On November 7, the Revolution — provoked by cold winters, insufficient fuel, poor transport, inflated prices, food shortages and starvation as well as propaganda, strikes, barricades, civil and foreign wars, and terror — broke out in Petrograd. With Lockhart’s help, Kerensky fled the country. Lenin became Chief Commissar, Trotsky Commissar for Foreign Affairs. In March 1918 the Bolsheviks signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, on the Russian-Polish border, which took Russia out of the war. In July the Tsar — first cousin of King George V, who refused to give him refuge in England — was murdered with his family in Yekaterinburg. That month the German ambassador, Count Wilhelm von Mirbach, was assassinated. This was intended to sabotage Brest-Litovsk, but his death failed to provoke a German attack and bring Russia back into the war. In August a weak and insufficient Allied force landed at the north-western port of Archangel to fight the Reds. At the end of that month the socialist revolutionary Dora Kaplan shot and wounded Lenin. The “Red Terror” then rounded up and killed a thousand political opponents. Lenin’s persuasive slogans were “bread, land, peace” but the people did not get bread, the peasants did not get land and there was no peace during the next five years of civil war.

William Gerhardie (1895-1977) was born and spent his childhood in St Petersburg, where his father was a British cotton manufacturer. In the First World War he was posted to the British Embassy in Petrograd as military attaché and given the notably undemanding tasks of receiving visitors, writing letters and deciphering telegrams. Lockhart disdained Gerhardie as “a kind of office-boy in military uniform”. But he praised Gerhardie’s commanding officer, Major Alfred Knox, the liaison officer with the Russian army: “Up to the Revolution no man took a saner view of the military situation on the Eastern front and no foreign observer supplied his Government with more reliable information.” Gerhardie’s biographer, countering Lockhart’s biased opinion, maintained that Knox valued him highly as “the most practically useful officer” on an important mission to Vladivostok.

Despite his military training and lifelong experience in Russia, Gerhardie was an unreliable witness who seriously misjudged the leaders, gravity and consequences of the revolution. He mistakenly called the humane but weak Kerensky a first-rate prime minister. (When I heard the dignified, white-haired Kerensky speak in Berkeley in the early 1960s it seemed clear that he would have been helpless against the completely ruthless Lenin.) Gerhardie also failed to understand Lenin, a fierce and fiery orator,  asserting that nothing in his “speech or looks gave an inkling of his future career”. Though Lenin proclaimed “through Red terror to peace” and wiped out the opposition, Gerhardie welcomed the Revolution that overthrew the old regime and promised to give power to the long-suffering underdogs. Unaware of the impending disaster, he treated the entire historical episode as a kind of joke and declared that the Bolsheviks “behave like real gentlemen and there is really no actual danger living in this place. The whole thing is a Gilbert and Sullivan Comic Opera.”