Ransome, who actually came under fire in March, felt like “a horribly observant warder in a lunatic asylum who cannot help imitating the grimaces of the patients”. He vividly reported some surrealistic scenes: “a machine-gun brought up in a hired sledge and planted on the snow” and “soldiers handing over their rifles to anybody who would take them, and small boys and youths shooting with army rifles at pigeons”. The March revolution, which Ransome welcomed, was easily suppressed. But since the new government made no significant reforms and remained in the war, the November revolution was inevitable.

Ransome saw Lenin arrive and be welcomed by the crowd at the Finland Station in Petrograd. Thus far Russia had sacrificed two million men dead, five million wounded and two-and-a-half million taken prisoner, and Lenin urged an immediate peace treaty with Germany. Three months later, in June 1917 — with the economy ruined, no prospect of peace and Kerensky weak and futile — several Russian leaders told Ransome that “no power on earth will keep the Russian army in the trenches this winter”. Ransome predicted that a Bolshevik revolution would take place in January 1918. In October 1917 he made a serious error by returning to England to advocate his political views and missed the long-awaited revolt.

Returning to Russia in December, Ransome saw Trotsky every day and began an affair with the Commisar’s secretary, Evgenia Shelepina. He eventually left Russia with her as his common-law wife, and after obtaining a divorce from his estranged wife, married her in 1924. Ignoring Trotsky’s brutal tactics and attempts to eliminate the political opposition, Ransome praised him as a high-minded idealist. He declared, “I do not think he is the man to do anything except from the conviction that it is the best thing to be done for the revolutionary cause” — though this gave Trotsky plenty of leeway to justify his atrocities.

Constrained by his official position, Gerhardie had to suppress his political views and later expressed them in his books. Ransome was free to oppose British policy in his newspaper reports and confidential advice. In January 1918 he advised the government to establish diplomatic relations with the Bolsheviks and use them to defeat the Germans instead of invading the country and trying to overthrow them. He was then considered a dangerous Red and suspected of disloyalty by the British intelligence services.

The New Zealand-born polyglot and Russian expert Harold Williams, also on the scene, opposed Ransome’s views and accurately predicted: “They want external peace for internal war. Remember my words, the Bolsheviks will fight no one except the Russians.” Dogmatically following Marxist theory, the Bolsheviks mistakenly believed that their revolution would spread to the industrial workers of Germany. When that uprising failed to take place, Lenin continued to argue that further military resistance was hopeless and that the Western allies would not rescue Russia. In March 1918, when Russia finally withdrew from the war, Germany imposed extremely harsh conditions at Brest-Litovsk. Russia was forced to cede the Baltic states to Germany and part of the South Caucasus to Turkey, recognise the independence of Ukraine and pay reparations of six billion German gold marks.