Among the events which gave so brilliant a promise to the spring of 1917, not the least was the revolution in Russia. From the first, indeed, there was anxiety about the effect which so great a change in the midst of war would have upon the military efficiency of our ally. But that had suffered under the old regime, and the failure to capture Lemberg in the summer of 1916, distracted as the Central Empires were by the Somme and Italian campaigns, followed by the more discreditable failure to protect Rumania in the autumn, raised serious doubts of the competence of the imperial bureaucracy. Its honesty also fell under grave suspicion. Sazonov, the Foreign Minister, had been dismissed in August, and Stuermer became Prime Minister. A fierce indictment of his conduct by Miliukov in the Duma led to his retirement in November, and an honest Conservative, Trepov, succeeded. But Stuermer retained his power at Court as Imperial Chamberlain, and a renegade from the Liberal party, Protopopov, was introduced into the Ministry and exercised therein a growing and sinister influence. Winter saw the Russian Government turning its back on its Liberal professions, proroguing the Duma, prohibiting the meetings of town councils and Zemstvos, provoking a revolution in order to suppress it and re-establish the old despotism on its ruins, and apparently casting wistful glances back at its old alliance with the German champions of autocracy. The Tsar himself was a firm friend of the Entente, but the same could not be said of the Tsaritsa nor of the reactionary and disreputable influences to which she extended her patronage. If therefore there were risks to the Entente cause in a Russian revolution, there were also perils in its postponement; and it might well be thought that a Liberal Russia would be bound more closely and logically to the Western Powers than autocracy ever could be. A revolution would at least clarify the issue between the combatants and give a more solid basis of political principle to the Entente.