In this episode of the Explaining History Podcast, we step away from the battlefields and examine how the February Revolution of 1917 was received and interpreted in two key Western cities: London and New York.

When the Tsar fell in March 1917, governments around the world struggled to make sense of what was happening. Russia under revolutionary conditions was—and remains—notoriously difficult to penetrate. Whose reports could be trusted? Which factions would prevail? And what would it mean for the ongoing war against Germany?

For Britain, the stakes were existential. The government of David Lloyd George hoped desperately that a new Russian administration would fight more effectively than the Tsar’s. The Labour left, by contrast, hoped the revolution might end the war altogether. Both would be disappointed.

Drawing on Robert Service’s superb Spies and Commissars, we explore this forgotten moment when London briefly became the world’s largest hub for Russian political émigrés. Maxim Litvinov, the future Bolshevik commissar, was living in the East End with his English wife Ivy, agitating against the war and meeting with anti-war MPs like Ramsay MacDonald. Across the city, the Russian embassy at Cheshire House—still adorned with portraits of the imperial family—found itself issuing visas to revolutionaries it had spent decades monitoring.

We follow the revolutionaries as they attempt to make their way home, br