Aleksandr Fedorovitch Kerensky
Russia's prime minister for much of the time between the two revolutions of
1917. The ambitious and flamboyant Kerensky was the only man to take part in both halves of the revolutionary political system, the
Provisional Government and the
Petrograd Soviet, from the start, and came to symbolise the
February Revolution itself.
The Imperial Theatre
Kerensky was born in
1881 in the central Russian town of
Simbirsk, where his father was the headmaster of the local school. Kerensky senior obtained a promotion when his son was eight years old and moved the family to
Tashkent, which at least freed him from teaching the Simbirsk gymnasium's most famous
alumnus, a certain
Vladimir Ulyanov Lenin.
Young Kerensky's exposure to radical student politics during his
history course at
St. Petersburg University where he took part in several demonstrations fired upon by the tsarist police, persuaded him to switch to a law degree and to abandon his boyhood dreams of acting: at the age of 14, he had signed a letter to his parents 'The future artist of the
Imperial Theatre. His love of the
limelight, however, would not leave him throughout his political career.
Kerensky, still at university, was present at the
Bloody Sunday massacre on
Nevsky Prospekt which catalysed the attempted
revolution of 1905. A moderate socialist by Russian standards, he joined the small, agrarian
Trudovik party and became one of its representatives in the
Duma, the parliament wrung from Tsar
Nicholas II after 1905.
Meanwhile, he raised his profile as a lawyer by joining a protest in
1913 against the framing of
Mendel Beiliss, a Jewish clerk, for the murder of a 13-year-old boy in
Kiev.
After war had broken out in August
1914, Kerensky was one of the most vocal opponents of the war minister
Vladimir Sukhomlinov. The radicals in the Duma blamed Sukhomlinov for the crippling shortages of shells and rifles which they believed had forced the Russian army into the
Great Retreat of 1915.
Although the Tsar gave in on this occasion and sacked his war minister, the contempt he and the
Tsarina displayed towards the Duma finally alienated liberals even some way to Kerensky's right, not least after Nicholas had assumed personal command of the army.
A
palace coup organised by
Aleksandr Guchkov and trusted officers had been pencilled in for the spring of 1917, even before the outbreak of popular discontent which was joined by war-weary soldiers from the Petrograd
garrison and became the February Revolution.
Man of the People
As the first revolution progressed, the socialists of Petrograd quickly organised themselves into the Soviet, a council of workers, soldiers, and sailors from the nearby naval base at
Kronstadt. The Duma's uneasy liberals, holed up in their meeting place at the
Tauride Palace, initially debated whether to take power at all, much to Kerensky's
chagrin.
In fact, the
Provisional Government did not come about until the Soviet took up residence in another wing of the Tauride and convinced them that, if they did not assume command of the revolution, other forces were only too willing to do so instead.
During those first crucial days, Kerensky dashed between the meetings of the two authorities, wearing a
morning coat and starched collar for the benefit of the liberals and removing both when he came to address the Soviet, displaying a talent for a
quick change that would not have served him too badly had he fetched up at the Imperial Theatre after all.
The Soviet's official policy was not to join a
bourgeois government, but Kerensky had no such qualms, and enthusiastically took up the offer made to him by the first prime minister,
Prince Lvov, to become Minister of Justice. True to form, Kerensky ran straight to the Soviet, letting them know that his first ministerial act had been to free all the Tsar's
political prisoners and only then asking them for their
rubber stamp on his appointment. The
impromptu speech allowed him to show off the emotional style of
oratory which quickly became his trademark.
Other members of the Soviet joined the Provisional Government too after the
Miliukov Note crisis in April, which made the liberals anxious to co-opt popular support, but Kerensky still supposed himself the
linchpin between the two institutions. As it became apparent that only the Soviet, and not the Government, commanded the loyalty of the soldiers, Kerensky was no doubt pleased to be appointed
Minister of War in May.
Levée En Masse
As War Minister, Kerensky was able to fully indulge the parallels that he, and the educated liberals with whom he found a natural affinity, saw between revolutionary Russia and
revolutionary France. Under attack from
Prussia and
Austria, the French people had mobilised themselves in the
levée en masse to repel the invaders and, with the help of one
Napoleon Bonaparte and lashings of
élan, gone on to spread the word across most of Europe.
Kerensky encouraged volunteers to sign up for his new
shock battalions, which tended to attract middle-class men infected with a sudden bout of patriotism and soldiers in support roles anxious to have a crack at the
Boche. Among the more remarkable units the recruitment drive produced was the
Women's Battalion of Death, one of the few detachments of the revolutionary army to stay loyal to Kerensky's government until the
bitter end in October.
