When Theodore Rothstein succeeded Litvinov as Lenin's unofficial diplomatic representative in London he immediately stepped up his clandestine activities on behalf of the Bolshevik government. One of his first acts was to approach Leonard Woolf and suggest that he publish in the International Review the full text of a number of Lenin's post-April 1917 speeches:

This early example of how to execute the ‘brush pass’ was a good illustration of the lengths ‘the real underground revolutionary’ was prepared to go to overcome the government's efforts to control the reading matter of the British working class. Was it necessary? Certainly the government, the security services and Lord Beaverbrook, owner of the Daily Express and Director of the Ministry of Information, thought so. They had been so thoroughly alarmed by Bolshevik propaganda that they had recently invited the leading writer of spy fiction of the day, John Buchan, to write a novel about the threat socialism posed to the British Empire. In his first post-First World War novel, Mr. Standfast, the main danger to the British empire from foreign espionage may have remained German imperialist ambition, but ‘the enemy within’ in the shape of a rebellious working class manipulated by foreign revolutionaries was never far from the surface: