Most accounts of the development of Anglo-Russian relations following the Bolshevik revolution make at least passing reference to the initial diplomatic impasse caused by the internment in Britain of two noted Russian revolutionaries, George Chicherin and Peter Petroff. They had been interned separately during the First World War, charged with actively supporting the enemy cause and associating with enemy aliens. In the immediate aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution their internment assumed an important diplomatic significance. Trotsky, the Bolshevik commissar for foreign affairs, informed British diplomatic staff in Russia that the release and return of the internees was an issue of the first importance. Moreover, he warned that a refusal to grant their release would lead to appropriate reprisals against Britons living in Russia. The diplomatic offensive undertaken by the Bolsheviks on behalf of Chicherin and Petroff is explicable in terms of a conjunction of principled concern for the fate of the internees and a desire to initiate diplomatic contact with the British government. Some indication of the personal concern which the Bolsheviks felt for Chicherin and Petroff can be gleaned from the fact that the Bolsheviks saw Chicherin as their official spokesman in Britain prior to and during his internment in Brixton prison. Indeed, Chicherin received a secretary of the Roumanian Legation in Brixton prison in his capacity as Bolshevik 'ambassador '.1 In addition, both Chicherin and Petroff had a long history of revolutionary activity and were known personally to Lenin and Trotsky. On returning to Russia in January I9I8, Chicherin became Trotsky's first assistant at the foreign ministry before succeeding him as commissar for foreign affairs in May I9I8, a post he held until his retirement in I930. Petroff was the acting under-secretary for foreign affairs at the time of Brest-Litovsk and thereafter held a number ofimportant official positions before resigning from the Russian Communist party while attached to the Soviet commercial agency in Berlin in I925. In a recent detailed study of Bolshevik foreign policy in the year following the revolution Richard Debo has suggested that Trotsky raised the Chicherin-Petroff issue with an intensity specifically designed to capture the attention of the British government. According to Debo the Bolsheviks feared that their diplomatic isolation might encourage the Germans to impose unacceptably harsh territorial terms as the price for peace. While hoping for a general European revolution the Bolsheviks also