The Russian Revolution prompted extensive discussion and necessitated urgent investigation, both among supporters and opponents, and this generated a great deal of print publication, in newspapers, political and cultural journals, pamphlets and books. A handful of these came from the British who were based in Petrograd, as correspondents or on government business, at the time of the February Revolution, some of whom left before the October Revolution; others – including the members of the British Embassy – who left before the government of what was by then called the Russian Soviet Republic displaced to Moscow in March 1918 to escape German aggression; and a very few who followed the new government to Moscow. The formative Soviet State was keen to influence perceptions abroad, and to this end operated an efficient press office and invited sympathetic visitors to Moscow, with many overlapping arrivals in 1920, the year in which the Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement was being negotiated. This literature embodies a complex climate in which both factual observation and intellectual opinion become in a degree uncertain and exploratory, as commentators attempt to decide exactly what has happened in Russia, arrive at a vocabulary for describing it, and evaluate its global implications. These writings include descriptions of journeys, places and meetings with common Russian people as well as with ministers of the Bolshevik government including Lenin and Trotsky, and the texts have to be seen from the perspective not only of politics but of the broader question of the presentation of the new and changing Russia in the public imaginary.

Most of these publications were intended as a form of intervention, and the earliest among them arrived as part of political pamphlet series, whether sponsored by left-wing groups such as the Communist Party or the Workers’ Socialist Federation, or the Right, notably the Russia Liberation Committee. Among the most noted of those present in Moscow in 1917 was Arthur Ransome. Ransome's career is well documented, and the debate about his status as a double agent continues to attract comment. In many ways, though, the story of the author is more interesting and romantic than his frequently tendentious publications.