Even following America’s entry into the war, the revolutionary defensists still counted on Wilson for support. And Wilson fully appreciated their dilemma. He regarded the secret Entente agreements of 1915 and 1916 in which Imperial Russia was entangled as odious. He knew, as he put it to a British confidant, that the Russians ‘in setting up their new government and working out domestic reforms’ might arrive at the point at which they found ‘the war an intolerable evil and would desire to get to an end of it on any reasonable terms’.
