ABSTRACT
During the First World War Alexis Aladin had worked for the British government on other occasions, putting his experience of revolutionary politics to particular use on a visit to Ireland in the aftermath of the Easter Rising of 1916. Increasingly policy-makers began to talk about the need to make links with patriotic socialist groups prepared to continue the war effort, referred to indiscriminately in British parlance as ‘Mensheviks’. The idea of intervening in Russia by cultivating patriotic socialist groups had been around in embryo since the late spring of 1917 but was first clearly formulated by W. Somerset Maugham. Maugham’s own preparations proper began in July, when William Wiseman organized for him a series of contacts in Russia, which highlighted the role to be played in the venture by non-Russian nationalities. Maugham’s suspicions of the Kadets showed that he had grasped at once the need to distance the Allied cause from ‘Kadets and counter-revolutionaries’.
