Comrade Kerensky. Boris Kolonitskii
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Название: Comrade Kerensky

Автор: Boris Kolonitskii

Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited

Жанр: Историческая литература

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isbn: 9781509533664

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СКАЧАТЬ describe his ‘parliamentary’ period as forced upon him, and even as an ordeal: ‘He felt fettered by his work in the Duma, and the need for constant interaction with the bourgeois parties was burdensome and irritating.’ They emphasize that his speeches, which sounded ‘trenchant and bold’ within the walls of the Tauride Palace, met with ‘hostility from the vast majority of those elected to the restricted-franchise Duma’ but elicited ‘a fervent response from the ranks of democracy’.88 Kerensky’s Odessan biographer highlights his unique situation in the Duma, contrasting the radical politician with the other deputies.

      He became the conscience of the Fourth Duma, one of its few bright spots. At moments when Russia’s prematurely born parliament was crushed by contempt and arrogance from the ministerial box, when the tsar’s lackeys from the podium of the State Duma derided the people’s representatives with such maxims as the notorious ‘that is how it was, and that is how it will be!’, only one voice rang out invariably firm, invariably bold and confident. That was the voice of A. F. Kerensky….

      The five years of Kerensky’s battle for freedom and truth are all that can redeem the five years of lassitude and impotence of the Fourth State Duma.89

      The members of the Provisional Government, the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, and the former deputies of the State Duma – Mensheviks, Trudoviks, progressives and Constitutional Democrats – would hardly have concurred with that judgement. Nor would anyone who read the Duma reports attentively. Nevertheless, some readers of the era of revolution who were only just beginning to take an interest in politics might well have believed that Kerensky was the only real representative of the people in the restricted-franchise and ‘bourgeois’ Duma.

      During the revolution, Kerensky himself described his work in the State Duma as a constant struggle against the enemies of the people. ‘For five years from this rostrum I battled with and denounced the old government. I recognize enemies of the people and I know how to deal with them,’ he declared in his speech of 26 March to the soldier’s section of the Petrograd Soviet.90

      The young lawyer very soon became the Trudoviks’ principal speaker. His meteoric rise caused alarm to some of the old guard of the Trudovnik group. Armand mentions that they periodically discussed plans to mount resistance to ‘Socialist Revolutionary domination’, but Kerensky’s authoritativeness, she claims, frustrated this. ‘His forcefulness won naturally, without tension.’91

      The right-wingers reacted angrily to Kerensky’s impassioned speeches. There were scenes. Those chairing the sessions interrupted the speaker, deprived him of the right to speak or debarred him for several sessions. His reputation as a troublemaker could mean that quite unforeseen meanings could be read into the most innocent expressions. There was even a joke that the official preamble, ‘Honourable members of the State Duma …’, had caused the chairman to react with, ‘Member of the Duma Kerensky, I am issuing you with a first warning.’ Armand writes proudly about his insubordinate behaviour and the reaction it evoked.94 His aggressive manner only increased respect for Kerensky in radical circles.

      It is hardly surprising that his speeches provoked conflict and attracted the attention of the press. Journalists in the Duma who were hungry for sensations often reported them. Kerensky became popular and was much quoted. His influence grew, and he began chairing meetings of the Trudoviks. From 1915 he was officially their leader.95

      There were times when Kerensky was perceived as the most prominent and best known of all the left-wing deputies. Nikolai Chkheidze, the leader of the Menshevik group, was a lacklustre orator, incapable of firing up his colleagues or attracting the attention of journalists. His adherence to Marxist orthodoxy prevented him from engaging in tactical negotiations with ‘bourgeois’ groups, and, as a result, the more dynamic Kerensky sometimes conducted negotiations on behalf of both the left-wing groups – a further boost to his standing.

      Not everyone was taken by the histrionic style of Kerensky’s speeches, which ran counter to traditional expectations of parliamentary oratory. Senator Nikolai Tagantsev remembered them as ‘demagogic’, and, while not denying that he had a gift for it, considered that his rhetoric was fit only for making speeches at protest rallies.96 In 1917, of course, that kind of rhetoric was just what was needed to enthuse huge rallies. Leonidov lavishes praise on Kerensky’s oratorical style. ‘You will not find exquisite honing in the speeches the present minister made in the Duma, nor will you find oratorical flourishes. Everything is improvised. These are not speeches in the narrow, commonly understood sense: they are the howls of a rebellious, bleeding heart, the great, ardent heart of a true tribune of the people.’97

      Kerensky continued to involve himself in illegal and semi-legal undertakings. He had a fat dossier in the Police Department, where a close eye was kept on him, with informers being infiltrated among those close to him. In 1913 Kerensky worked with the Petersburg Collective of the Socialist Revolutionaries. Okhrana agents based in Paris even reported that he had become a member of the party’s Central Committee. The information was false but indicative of the Interior Ministry’s suspicions about him. In reality, Kerensky declined an invitation from the Socialist Revolutionaries to become their representative in the Duma, aiming instead to unify all the Narodnik groups politically. These police reports were nevertheless published by supporters of Kerensky in 1917, which may have given readers an exaggerated impression of the scale of his illegal activities. This was all to the good as far as his status was concerned.100

      On 23 July 1914, on the eve of the First World War, Kerensky was detained in Yekaterinburg at a gathering of teachers which had not been officially sanctioned. He was saved from actual arrest by his immunity as a Duma deputy.101

      In 1911 or 1912, the young politician had been invited to join the Great Orient of the Peoples of Russia, a secret society established in 1910 on a basis of Masonic lodges.102 Kerensky played a major role in the organization and became both a member of the Supreme Council of Lodges and, in 1916, its secretary (a position he may still have been holding in early 1917). A historian of Freemasonry even writes of this as Kerensky’s organization, seeing the Great Orient of the Peoples of Russia as distinct from Russian Freemasonry in the preceding period.103

      To what extent СКАЧАТЬ