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to the military attaché. He stressed the interdepartmental nature of his mission, and that, whatever happened on the military side, the naval and war trade work could not be handed over. ‘It will be remembered’, he wrote, ‘that M.I.1(c), the section under which I directly work, is the organisation into which our Secret Service has developed.’ With words which might be borne in mind for the future, when Hoare himself served successively as Foreign Secretary and as British ambassador to Spain, he added that ‘both as a matter of policy and a necessity of organisation, it has always been found necessary to keep the Secret Service as a unit working in harmony with, but quite independent of the staffs of Embassies and Legations’.10

Very few explicit records have survived of reporting from Hoare’s mission, though a letter from Cumming to Hoare not long after he had arrived in Petrograd thanked him for letters he had written to Frank Stagg: ‘They were extremely interesting and just what I wanted.’ In December 1916 Hoare began sending ‘weekly notes’ on the situation in Russia. ‘Personally,’ he wrote presciently on Boxing Day, ‘I am convinced that Russia will never fight through another winter.’ Among the handful of Russian reports sent in ‘by our agents abroad through “C”’, which have been preserved in the SIS archives, is a transcript (‘from the Speaker’s own notes’) of Professor Pavel Miliukov’s famous speech to the Duma (parliament) on 1 November 1916 when he fiercely attacked the Prime Minister, Boris Sturmer, as incompetent and pro-German. Miliukov raised the spectre of ‘dark forces fighting for Germany and attempting to destroy popular unity’, accused Sturmer of being in collusion with the influential monk Rasputin and concluded with a sharp series of criticisms, asking each time, ‘is this stupidity or treachery?’. The notorious Rasputin, who was widely believed to exercise evil political influence over the Empress Alexandra, was murdered in the early morning of Saturday 30 December. On New Year’s Eve Hoare cabled Cumming, who was the first person to get the news confirmed in London. On 2 January 1917 Hoare despatched a ten-page report of the event to Freddie Browning, which he suggested Cumming might show to the King, George V. It was, he wrote, ‘one of those crimes which by their magnitude blur the well-defined rules of ethics and by their results change the history of a generation’. ‘If it is written in the style of the “Daily Mail”,’ he told Browning, ‘my answer is that the whole question is so sensational that one cannot describe it as one would if it were an ordinary episode of the war.’11

The first page of Samuel Hoare’s dramatic account of the death of Rasputin. Because of its sensational nature, he admitted to writing it in ‘the style of the “Daily Mail”’.

The Milner Mission had been sent out to assess the situation in Russia and bolster up its war effort, especially in order to tie down German forces on the Eastern Front. But by the start of 1917 the Russian state was so enfeebled and the political and military leadership so apparently out of touch with popular opinion that little could be done to save the imperial regime. According to his memoirs, Hoare sought to persuade Milner of ‘the gravity of the internal crisis through which Russia was passing’ and, indeed, Milner returned to England with very gloomy predictions about the future of the country. On the military side, Wilson, unwisely attaching ‘more weight to Knox’s opinion on any matter affecting the Russian Army’ than he did to the opinion ‘of any other man in Russia’, reported mistakenly on the essential ‘soundness’ of the Russian army. But Milner was better informed than Wilson (or Knox). The Russian imperial monarchy was swept away in the February Revolution of 1917 and replaced by a social democratic government under Prince Lvov, who was succeeded in May by the socialist Alexander Kerensky. At first there were hopes in the West that a more constitutional regime, promising democratic reform, might actually strengthen the Russian war effort. Reporting