Introduction

It was the first of the two Russian revolutions of 1917 that gave substance to Woodrow Wilson's call for the United States to “make the world safe for democracy” through its intervention in the First World War. The sudden collapse of the Tsarist monarchy and the establishment of a liberal democratic Russian government under the leadership of Alexander Kerensky in the winter of 1917 gave credence to the hopes of American democrats that Allied military victory over Imperial Germany would usher in an age of universal democracy and with it an age of universal peace. The tide of democratic sentiment also flowed westward from the Russian capital Petrograd, where Kerensky's government, anxious to convince its British, French, and now American allies of Russia's newfound democratic allegiance, kept a grieviously weakened Russia engaged in the fourth year of war with Germany and launched ill-conceived offensives that by the summer of 1917 had resulted in the disintegration of the Russian Army as an effective combat force. Sir George Buchanan, the British ambassador in Petrograd, wondered in his diary whether it might not have been prudent of the Western democracies to have withdrawn the military pledges they had extracted from what had become a gravely weak Russia and let the country negotiate its own path out of the war.