Comrade Kerensky. Boris Kolonitskii

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      His Odessan biographer wrote: ‘Supporting the Socialist Revolutionary Party, Kerensky suffered all the adversities of 1905 with it. Despite the strict secrecy, despite the fact that the party was doing its best to protect Alexander, aware of his extraordinary strength, he was arrested and put in prison.’⁶³ In reality, the party leaders are unlikely to have been acquainted with the young assistant attorney.

      In May 1917 Kerensky described his position at the time: ‘After 1905, in the midst of general exhaustion, I was one of those who demanded an attack on the old regime.’⁶⁴ Reminding the public of a time when he had demanded new, more radical action against the regime served to legitimize his right to curb the excessive demands of the soldiers. For Kerensky, who had by then become minister of war, that was a high priority.

      On 23 December 1905, the young lawyer was arrested, accused both of preparing armed insurrection and of belonging to an organization seeking to overthrow the existing order. On 5 April 1906, however, he was released under special police supervision but prohibited from residing in the capitals. Kerensky went back to Tashkent, where his father still worked. With the aid of his family and influential family friends he managed to have that restriction lifted, and he returned to St Petersburg in September.⁶⁵

Kerensky’s biographers did not report that it was connections in bureaucratic circles that helped him to escape exile. They found different explanations: ‘There was no hard evidence, however, and the future minister of justice was released from a Russian prison,’ the Odessan biographer ad-libbed.⁶⁶ Neither did they write in 1917 about Kerensky’s return to St Petersburg. Mitigation of his sentence did nothing for his revolutionary reputation. Mentioning his arrest, on the other hand, was very much to the point. After Kerensky was appointed minister of war, the ministry’s main newspaper wrote: ‘A. F. Kerensky was arrested several times by the old government for belonging to far-left movements before commencing his political work as a member of the State Duma.’⁶⁷ In the circumstances of the revolution, having been in prison under the old regime was a source of authority, even an important qualification for holding such a position. His biographers (Kiriakov and the Odessan biographer) also wrote about his arrest, and Leonidov, implying he had spent a considerable time in prison, claimed that, ‘If Kerensky ever did rest, it was only while in prison.’⁶⁸

      The arrest was important for his political career, but returning to St Petersburg was no less important: in the provinces Kerensky’s future would have developed quite differently. Once back in the capital, the young lawyer again became active politically, although again the scope of his activities is exaggerated by some biographers. Here, for example, is the Odessan biographer describing his role in organizing elections to the Second State Duma: ‘To prepare for the elections, a special organization of Socialist Revolutionaries was set up in St Petersburg, with A. F. Kerensky as its soul. For tactical reasons the party did not nominate him personally as a deputy.’⁶⁹ The truth of the matter was evidently that the Socialist Revolutionary leaders did not consider this junior lawyer a suitable candidate.

      Kiriakov recalls the episode, but frames it differently:

      This was all taking place in Zemlya i volya, the Land and Freedom movement, a group of Petersburg intellectuals organizing preparations for the elections to the Second State Duma, in the late summer of 1906. He immediately won everybody’s hearts and several times surprised them with his practical understanding of how the state worked, something in short supply among the old party workers, who had been obliged before 1905 either to keep their heads down in the underground or to live most of the time abroad.⁷⁰

      As described by Kiriakov, Kerensky is seen not as a prominent Socialist Revolutionary – which, at that time, he was not – but as belonging to a radical non-partisan association of intellectuals. It is interesting to find the young lawyer being portrayed as the representative of a new generation, more practical and attuned to affairs of state, coming up to replace the veterans of the revolutionary movement. The pragmatism of a statesman, already evident in the young man, further qualifies him for leadership in the revolutionary era, when the new politicians assuming power need skills and knowledge which the radical figureheads of the previous generation simply do not possess. Kiriakov, on the right wing of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, was clearly contrasting Kerensky with Victor Chernov and other party leaders who favoured more centrist positions.

Kerensky’s arrest and subsequent political activity enhanced his reputation in radical intelligentsia circles. In October 1906, Nikolai Sokolov, a Social Democrat and prominent ‘political lawyer’, asked Kerensky to go as a matter of urgency to Revel to defend Estonian peasants who had participated in rioting on the estates of the Ostsee barons. Kerensky immediately travelled to the capital of Estland and conducted a successful defence: most of the defendants were released, unpunished, in the courtroom.⁷¹

      One biographer describes this development in Kerensky’s career: ‘Into the dark, dreary night of reaction, A. F. Kerensky brought these persecuted brothers his love and professional skill. He abandoned his practice as a talented young lawyer to devote himself wholly to political trials. Few took place without Kerensky acting for the defence.’⁷²

      The reader is being offered the image of a successful, highly paid Petersburg lawyer who, for the sake of an ideal, was renouncing a career which promised to provide him with a substantial income. This was not the case, although idealistic motives did influence the assistant attorney’s decision. Tan too wrote of Kerensky’s hardships, apparently exaggerating them somewhat. ‘He received 25 rubles a month from his patron, for a long time suffered want, and lived with his family in an attic.’⁷³ As we shall see, the image of an ascetic devoting himself entirely to the struggle for freedom was an important part of how he was represented as the Leader of the revolution.

      After the trial in Revel, Kerensky was accepted as a fully fledged political defence lawyer. Almost all his biographers mention this occupation, and the minister of war himself, working on his credibility, reminisced both about his time in prison and his defence of people accused of crimes against the state. In the course of an important speech on 26 March 1917 in front of the soldiers’ deputies in the Petrograd Soviet, he stated: ‘I have spent much time in the dungeons of Russian justice, and many champions of freedom passed through my hands.’⁷⁴

3 ‘Tribune of the people’

      The specialization of ‘political defence lawyer’ was not lucrative, but it did bring renown in radical circles. It was a career which required observance of an unwritten but strict code of conduct well understood by both lawyers and defendants. Political defence lawyers confronted a number of ethical and professional issues. They were expected to have the accused acquitted while at the same time defending their client’s political views. To do both things simultaneously was difficult, and at times impossible. For the Constitutional Democrat Vasiliy Maklakov, one of the most prominent lawyers of the time, the first priority was legal defence of the client. ‘If he [the lawyer] should not offend or denigrate the political views of his client, if he could not, without humiliating himself, hypocritically dissociate himself from them because he agreed with them, he must nevertheless respect the duty of judges to observe and uphold the existing law. It was not permissible to conflate the obligations of political campaigner and defence lawyer,’ he reminisced.⁷⁵

Many lawyers, however, were perceived by society as politicians and behaved as such. This role of ‘tribune of the people’, denouncing the regime and its ‘servants’, was one Kerensky assumed. For him, every trial was a battle with a hateful government personified by the state prosecution. Here is how his role is described by Leonidov: ‘A. F. Kerensky was least of all a professional lawyer, selling his time and powers to individuals to protect their selfish interests and rights. He has always been drawn to defend the interests of the disenfranchised social СКАЧАТЬ