Kerensky — Part 1: Revolution
Alexander Kerensky led a provisional government between the two Russian revolutions of 1917. Was it a“glorious spring in the wintry life of his country”?
In February 1917 Russia experienced it second revolution in twelve years. Street protests escalated into large scale riots, factory workers threw out their bosses and soldiers mutinied. Most significantly, Tsar Nicholas II abdicated, ending the five hundred year Romanov dynasty.
As the smoke cleared, a Provisional Government was formed to guide the transition to a democracy. Under the leadership of Alexander Kerensky it abolished the death penalty and promised liberal reforms, including freedom of speech and political assembly.
A tumultuous eight months followed.
Alexander Kerensky first made his reputation as a very young defence lawyer of revolutionaries arrested after the 1905 Revolution. Like Lenin, who his father taught, he was born in Simbirsk (now Ulyanovsk) four hundred miles from Moscow. Elected as a Socialist Revolutionary to the Duma (parliament) in 1912, he was key member of the member of the Progressive Bloc an alliance of the non-Bolshevik left wing parties.
Lenin, seething in exile in Switzerland, loathed Kerensky’s flamboyant performances in Duma. This “loud mouth,” and “idiot” was “objectively an agent of Russian bourgeois imperialism’. But the Lenin was exiled in Zurich with his small band of malcontents. Who cared about that loser?
The February Revolution produced two centres of power: the Duma or parliament and the Petrograd (Petersburg) Soviet or council. Kerenksy held key offices in both bodies. He was ideally placed to play a key role in the new regime.
This proved to be a poisoned chalice. With war still raging, the Provisional Government was inherently unstable. Initially, its precariousness played to Kerensky’s flair for the dramatic. In May he stood up in the Petrograd Soviet and gave a stirring speech.
“I cannot live without the people. In the moment you begin to doubt me, then kill me.”[23}
By this point the Bolsheviks, the minority party making the majority of the trouble, had their leader back in Petrograd, courtesy of a sealed train provided by the German High Command. They were hoping to cause trouble for the Kerensky regime. They succeeded beyond all expectation.
Over the summer support for the Provisional Government drained away. Inherently unstable it was ultimately paralysed by mass desertion from the front, strikes and mutinies. Kerensky’s personal popularity plummeted as his political judgement deserted him.
In July the Bolsheviks made a an abortive attempt to seize power. Some Bolshevik leaders were arrested in a half-hearted crackdown. Lenin was off again, hiding out inFinland.
August brought the discovery of a coup conspiracy involving military leader, General Kornilov. Miscalculating, Kerensky saw off this challenge from the right by empowering his government’s deadliest and best organised enemy: the Bolsheviks.
In October Lenin made his move. Secretly returning from Finland, he now astonished his own party by urging it to seize power.
At dawn on October 25th (November 5th), Bolshevik soldiers occupied key bridges and checkpoints throughout Petrograd. They also cut phone lines to the Winter Palace, where the provisional government was meeting.
A naval cruiser, Aurora, crewed by Bolshevik sailors, sailed up the Neve to join the fun. Its firing of a blank shell was the signal for the assault on the the Winter Palace to begin. The Palace’s defenders — some young cadets, and the Women’s Battalion of Death — were in a hopeless position.
The invaders had orders to arrest Kerensky. But though Government ministers were meeting around a dining room table, their prime minister was not amongst them.
According to later Soviet propaganda, Kerensky’s escaped Petrograd disguised as a maid. In fact he had left the city earlier in the day in a car borrowed from the US Embassy. This drove him to the Gatchina Palace, near Petrograd. It is here that Kerensky receives a cable indicating that the Bolsheviks have seized the Winter Palace
The deposed Prime Minister tries to rally the troops to retake the city. His military commanders warn him that there is little support for this
November 14, 1917: Gatchina Palace, near Petrograd.
As a crowd gathers Kerensky receives news that his arrest and extradition is imminent.
Just before the Bolsheviks were to enter Kerensky’s quarters, a young soldier named Belenky, together with a sailor, burst in. Immediately, Kerensky donned the ill-fitting sailor’s uniform, and he and Belenky calmly walked past the sentries and milling soldiers and out the palace gates. They hailed a cab and made it to a waiting car at the Chinese Gate to Gatchina village.
The fleeing prime minister sledges through the snow to a farmhouse, the first in a chain of safe houses. The host family gives him a small icon to wear around his neck, and the only possession he will take into exile. He grows a beard and moustache and begins to travel more openly.
The tells aides of a new plan — to make a dramatic appearance at the scheduled meeting of the Constituent Assembly in January. Aides are horrified, “You can’t do that!” they plead. “They’ll kill you.
Eventually Kerensky is persuaded to remain in hiding. This proves wise counsel, as the Bolsheviks swiftly close down the Constituent Assembly, after a single session. This ushers in a one party state.
Onto Plan B then: a government in exile. Or the ‘dustbin of history’, as Trotsky liked to goad his opponents. As it turned out, there were worse places to be. As long as you didn’t hang around in Russia, that is.
In July the Romanovs would tragically learn this the hard way.
