Ransome began to shift his allegiance from Trotsky and became a close friend of the powerful Polish-born leader Karl Radek, who introduced him to the most influential Bolsheviks and gave him valuable inside information. Radek, who had been on the train with Lenin from Zurich to the Finland Station, was Vice-Commissar for Foreign Affairs and had been a leading negotiator at Brest-Litovsk. Even after Russia signed the treaty, Ransome remained adamant and insisted that it was only an expedient measure: “Every step taken against the Soviets helps Germany. Russia is temporarily concluding a separate peace. If the Soviet power is overthrown, that peace may be permanent.” He even blamed Britain rather than Russia for the crippling agreement signed by the Russian dictators: “The old fools who governed England had rejected the friendship of democratic Russia and driven her to make peace with Germany.” Denying reality, Ransome saw only the Lenin he wanted to see.

Despite British policy, Ransome and Lockhart continued to work together to create a rapprochement with the Bolsheviks. Though he supported the Bolsheviks, Ransome also thought they would soon fall from power and told Lockhart that “the show was over”. The two colleagues got along well and became good friends. Ransome called the hedonistic Lockhart, who was three years younger, “a popular, cheerful young man with a taste for gypsies, wine and dancing, that much endeared him to the Moscow society of business men, landed proprietors and actors of the old regime”. When analysing Ransome’s genial character, Lockhart zeroed in on his crucial defect: his over-active imagination and poor grasp of reality, which cast doubt on the information he provided and the reports he sent back to his newspaper: “Ransome was a Don Quixote with a walrus moustache, a sentimentalist, who could always be relied upon to champion the under-dog, and a visionary, whose imagination had been fired by the revolution. He was on excellent terms with the Bolsheviks and frequently brought us information of the greatest value. An incorrigible romanticist, who could spin a fairy-tale out of nothing, he was an amusing and good-natured companion.” After returning to England, Ransome used his imagination more fruitfully and wrote the highly successful series of children’s books that began with Swallows and Amazons (1930).

Hugh Walpole (1884-1941), born in New Zealand and rejected by the army for poor eyesight, made his first trip to Russia in September 1914, a month after the start of the war. He despairingly wrote to his mentor and idol Henry James: “The streets swam in mud, I got no news of the war because I couldn’t read [Russian], the food was all sweets and cabbage, and I was lonely beyond belief. I felt too that I was utterly useless.” In the Kremlin cafeteria, even high Party officials had to dine on horse meat and turnips. Walpole used his Russian adventures in his novels The Dark Forest (1916) and The Secret City (1919).

While praising Walpole’s engaging character, Lockhart suggested that civilian life continued unchanged in the big cities while thousands of soldiers were being slaughtered on the Russian front. Walpole’s biographer wrote that “he and his wife entertained Hugh constantly at their flat, introduced him to the English colony, took him to the ballet, the opera, the circus, and altogether looked after him. Lockhart’s impression of him was of someone ‘entirely unspoilt, who could still blush from an overwhelming self-consciousness, and impressed me more as a great, clumsy schoolboy, bubbling over with kindness and enthusiasm, than as a dignified author, whose views were to be accepted with awe and respect’.”