In previous posts of the Forensic View, we have seen that eyewitness memory, while frequently convincing to jurors and the public, is frequently and sometimes fabulously unreliable. But what happens when our confidence in reported eyewitness information is essentially “wired in parallel,” shared among different people who may, with repetition, put their own stamps on the information?
In 1914, during the First World War, these processes resulted in strongly held beliefs that Russian troops were coming.
To Scotland.
All histories of that terrible conflict discuss the importance of Russian military operations in Eastern Europe. The hardships and horrifying casualty counts of that very harsh campaign are well attested.
But none of that happened in Scotland, where tens of thousands of entirely imaginary Russians were firmly believed to have turned up anyway.
How a Railway Delay Sparked the Russian Troop Rumor in 1914
The whole mess seems to have started on August 27th, 1914, when there was a long delay in the railway service linking London and Liverpool. Somebody, perhaps in an ill-advised attempt to boost morale, explained to somebody else that this was due to the diversion of trains which were transporting thousands of Russian troops, who had landed in Scotland, to reinforce the Western Front.
Word spread. These Russians’ route was allegedly very specific; they had crossed the Arctic Sea to Norway, then traveled by steamship to Aberdeen, and from there were being carried by special troop trains to the Channel ports.
Why Specific Details Make False Eyewitness Accounts Seem Credible
Now, prior frameworks for understanding strongly influence our ability to remember and interpret information (Bransford & Johnson, 1973), even when those frameworks are completely incorrect, and the resulting memories and interpretations are therefore complete rubbish (Sharps, 2024; Sharps & Price-Sharps, 2026). However, when such frameworks, accurate or not, are filled with plausible feature-intensive detail, people may be increasingly inclined to believe them (Sharps, 2022, 2024); and the specificity of these peripatetic Russians’ itineraries helped to convince people of their absolute reality.
Additional details followed. Witnesses had supposedly seen Russians stamping snow off their boots at railway stations (Pennell, 2015). Makes sense—Russia has a lot of snow. Granted, how those troops managed to maintain that snow on their boots all the way to Edinburgh in August is quite a mystery (Tuchman, 1962); but since the story included the very specific detail of an imaginary railway porter who had swept up the imaginary snow, who was going to argue with this imaginary account?
Wartime Stress Helped People Overlook Flaws in the Rumor
Very reliable people had supposedly seen these Russians. An Oxford professor knew a colleague who’d been summoned as a Russian translator, and a Scots army officer had seen their big fur caps and, believe it or not, their bows and arrows. Why these Russian troops lacked modern weapons remains unexplained, but with enough popular momentum behind the story, people believed it anyway. The people of the time were under the extraordinary stress of horrible new types of warfare that produced casualty rates virtually beyond comprehension for that day—and it has been shown that when people are under stress, they are more likely to ignore evidentiary flaws in accounts (Sharps et al., 2013; Sharps, 2024).
Evidently, this psychological effect extended to snow in August and 20th-century Russian infantrymen armed like Robin Hood.
Imaginary Troop Numbers and Real Events Fueled the Rumor
A Scots landowner personally reported 125,000 Russians marching across his property (Tuchman, 1962), which seems a bit low when 500,000 imaginary Russians were originally reported; but gradually these imaginary numbers dropped down to an equally imaginary 70,000 or 80,000, which presumably made people feel more confident about the realism of the whole imaginary business.
Some actual history became involved in this mess, as well. The naval battle of Heligoland Bight, which had nothing whatsoever to do with Russians, was explained as some form of weird diversion to cover the sea transport of these imaginary forces to Belgium (Tuchman, 1962). On the continent, people waited en masse in Paris to welcome their Cossack defenders. The Germans became concerned as well (Tuchman, 1962). Contemporary reports held that the Kaiser and his senior staff had left France from fear of the “250,000” Russian troops believed to be in the field there, and the German Army was reported to have detached two sorely needed divisions to repel this imaginary invasion from the Steppes.
Why the Psychology Behind the 1914 Rumor Still Matters Today
Readers today may find this account mildly amusing, but essentially irrelevant to our modern lives. The First World War seems lost in remote antiquity, with the Red Baron, perhaps better known today for pizza than for aerial victories, flying about in a powered box-kite, and antique cannons being dragged around mud-soaked battlefields by teams of panicked horses. The whole thing may seem as remote to modern people as Crecy or Agincourt.
But if you were able to examine the brain of a person in 1914, you would find no substantive difference between that brain and the one in the head of any modern Internet-ridden person today. The effects of inaccurate prior frameworks, of stress-related reduction in critical thinking, and of the uncritical sharing of purported eyewitness accounts would be psychologically the same in the worlds of 1914 and 2026.
However, there would be an important exception today, based on our technology rather than our psychology. Unlike the word-of-mouth campaigns that spread false rumors in clubs and at railway stations in 1914, we of 2026 have the internet to spread false rumors worldwide at electronic speeds, either by mistake or by design on the part of people who have something to gain. We also have AI-generated imagery so advanced that its products are virtually impossible for most of us to tell from reality.
The remote and imaginary reports of Russians in Scotland in 1914 are more than a quaint episode in the history of eyewitness memory. They form a significant warning for those of us in the modern age of technology. Today, more than in any previous era, we must be very careful in our assessment of evidence, eyewitness, visual, and otherwise, and very aware of how the principles governing our psychology may influence that assessment.
