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igi7] RIZOV’S PROPHECY FULFILLED 463
conversations on the telephone. We may be overheard.
I wish you good-bye. Slut/"1 and I replaced the receiver.
Two days after Rizov’s departure I received a
telegram from the Foreign Office instructing me—in the
event of another visit from Rizov—to listen attentively
to him and to endeavour to make him formulate more
definite propositions ; the same instructions were being
issued to my colleague in Christiania.
I heard later that my colleague—it was M.
Gulkevitch—in accordance with these instructions, had
more pregnant conversations with M. Rizov than mine
had been. But these conversations ended in nothing.2
Rizov, who appeared to be in good health when he
came to see me in Stockholm, died suddenly very soon
afterwards.
When the Russian Revolution had broken out and
was in full swing, I recalled the words uttered by Rizov
as he was leaving my study in Stockholm: " in a month,
a month and a half at latest, events will occur after
which I feel sure that on the Russian side they will be
more disposed to talk with us." Hence Rizov had
accurately foreseen our revolution. Now, heccame from
Berlin, and the steps taken with regard to us had in all
probability been suggested to him by German diplomacy,
and the German General Staff. And in my eyes this
constitutes one more proof that our revolution had one
of its main sources in German action. The wires of this
political cataclysm converged in Berlin, and there they
calculated in January, 1917, with remarkable accuracy,
even the day on which the skilfully laid mine would
explode.
1 Finis !
2 The Times published in its issue of the 4th October, 1918, an article
relating the episode of negotiations which were supposed to have taken
place between Rizov and some Russian representatives in Christiania
and in Stockholm. I hastened to correct, in a letter written from Nice
to the Editor of the Times, the account in this newspaper, as far as i
personally and Stockholm were concerned. Unfortunately the Times
did not think it possible to publish my correction, alleging as an excuse
the forced economy—" in these days "—of paper.
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