On April 23, 1918, the forty-seven-year-old Count Wilhelm Mirbach (b. 1871), who had been in Petrograd to negotiate prisoner exchanges with the Bolsheviks and had worked at the embassy in the tsarist period, arrived back in Moscow as ambassador with a mission to ensure that no Russian rapprochement with the Entente took place. Mirbach had been reporting that the Bolshevik regime was “not for long,” and that all it would take to sweep it away would be “light military pressure” by German forces sent via Estonia. The count openly courted monarchist groups as Bolshevik replacements, and behaved as
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