviks and was now a marked man. If captured by the Reds, who were shooting all their enemies, he would certainly have been executed. On November 5, two days before the revolution, he hastily left for London with an urgent personal message from Kerensky to the Prime Minister, Lloyd George. In January 1918 Maugham wrote that he had had an exciting time in Russia and was sorry to be recalled, but he had to deliver Kerensky’s message and get himself out of danger. He had planned to return after a week in London, but the revolution broke out while he was en route to England and everything he had been striving for came to naught. On December 5 Russia signed a preliminary armistice. Maugham believed, perhaps naively, that his mission might have succeeded. In 1933 he told Lockhart that if he had been sent to Russia sooner, and with greater resources and power, he could have made the “Bolshevik coup d’état impossible.”

Despite the considerable limitations imposed upon him, Maugham showed great insight into the chaotic political events in Russia and the precarious state of the provisional government. An expert on espionage has concluded that his reports, highly valued and seriously considered, were immediately sent to the highest authorities: