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 revolution was bound to produce a state of affairs for the time being bordering on chaos. What ought to prove the decisive year of the war was at hand. Revolution must be staved off at all costs.