es for British
intervention with their rulers. Our ambassador appears to have done
everything that man could do, even remonstrating in set terms with the
Emperor; but he would not seem to have been accorded the strenuous
support from home which he had a right to look for, and which would
have given his representations that compelling weight demanded by an
exceedingly precarious situation.

Owing to the nature of my duties in connection with supplies of all
kinds for Russia, following upon visits to that country, I had been
closely in touch with the situation for some months, heard from our
military representatives from time to time, and saw Russians in an
official position in London practically daily. By the end of the year
the position seemed to me so fraught with peril that, on learning of
the contemplated despatch of a special political and military Mission
to Murmansk _en route_ for the interior, I wrote a private letter to
Mr. Lloyd George, and this was duly acknowledged with thanks by his
Private Secretary. This communication warned the Prime Minister that
Russia was on the brink of revolution owing to the reactionary
tendencies of her government; it pointed out that if a revolution were
to break out the consequences must be disastrous to the campaign of
1917 on the Eastern Front, as all arrangements would inevitably be
thrown out of gear; and it proposed that we should play our trump
card, that, backed by the express authority and enforced by the active
intervention of the War Cabinet, we should turn to its fullest account
the influence of our Royal House with the Emperor Nicholas. The remedy
might not have produced the desired effect. The diagnosis at all
events turned out to be correct.

One never anticipated, needless to say, that if the revolution which
seemed to be imminent were actually to take place, the consequences
would be quite so terrible as those which have actually supervened.
One never dreamt of the executive power over great part of the vast
dominions then under the sway of the Romanoff dynasty falling into the
hands of wretches such as Peter the Painter, Trotzky and Lenin. But,
even assuming a more or less stable form of reasonable republican
government to replace the existing autocracy, it could not be other
than obvious to all who were in any way conversant with the social
conditions holding good in this enormous area, peopled as it was by
illiterate and profoundly ignorant peasants, that a r