In 1917 Kerensky was the most powerful man in Russia: justice minister in March, prime minister in July, a fugitive in October. Within a single year he was both the hope of the revolution and its disappointment.
From Simbirsk to the Duma tribune
Alexander Fyodorovich Kerensky was born in Simbirsk in 1881. His father was a teacher and sent his son to study law. The young Kerensky practised in Petrograd, where he took on the defence of political prisoners in the tsarist courts. Those cases gave him two things: the knack of speaking to a crowd and the art of turning a room his way.
He entered the Duma in 1912 as spokesman for the labour deputies, the Trudoviks. When the streets brought down the Tsar in February 1917, Kerensky was one of the revolution's best-known faces. The Provisional Government formed in March gave him the Ministry of Justice. He was its most talkative member. The Trudoviks had lingered in the shadow of the large parties; Kerensky's voice carried this small group onto the country's agenda.
Minister of Justice: the man of amnesty
Kerensky's first act was to abolish the death penalty. He freed the political prisoners, and revolutionaries returning from Siberia and the prisons poured into Petrograd. The amnesty gave him the part of the revolution's conscience; it also deepened the distrust of him among tsarist officers and police. In those same days the Tsar's family was held at Tsarskoye Selo, and Kerensky's ministry was rising on the wreckage of a fallen regime.
The contradiction showed quickly. When the front collapsed in July, the government restored the death penalty in the war zone, and Kornilov was the commander who used that power most harshly. The man who had proclaimed amnesty signed, a few months later, the decree that would have deserters shot. Kerensky wanted to make a revolution by law, but the revolution had long since left the law behind. That was 1917's plainest contradiction: the revolution's minister was trying to bring the revolution's army to order by tsarist methods.
May: a voice for the front
In May the first coalition government was formed, and Kerensky became Minister of War and the Navy. He was no longer speaking from a tribune but in front of the trenches. He went from regiment to regiment and called the soldiers to attack; the voice that had stirred crowds now had to compete with the guns.
The answer came on 18 June, when the Kerensky Offensive began. In the first days a little ground was gained in Galicia, and the newspapers wrote of victory. Then the Germans counter-attacked, the front broke at Tarnopol, and the offensive turned into a rout.
The July Days and the premiership
At the beginning of July armed demonstrations erupted in Petrograd: the July Days. The demonstrators wanted the capitalist ministers out; the government put the rising down, some of the Bolshevik leaders were arrested, and Lenin went into hiding. On 8 July the premiership passed to Kerensky, who kept the war ministry as well.
The victory was brief. The June offensive had cost more than 60,000 men, and peasant soldiers were leaving the front, going home and joining the seizures of land. In the coalition the socialist ministers became targets for the Kadets, and the government cracked a little more each week. Kerensky spent his first weeks as prime minister putting out fires, trying to hold the front and to calm Petrograd at the same time.
Kornilov: the general he armed himself
At the end of August came a reckoning with the commander-in-chief, Lavr Kornilov. At the Moscow State Conference that month Kornilov had been greeted as the hero of the right. Kerensky first asked him to send troops to Petrograd, then became convinced that the general was preparing a coup against him. The bargaining between the two ran through Lvov, by way of the Duma, and collapsed at the end of August.
Kerensky declared Kornilov a traitor and turned to the Soviet for help. The Red Guards were armed, railwaymen blocked the cavalry's road, and Kornilov's troops never reached Petrograd. The coup collapsed, but so did Kerensky's authority. The men he had armed would take his own power a few months later. The SRs stayed in the government, but the alliance behind Kerensky had narrowed.
Republic, Riga and loneliness
On 1 September Russia was proclaimed a republic. Kerensky headed the government that did it, but in those same days the Bolsheviks had won majorities in the Petrograd and Moscow soviets. In September Riga fell to the Germans within days, and the peasants' seizures of land quickened. The Constituent Assembly elections had been postponed for months; instead of accounting to the people, the government kept moving the date.
Britain and France found him weak and looked on Kornilov with sympathy. In September Trotsky took the head of the Petrograd Soviet, and Kerensky could not stop it. He was left with a gift for speech and the signature of a provisional government. He could trust neither the generals nor the soviets, and trying to manage both, he wore away his own base.
25 October: an American car
On the night of 25 October the Bolsheviks took Petrograd almost without a fight. The Winter Palace fell, and the sailors of Kronstadt marched into the city. Kerensky left in a car from the American embassy, tried to bring loyal troops from the front, failed, and never returned to power. The rising had been organised by the Military Revolutionary Committee under Trotsky; against Kerensky now stood not a scattered crowd but a planned organisation.
He hid in Russia for a few months, then left the country in disguise. He never went to prison. After October his government dissolved, and Bolshevik power never let him back into the country.
Exile: London, Paris, New York
In 1918 he went to London and Paris and found no support among the Allies. That same year the Komuch, set up in Samara, was a government of Constituent Assembly members, and it did not take Kerensky in. His wife Olga and their sons escaped from Russia only in 1920.
In 1919 the peace conference met in Paris without Russia; Kerensky was left in the corridors, as were the representatives of the Whites and the émigrés. He never returned to Russia and died in New York in 1970. He remains the man who talked most and was heard least in 1917.