Alexander Kerensky

Alexander Fyodorovich Kerensky was the most popular man in Russia in the spring of 1917 and one of the most hated by the autumn of the same year. A lawyer, defence counsel in political trials and a socialist deputy in the Duma, during the February Revolution he was the only man to sit both in the Provisional Government and on the leadership of the Petrograd Soviet. He served in turn as Minister of Justice, Minister of War and prime minister, and finally as Commander-in-Chief as well. He wanted democratic Russia to honour its obligations to its allies and to hold out until the Constituent Assembly met, but he gave the exhausted country neither peace nor land. In November 1917 he was overthrown by the Bolsheviks. His defeat opened the way to a dictatorship, which he fought with his pen in exile for the rest of his long life, and it ended the only attempt of those years to build a democratic state in Russia.

Youth and the Duma

He was born on 4 May 1881 (22 April in the Julian calendar) in Simbirsk on the Volga. His father was headmaster of the local gymnasium, where one of the pupils was Vladimir Ulyanov, the future Lenin. In 1889 the family moved to Tashkent, where his father became the regional inspector of schools. Kerensky studied history and philology, and then law, at the University of St Petersburg. As a young man he dreamt of the stage and loved acting, something that later showed in his speeches.

After Bloody Sunday in January 1905 he drew close to the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs). At the end of 1905 he was arrested on suspicion of belonging to a militant group and spent several months in prison. He then made his name as defence counsel in political trials, defending peasants, revolutionaries and members of the Armenian Dashnaktsutyun party. In 1912 he took part in a public inquiry into the massacre of striking workers at the Lena goldfields. The same year he was elected to the Fourth State Duma. As the SRs were boycotting the elections, he sat with the Trudoviks, moderate socialists with ties to the peasantry. He was regarded as one of the best orators of the left.

War and opposition

When the First World War broke out, Kerensky did not join the socialists who condemned it. He supported a defensive war, fought in the hope of a democratic peace, while at the same time attacking the government fiercely. He demanded an amnesty, autonomy for the Kingdom of Poland, the restoration of Finland’s constitution and the lifting of restrictions on the Jews. In 1916 he chaired a Duma commission that investigated the bloodily suppressed revolt in Central Asia. In December 1916 he in effect called in the Duma for the overthrow of the autocracy, and Empress Alexandra Feodorovna wrote that Kerensky ought to be hanged.

The February Revolution

On 12 March 1917, when the Petrograd garrison went over to the strikers, Kerensky greeted the mutinous soldiers outside the Tauride Palace, joined the Provisional Committee of the Duma and that evening became deputy chairman of the Petrograd Soviet. He accepted the post of Minister of Justice in the Provisional Government of Prince Georgy Lvov, even though the Soviet had decided that socialists would not join the government, and won its approval with a fiery speech. The day after the abdication of Nicholas II he persuaded Grand Duke Michael not to accept the crown.

As Minister of Justice he carried out a political amnesty, brought revolutionaries back from exile and secured the abolition of the death penalty. He set up a commission to investigate abuses by former ministers and was responsible for the safety of the imprisoned imperial family. The government he belonged to recognised Poland’s right to independence. Kerensky became a living symbol of the revolution: he wore a military tunic, made speeches incessantly and was greeted everywhere with ovations. The press called him “the first love of the revolution”.

Minister of War and prime minister

When Pavel Milyukov and the Minister of War, Alexander Guchkov, left the government in May, Kerensky took over the Ministry of War and the Navy. He believed that Russia could not leave the war without catastrophe, and that victory would strengthen the revolution and give it a strong hand in peace talks. He toured the front and carried crowds of soldiers with him, though their enthusiasm often vanished as soon as he left. Officers nicknamed him the “persuader-in-chief”. The offensive launched in Galicia on 1 July stalled after a few days, and the German–Austrian counter-attack shattered the Russian armies.

After the July Days in Petrograd and Lvov’s resignation, Kerensky became prime minister on 21 July. He was the only politician acceptable at once to the moderate socialists, the liberals and the generals. He shut down the Bolshevik press and restored the death penalty at the front, having himself signed its abolition only shortly before. He appointed General Lavr Kornilov Commander-in-Chief. In September, after murky negotiations through intermediaries, he concluded that Kornilov was preparing a coup, dismissed him and declared him a rebel. The soviets and armed workers were mobilised to defend the capital, and the revolt collapsed without a fight. Kerensky took over the supreme command himself and proclaimed the Russian Republic.

The victory was illusory. The officers never forgave him for imprisoning Kornilov, while the left suspected that he had been part of the plot himself. The Bolsheviks kept their weapons and won majorities in the Petrograd and Moscow soviets. Kerensky underestimated the danger. According to the liberal Vladimir Nabokov, he said that he was positively praying for a Bolshevik rising, because he had enough forces to crush it. When on 6 November he tried to close down the Bolshevik newspapers, the Military Revolutionary Committee went on the offensive. On the morning of 7 November Kerensky left Petrograd to fetch troops from the front, and that night the Bolsheviks took the Winter Palace and arrested his ministers. Only General Pyotr Krasnov answered his appeal, with a few hundred Cossacks. After their defeat at Pulkovo the Cossacks were ready to hand the prime minister over to the Bolsheviks, and he escaped from Gatchina disguised as a sailor. The legend that he had earlier fled the Winter Palace dressed as a woman angered him for the rest of his life.

Exile

For several months he hid in Russia. In June 1918, with the papers of a Serbian officer and the help of British agents, he left via Murmansk for London and then Paris. He lobbied for Entente support for a democratic Russia but opposed the military dictatorships of the White generals, which he considered no better than the Bolsheviks. In the 1920s and 1930s he lived first in Berlin and then for many years in Paris, publishing the émigré paper Dni, lecturing and writing successive versions of his memoirs. The Russian emigration was divided, and to the monarchists and former officers he remained the man who had destroyed the army and opened the way for Lenin.

From exile he watched the state that had replaced his republic become the dictatorship of Joseph Stalin, while in Germany Adolf Hitler came to power. In 1939 he married for the second time, to the Australian Lydia Tritton. When Germany attacked France in 1940, the Kerenskys left for the United States. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Kerensky, for all his hostility to Soviet rule, came out in favour of defending Russia against Hitler.

Last years

After the war he settled in New York. He spent much of his time at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, which collected archives of the Russian Revolution, and with an American historian he compiled a three-volume collection of documents of the Provisional Government. He also published the final version of his memoirs, Russia and History’s Turning Point (1965). He died in New York on 11 June 1970, one of the last surviving leaders of 1917. The Orthodox parishes of New York refused him a funeral, blaming him for the fall of Russia, so he was buried in London, at Putney Vale Cemetery.

Significance

From the very beginning Kerensky’s reputation was a battlefield. To the Bolsheviks he was a “bourgeois” politician who had deceived the people and waged an imperialist war; to the monarchists and White officers he was the gravedigger of the army. The word “Kerenshchina” became a byword for empty talk and powerless government. Kerensky himself argued to the end of his life that he had lost because he could not conclude a separate peace, the Allies would not help, and Kornilov really had been preparing a coup.

Historians take a more nuanced view. Most agree that what Russia wanted above all in 1917 was peace and land, and that Kerensky, loyal to the Allies and to the Constituent Assembly, gave it neither. His fall had consequences far beyond Russia. Instead of a democratic republic tied to the Western Allies, there arose a communist state that broke with them, made a separate peace with Germany and, two decades later, in August 1939, came to terms with Hitler.