By a strange twist of fate the rather obtuse Gerhardie was the only one of the five writers who actually witnessed both the March and November 1917 revolutions in Petrograd. In March he reported the events in a series of terse bulletins that resembled newsreel flashes: “The revolution had already broken out. The [British] Admiral had just witnessed the sacking of the Arsenal by a disorderly crowd. Regiment after regiment was going over to the revolution. Solitary shots, and now and then machine-gun fire, were heard from various quarters of the city.” In a mixture of pointless riot and deliberate destruction, the rebels “all seemed drunk with the revolution. Shots were heard every now and then, mostly fired in the air, while the law courts had gone up in flames.” When the real revolution exploded in November, Gerhardie still refused to take it seriously and merely noted, “Barricades appeared in the streets. Bridges were being suspended. Lorries of joy-riding proletarians became familiarly conspicuous.”

After the revolution, the crucial question was whether the British government should intervene in the Russian civil war and help the pro-Tsarist Whites defeat Lenin’s Reds. Here again, Gerhardie got it all wrong and had no idea of how disastrous the Bolshevik regime would be both to the Russians and the British. He believed that Bolshevik rule would be short-lived and that a foreign invasion would only arouse popular support for the Reds. According to Gerhardie’s biographer, he thought that “intervention was a waste of time, effort and money, and, if anything, only served to prolong the misery of the Russian people. He believed that Bolshevism in its militant and objectionable form would last only as long as there was military opposition to it. It was impossible to beat the Bolsheviks, and therefore intervention was nothing short of ‘insanity.’” But the newly established Red army, fighting a war against experienced Tsarist generals on several fronts, was perilously weak and could have been defeated by strong Allied invasion.

The British ambassador Sir George Buchanan was courteous and gentle, and had a kind of baffling simplicity that often caused adversaries to consider him stupid. Like Kerensky, he was not capable of dealing with these apocalyptic events. Early in March 1918, Gerhardie and Buchanan returned to England with most of the British officials. In August Captain Francis Crombie, the British naval attaché, was killed while defending the embassy from invaders.

Arthur Ransome (1884-1967), fleeing an unhappy marriage in England, first arrived in St Petersburg in 1913 to study folklore. He became fluent in Russian by reading children’s books and published a collection of legends and fairy stories, Old Peter’s Russian Tales (1916). He also wrote a guide to St Petersburg, which could not be published after the war broke out in August 1914. He became the correspondent of the liberal Daily News, provided valuable information to British intelligence and when the war started he saw the Tsar greet the people from the balcony of the Winter Palace. Ransome attended many sessions of the parliament, the Duma, which soon became powerless. He made three trips to observe the armies at the Russian front, getting as far as Bucharest, and saw the great disparity between the army’s enormous potential and its actual weakness. After witnessing the disastrous Russian defeats in 1914 and 1915, he watched the Russian autocracy disintegrating before his eyes and thought only a miracle could prevent a complete military and political collapse. Like Lockhart, he believed the country was heading for a revolution and accurately predicted that Russia would leave the war by the end of 1917.