Comrade Kerensky. Boris Kolonitskii

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СКАЧАТЬ activities. They attributed acts to him which he had not committed, but now, in the circumstances of the revolution, even these exaggerations, ‘confirmed’ by the intelligence agents of his political opponents, contributed to boosting the authority of the minister formerly at the centre of their attention. It seems clear that this publication appeared with the assistance of the minister or his staff.

      Several collections of Kerensky’s speeches and orders were published, including the texts of pre-revolutionary speeches. Attention focused particularly on those previously banned, and here too we may assume Kerensky was personally involved in preparing them for publication. There were sometimes acknowledgements that he had provided the publishers with authentic transcripts of his speeches to replace the edited versions which had appeared in official publications. Supporters of Kerensky would now preface the text with a brief biography, placing him in the historical pantheon of famed ‘champions of freedom’. In the preface to a collection issued by the Socialist Revolutionaries, his name was placed alongside such predecessors and heroes of the party as the Narodnaya volya [People’s Will] volunteers and members of the SRs’ Combat Organization, and his career was presented as an important part of the history of the revolutionary movement.⁹ Other publications brought together facts about Kerensky’s life with excerpts from his most famous speeches.¹⁰

      In 1917 the life of politicians in general became a matter of public interest, but no other leader found himself on the receiving end of as much biographical writing as Kerensky. This resulted from the public demand for information about him personally, from the considerable financial resources invested in building him up, and also from the political needs of the forces supporting him. Finally, this famous politician had many supporters among writers and features writers, and they willingly and creatively extolled him, receiving commissions and possibly soliciting them.

      Kerensky’s first biographer was Vasiliy Kiriakov (1868–1923), who had known him for many years. His articles in 1917 were prepared and published with Kerensky’s assistance. A rural teacher, active in teachers’ associations and well known as a literary commentator in radical circles, Kiriakov came to prominence at the All-Russia Peasant Union in 1905 and was elected to the Second State Duma.¹¹ When the leaders of the Peasant Union were arrested and put on trial, Kerensky, as a lawyer, defended Kiriakov. They stayed in touch. In 1917 Kiriakov wrote for the Trudoviks’ publications, and in the autumn he edited the Petrograd newspaper Narodnaya pravda [the People’s Truth], which was published by supporters of Kerensky with American funding.¹²

In May 1917, Kiriakov wrote a feature on Kerensky for the popular illustrated magazine Niva.¹³ The story in the magazine stopped short of the present, and readers were informed that Kiriakov was preparing a booklet about the life story of the champion of freedom for the publishing house Narodnaya vlast’ [Power of the People], which had been set up by the right wing of the Socialist Revolutionary Party. This was to detail also the doings of the minister ‘in these radiant days of the revolution, as the genius of Russia’s freedom’.¹⁴ Kiriakov duly published the pamphlet, whose first chapters were a revised and abridged version of the Niva feature. In it he included his reminiscences of meetings with Kerensky and newspaper articles and documents from the police archives (evidently provided by the minister’s staff). Kiriakov quotes some of Kerensky’s speeches, and indeed at times this stylistically heterogeneous biography turns into a dense assemblage of quotations.

      As Kiriakov describes him, Kerensky is ‘the first citizen of free Russia, the first people’s socialist tribune, the first people’s minister of justice, the minister of truth and fairness’. For Kiriakov, Kerensky is not only the principal leader but also an important symbol of the revolution – ‘a noble symbol of the noble Great Russian Revolution’.¹⁵

      Compared with other 1917 biographies of Kerensky, Kiriakov’s is the most Narodnik [Populist] and moralizing. In it we find the theme of ‘a debt for which there can be no recompense’ which the intelligentsia owes the common people, romanticization of the long-suffering people, the narod, and the cult of champions of freedom. Kerensky’s life is described as part of the history of the revolutionary movement as seen from a right-wing Socialist Revolutionary perspective. Kiriakov criticizes not only the Bolsheviks but also some moderate socialists, including fellow party members. He describes Kerensky as a Narodnik with a rare gift of leadership which enables him to establish a special connection with the people. ‘A. F. Kerensky has the ability to see into the very soul of the people and to quicken with his speeches all the latent greatness and holiness there, to merge himself with it creatively, and thereby draw it to himself forever.’¹⁶

      Kiriakov particularly notes Kerensky’s energy and devotion to the revolution. ‘Tempestuous and impulsive in his movements and his speech, he is fired by revolutionary emotion. His close friends say of him, “He does not walk, but runs; he does not speak, but bombards you.”’¹⁷ The hero in Kiriakov’s narrative is even endowed with the gift of prophecy, which is what has made him the Leader of the revolution. ‘A feature of A. F. Kerensky’s psychology is a nervous sensibility for political events which often extends to foreseeing them.’¹⁸

Kiriakov was also the author of popular biographies of other veterans of the Narodnik movement who supported Kerensky in 1917.¹⁹ In these sketches he makes use of the same techniques: through idealized biographies of the heroic Yekaterina Breshko-Breshkovskaya and Nikolai Chaikovsky, the author traces the history of the revolutionary organizations. He lays particular emphasis both on the special emotional connection between his heroes as they fulfil their moral duty and on the Russian people they are seeking to liberate. This theme of the reciprocated love of the revolutionary liberators and the people was prominent in the well-developed genre of Narodnik political hagiography within which Kiriakov was working. It is the same theme he develops in his description of the life of Kerensky.

      Another pamphlet about Kerensky comes from the pen of Oleg Leonidov (Shimansky, 1893–1951), a prose writer, poet, dramatist, translator, critic and essayist who later became famous as the scriptwriter of renowned Soviet films.²⁰ During the revolution Leonidov was serving in the army, apparently mainly as a propagandist. His military service did not prevent him from frequently appearing in print. Leonidov bases his pamphlet principally on police documents but writes also about his meetings with Kerensky, so it is more than likely that the latter assisted with publication of the biography. The Leader of Freedom, A. F. Kerensky was brought out by a Moscow publishing house in an edition of 24,000 copies. This was evidently well received, because a second edition appeared shortly afterwards with additional paragraphs reflecting Kerensky’s latest actions, by now as the minister of war.

      This is the most literary of the Kerensky biographies published in 1917. Leonidov made an effort to write in a vivid, lively manner. He stays with Kiriakov’s theme of a special connection between the Leader and the people but adopts a different style from the canonical Narodnik extolling of the champion of freedom. Kerensky is not a heroic martyr but a heroic victor. Leonidov hybridizes the genre of Narodnik hagiography with mass-media techniques of the early twentieth century for writing up celebrities, creating memorable portraits of Kerensky and graphically evoking his manner as an orator. The description of him as Leader in his title is significant and was obviously of significance also for both author and publisher. If the Socialist Revolutionary Kiriakov depicts Kerensky as a faithful member of the SR Party and a successor of the Narodnik tradition, Leonidov characterizes him as a national Leader, a Leader of the whole of the Russian people. This pamphlet is perhaps the most ‘leaderish’ of all Kerensky’s biographies, and in this respect it departs from the canonical Narodnik description of a hero. For Leonidov, Kerensky is not only the ‘finest son of the people’, the ‘true tribune of the people’, but also, ‘by the will of God, the Elect of the people’.²¹ It is probably going too far to see in this the direct influence of monarchist tradition, but Leonidov’s biography is hardly the product of a fully fledged democrat. In the additions made in the second edition, the themes of trust and devotion to the Leader, even of becoming identified with him, are yet more СКАЧАТЬ