Alexander Kerensky: The First Love of the Revolution

1047 Pages·1987·2.44 MB·English

by  Richard Abraham

Cover

Alexander Kerensky : The First Love of the
title:
Revolution
author: Abraham, Richard.
publisher: Columbia University Press
isbn10 | asin: 0231061080
print isbn13: 9780231061087
ebook isbn13: 9780585382715
language: English
Kerensky, Aleksandr Fyodorovich,--1881-
1970, Prime ministers--Soviet Union--
subject
Biography, Russia--History--February
Revolution, 1917.
publication date: 1987
lcc: DK254.K3A64 1987eb
ddc: 947.084/1/0924
Kerensky, Aleksandr Fyodorovich,--1881-
1970, Prime ministers--Soviet Union--
subject:
Biography, Russia--History--February
Revolution, 1917.
Page null01
ALEXANDER KERENSKY
Page ii
Image not available
The First Love. Kerensky salutes the navy, Sebastapol, May 1917.
Page iii
ALEXANDER KERENSKY
THE FIRST LOVE OF THE REVOLUTION
Richard Abraham
Page iv
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Abraham, Richard, 1941–
Alexander Kerensky: the first love of the revolution.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Kerensky, Aleksandr Fyodorovich, 1881–1970.
2. Prime ministers—Soviet Union—Biography.
3. Soviet Union—History—February Revolution, 1917.
1. Title.
DS254.K3A64 1987 947.084'1'0924 [B] 86–17548
ISBN 0-231-06108-0
Columbia University Press
New York Guildford, Surrey
Copyright © 1987 Columbia University Press
All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5
4 3 2
Book design by Ken Venezio
Page v
BARRY HOLLINGSWORTH
1935–1975
Page vii

Contents
Prefaceix
1. Inspector Kerensky's Career1
2. A Hesitant Hero14
3. Against the Tide36
4. Tribune of the People53
5. Terribly Little Time76
6. Citizen Brutus103
7. Fires of Hope and Aspiration125
8. The People's Minister of Justice146
9. Ambition and Diplomacy168
10. Patriotism of a New Type192
11. “The Supreme Persuader-in-Chief”210
12. No Longer an Idealist?226
13. Statesman or Revolutionary?247
14. Reproaches and Slander276
15. All Necessary Measures302
16. Regeneration?325
17. A Romantic Exile351
18. The Long Reprieve369
Notes385
Index of Persons458
Subject Index487
Illustrations appear as groups after pages 80 and 272
Page ix
Preface
The first light of dawn revealed the huddled, gray figures, chewing their
cheap tobacco. Around them were the hills and valleys of Galicia, dotted
with tree stumps and isolated wattle and thatch cottages, once so neat
with their fences and orchards, but now unkempt and roofless. The
hedgeless fields of wheat and rye looked equally forlorn, disfigured by the
shallow, sinister zigzags of the trenches and the random gashes of shell
craters. The larks were heard no more. The men tensed themselves for
the whistles and thuds of shrapnel, while those at the command post
stared at the thirty-six-year-old Minister of War who had come to urge
them on. His famous brush cut now concealed by a flat military cap, he
clenched his gloved fist against his plain but well-cut tunic as he paced
nervously back and forth.
They remembered how he had spoken up for them in courthouse and
parliament when the whole country had been silenced by the now
vanished gendarmes. Their new subalterns, fresh out of grammar
schools, worshipped him as the “Leader of the Intelligentsia.” For the
hidebound careerists, he was something else, a socialist waffler, an
upstart, perhaps even a “Yid.” He himself knew otherwise. A socialist
intellectual he had been, but he had the blood of a general as well. His
grandfather had served in the armies of the ill-fated Tsar Nicholas I, who
had been humiliated by the English and French in the Crimea. But he had
another dream, the dream of Themistocles that free men might fight
harder to defend their liberty than enemy slaves would to extinguish it.
The future of the world hung on this moment, on the Russian front in
June of 1917.1
Page x
Fifty years later I met Alexander Kerensky, but time was short and I never
got to know him. I did not then know what an irreparable loss this was.
There is one compensation: my resolve to tell his story unvarished might
not have survived a friendship with him. Even his closest friends admit
that he gave little away. As Elena Izvolskaya, his friend for four decades,
put it, “he has told in his books all that he has ever told me.”2 He lived
and died a conspirator, whose real gift eluded the literati who recorded
his failures. One can fail to be a “Great Man’’ but still be a great human
being. To many, Alexander Kerensky was an irresistibly lovable person.
Those who accepted their affection for him could never escape the web
of loyalty he wove. Others were blinded to his quality by patriarchal
prejudice and intellectual snobbery. No one who knew him well has ever
published an objective account of him.
In 1966, Professor Werner Mosse suggested Kerensky as a topic for
research, though the initial work was supervised by Dr. Lionel Kochan. It
was an almost full-time occupation during the three years I spent at the
University of East Anglia. By the early seventies, I had visited Paris,
Helsinki, New York, Austin, Stanford—and briefly Leningrad—and a book
was nearly complete. As the burdens of career and family mounted, the
work ground to a halt. It was rescued in the mid-seventies by Kerensky's
grandson, Oleg Kerensky, the ballet critic, who found readers sufficiently
encouraging to justify the disruption of our normal existence. The support
of Walter Deakin and Raymond Long secured the generosity of the Inner
London Education Authority, which released me for a term on full pay in
1982 to take up an Education Fellowship at Keble College, Oxford. The
Warden, Fellows, and first year politics students gave me the stimulus I
needed to get re-started. It has still taken another three years to
complete.
Oleg Kerensky prodded me into finishing the book and followed up some
important leads in New York. John D. Moore, President and Director of
Columbia University Press, repeatedly urged me to overcome the
practical obstacles to its completion. Börje Thilman, Director of Yritystieto
Oy. of Helsinki and occasional contributor to Hufvudstadsbladet,