Who Was Alexander Kerensky?
On 25 October 1917 (7 November N.S.), at 11:30 p.m., Alexander Kerensky left the Winter Palace in a Ford touring-car driven by a Wrangel-loyal officer of the Preobrazhensky Guard, took the railway to Pskov via the Finland Station, and from Pskov attempted a march on the capital. He had been Minister-President of the Provisional Government for 124 days. The provisoire was over. The Smolny was in the hands of the Military Revolutionary Committee. Kerensky reached Pskov on 27 October, the Petrograd Soviet had fallen, the Petrograd garrison had joined the Bolsheviks on 26 October, and the only armed force still loyal to the Provisional Government — the 3rd Cavalry Corps of General Pyotr Krasnov — surrendered to the Bolsheviks at the Gatchina station on 30 October 1917. Kerensky fled to France, then to Britain, and finally to the United States, where he died in New York on 11 June 1970, age 89. He was buried at the Saint Andrew Russian Orthodox Cemetery in Saddle Brook, New Jersey (Abraham, Kerensky, 1987; Katkov, The Kornilov Affair, 1980).
He had been born in Simbirsk (now Ulyanovsk) on 4 May 1881 (22 April O.S.) into the household of Fyodor Mikhailovich Kerensky, a teacher and headmaster of the Simbirsk Gymnasium, and Nadezhda Aleksandrovna Adler, granddaughter of a Jewish converted to Orthodoxy. He graduated from the St Petersburg University law faculty in 1904, was admitted to the bar in 1908, defended the Socialist Revolutionary deputies arrested for the 1905 first-duma campaign, and was elected to the Fourth State Duma in 1912 as a Trudovik.
The February Revolution
Kerensky was the first orator to address the Tauride Palace after the abdication of Nicholas II; he was a member of the Provisional Committee of the State Duma on 27 February 1917 (14 February O.S.) and was appointed Minister of Justice in the Lvov Cabinet on 5 (18) March 1917. He was the odno Minister of the Provisional Government who was a member of the Ispolkom (Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet) — a constitutional fact that gave him a veto over the Cabinet and the Cabinet a veto over the Ispolkom, and a series of stand-offs and dual-power collapses that the Cabinet survived by 5-to-1. He was the Minister of War from 5 (18) May 1917, and he toured the front in June 1917, addressing the 12th Army in the okop (trench-line) on 14 June 1917, wearing a colonel’s epaulettes and a kaska. The June offensive (18 June 1917) was his gamble. It produced 6,000 Russian dead for a 1.5 km advance (Kolonitskii, Interrex, 2017; Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 1996).
The Kornilov Affair
On 27 August (14 August O.S.) 1917, General Lavr Kornilov, the Supreme Commander, sent a telegrafnye dvorets telegram to the Provisional Government demanding the resignation of every Minister except Kerensky. The Kornilov “corps of volunteers” — the 3rd Cavalry Corps of General Alexander Krymov, the Tevtones (Dzhunkovsky) division, the Caucasian “wild” division of General A. S. Erdeli, the Cossack brigades of the Don — were already marching on Petrograd. The railway workers of the zheleznodorozhniki removed the points and locked the signals. The Bolsheviks distributed 40,000 rifles from the arsenal to the Krasnaya Gvardiya on Kerensky’s permission. The Kornilov bunt collapsed on 31 August (18 August O.S.) 1917. The 1,200 officers of the Tevtones surrendered at Luga on 1 September (19 August O.S.) 1917. The affair broke the Officer Corps, handed the Soviets the armouries, and made Kerensky a dependent of the Soviet (Katkov, 1980; Pipes, The Russian Revolution, 1990).
The July Days
The Bolshevik demonstration of 17 (4) July 1917 in Petrograd — 500,000 workers and Kronstadt sailors — was dispersed by the garrison and the Cossacks under the personal order of Kerensky. Forty are reported killed. The Bolsheviks went underground; Lenin fled to Finland on 18 (5) July 1917; Trotsky and the other Bolshevik leaders were jailed. Kerensky, who had been Minister-President since 8 July 1917 (25 June O.S.), survived the Kornilov Affair and dissolved the chrezvychainoe soveshchanie on 19 August 1917. He appointed General Aleksei Verkhovsky Minister of War on 12 September 1917, and Verkhovsky proposed an immediate armistice on the Eastern Front — a step the Allies were not ready to accept (Pipes, 1990; Service, The Russian Revolution 1900–1927, 1998).
The October defeat
Kerensky was in the Marinskii Palace in Petrograd on 25 October 1917 when the Military Revolutionary Committee under Trotsky opened the second Vserossiiskii s’ezd of the Soviets in the Smolny Institute. The Military Revolutionary Committee had already occupied the gosudarstvennyi bank, the telegraf, the telefonnaya stantsiya, the litovskii zamok (the Bolshevik-published Russian-Baltic fleet Detention barracks), the railway stations, and the electric-power station. The kreiser Aurora fired the blank shot at 21:00. The Gvardeiskii ekipazh (Garrison) declared for the Military Revolutionary Committee at 22:00. Kerensky fled at 23:30, and the Provisional Government, defended by the yuntsa cadets of the yunkerskie voiska and a rota (company) of the 1yi strelkovyi of the Pavlovsky Regiment, was arrested at 02:00 on 26 October (13 October O.S.) 1917. Twenty cadets were killed. The political work of the February Revolution was over (Figes, 1996; Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power, 1976).
The years in exile
From 1918 to 1940 Kerensky was in Western Europe. He edited the Dni newspaper in Paris, testified at the Kerensky Inquiry in London, and gave the Reith Lectures in 1962 on the BBC. He settled in New York in 1940, taught at the New School for Social Research (1940–1955), the Hoover Institution at Stanford (1968), and was a Fellow of the Russian Research Center at Harvard. He never returned to the Soviet Union. He testified before the U.S. Senate in 1966 on the 50th anniversary of the February Revolution. He was 89 when he died in 1970 (Abraham, 1987; Kolonitskii, 2017).