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Introduction: The End of Secret Diplomacy In late November 1917, the newly established Soviet government in Petrograd initiated a diplomatic offensive that would shake the foundations of the Entente alliance and fundamentally alter the political trajectory of the Middle East. Following the Bolshevik seizure of power earlier that month, Leon Trotsky, the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, authorized the seizure of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ archives. His objective was not to conduct diplomacy, but to dismantle the “bourgeois” system of international relations that had precipitated the Great War. Trotsky ordered the publication of the secret correspondence and treaties…