Such subtleties, however, were lost on the soldiers and workers for whom Kerensky still theoretically spoke. The rank and file of the army, in particular, could only with difficulty be persuaded to stay on the
front line rather than dash home to their villages for the
land reform which the peasant soldiers assumed would automatically follow the revolution. However, Kerensky expected that morale would be galvanised with the grand offensive, to be spearheaded by his favourite battalions, which was to take place in June.
In preparation for the
June Offensive, Kerensky set off on a
grand tour of the front, receiving a warm and attentive reception from the soldiers who turned up to his
walkabouts. His audience was composed of the junior officers active in the
soldiers' committees, so that he was quite literally
preaching to the converted; the common soldiers, as was increasingly their wont, played
truant, a sentiment which brought them closer, throughout the spring and summer, to Lenin's
Bolshevik party.
Still, Kerensky revelled in the adulation he was accorded by patriotic society, which verged at times on a
personality cult said to rival the Tsar's; the poet
Marina Tsvetaeva was only one of a number of writers to compare him overtly to Napoleon. Neither did it go unnoticed that, soon after taking on his responsibilities as Minister of War, his coats quickly took on a quasi-military cut.
Peacock of the Palace
The offensive in which Kerensky had invested so much emotion quickly collapsed, to the alarm of Russia's allies, under the weight of more than 170,000
deserters. In the wake of the
July Days, a violent demonstration against the war in Petrograd, Lvov's government collapsed, and Kerensky, the only figure whose support base still reached some way into the working class and bourgeoisie alike, became Prime Minister.
Kerensky moved his offices and the Government into the
Winter Palace, lately the residence of the abdicated Tsar, and even retained a number of the palace servants. The premiership may well have gone to his head, and
Sergei Eisenstein, in his
1927 propaganda film
October, tellingly intercut scenes of him ascending the palace stairs towards the balcony with shots of a
peacock flexing its tail.
Alarmed by an almost total collapse of discipline in the army, Kerensky attempted to reverse the tide with his new commander in chief, the
martinet General
Lavr Kornilov. Kornilov had become the darling of business leaders and disaffected liberals alike, and tried to march on Petrograd in late August after a chain of events known as the
Kornilov Affair, which Kerensky always described as an attempted coup.
While many of Kornilov's backers would surely have been glad to see the Government deposed, Kornilov himself may only have been trying to pressure Kerensky to declare what amounted to
martial law. Kerensky had initially approved the Kornilov reforms, but had had second thoughts after the demands became too extensive - or perhaps after the general upstaged him at the
Moscow State Conference in mid-August.
During a bizarre conversation with Kornilov over a
Hughes apparatus, an elementary
telegraph, Kerensky pretended to be
V. N. Lvov, who had previously been negotiating with the commander. He obtained enough proof of the conspiracy to be able to dismiss Kornilov, at which the latter then chose to mutiny after all. A motley coalition of Kronstadt sailors and Bolsheviks released from prison rallied round Kerensky in Petrograd, and railway workers blocked the advance of General
Krymov.
Although Kerensky was not unseated after the Kornilov crisis, his authority had become fatally weakened, as working-class support had ebbed towards the Bolsheviks and their simple slogan of '
Peace, Bread, Land'. Scurrilous propaganda suggested that he was sleeping with the cousin of his wife, was Jewish or liked to dress in women's clothes.
Kerensky had been warned on several occasions during the autumn that Petrograd was at risk of a
Bolshevik takeover bid, once by his last Minister of War. However, he still took no substantive action, perhaps out of confidence that he could weather the attempt.
On October 25, the night before the
All-Russian Congress of Soviets was due to meet, Bolshevik
Red Guards cut off telephone wires to the Winter Palace, defended by 3,000 soldiers, many of whom sloped back to their barracks as midnight approached: no 'storming', as the Bolshevik legend suggests, was necessary. Kerensky's last defenders were a couple of cadet detachments and 200 women from the Battalion of Death, who remained at their posts until the cruiser
Aurora fired on the Palace.
Kerensky was ushered to
Gatchina, where he set up his new headquarters but had little success in attracting troops to his cause. The
Russian Civil War would last until
1921, but Kerensky escaped to exile in
Paris, and later lived in America - where he spent some time at the
Hoover Institution - and
Birmingham. With several books on the events of 1917 to his name, he outlived most of his revolutionary contemporaries and died, at the age of 81, in
1970.
Read more:
Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy
Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution
Allan K. Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army