Comrade Kerensky. Boris Kolonitskii

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СКАЧАТЬ continued subsequently to demand the release of ‘the five’.¹¹⁴ The celebrated memoirist Nikolai Sukhanov, a Menshevik internationalist, recalled that Kerensky behaved like a professional revolutionary. He used his trips around the country as a Duma deputy for illegal work, delivering public lectures, helping to organize opposition, supporting it with funds provided by his liberal friends. This was not something which could remain unnoticed. The right-wing politician Nikolai Tikhmenev wrote: ‘The revolutionaries’ leaders, the likes of Kerensky, are busily travelling round Russia delivering talks and lectures, and in the meantime evidently arranging a bit of this and a bit of that. Financed by murky sources, new social-democratic newspapers are popping up like bubbles out of the mud in provincial towns. The insolence of the “progressive” press is on the increase.’¹¹⁵ Kerensky’s opponents in the Duma may have exaggerated the scope and results of his activities, but his renown was increasing all the time. His connections with those in the underground, and his reputation as someone with those links, were of importance to him during the events of February 1917.

      Kerensky, as we have noted, did not confine his illegal activity only to supporting Socialist Revolutionaries. Meetings aimed at bringing about unity among the left-wing organizations took place in his own apartment. On 16–17 July 1915 a conference of representatives of the Narodnik groups of Petrograd (as St Petersburg had been renamed at the outbreak of war), Moscow and the provinces was held there. The police considered Kerensky to be the prime mover of this meeting, at which a central bureau was established to coordinate the activities of the Trudoviks, the People’s Socialists and the Socialist Revolutionaries. Disagreements on the issue of the war, together with police harassment, prevented the union from becoming a reality. Meetings of the capital’s Socialist Revolutionaries also took place in Kerensky’s apartment, as the secret police were well aware. In July 1915, police posts on the Russo-Finnish border received a secret order advising them that Kerensky was travelling around the empire, ‘engaging in anti-government activity’. They were instructed to keep him under observation. After the revolution this document was put up at Beloostrov railway station at the Finnish border for the public to see, as publications supportive of Kerensky duly reported.¹¹⁶

      The police exaggerated the role of the Trudovik leader in organizing protest. A report from the director of the Police Department linked the strikes of summer 1915 to Kerensky’s propaganda activity, claiming he had called for the establishment of factory collectives to form soviets along the lines of those which had appeared in 1905. In the report Kerensky was named as ‘the principal leader of the current revolutionary movement’. In reality, Kerensky and Chkheidze had urged the workers not to waste their energy on individual strikes but to prepare for future decisive action against the regime. After February 1917, police assessments of this kind, even if factually erroneous, were all to the good of the reputation of the champion of freedom. Newspapers published such documents, provided by Kerensky’s supporters who had the archives under their control. His biographers readily quoted from them.¹¹⁷

Kerensky’s wartime experience was important training for the politician. He tried persistently, if not always successfully, to reconcile fundamentally different political forces in order to enable them the better to fight their common enemy, the existing regime. He kept his position on the most controversial issue – his attitude towards the war – unclear, and at times in front of different audiences described it in different ways or with different emphases. It would, nevertheless, be a mistake to classify Kerensky as a centrist. His behaviour was more a matter of pragmatic ideological flexibility, sincere if bordering on opportunism. This ambiguity prevented him from becoming the leader of any one party, but it also meant he was welcome in very diverse circles, which was crucial for someone attempting to broker interparty agreements and who saw his mission as being to build a broad coalition of oppositionists.

      It is not easy to assess Kerensky’s actual contribution to organizing the underground. Michael Melancon, a historian of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, believes the clandestine revolutionaries used Kerensky and the resources he controlled but rejected him as a leader.¹¹⁸

      Other illegals also discussed relations with Kerensky, whose influence was on the increase. Revolutionaries were no doubt also attracted by the money at his disposal. Alexander Shlyapnikov seems to have raised the question of possibly making use of these resources with Vladimir Lenin. In his reply in September 1915, the Bolshevik leader characterized Kerensky as a ‘revolutionary chauvinist’ with whom it was impossible to enter into any alliance but with whom there could be cooperation in technical matters. Lenin’s letter can be interpreted both as a recommendation to make use of Kerensky’s resources and as a call for joint action to achieve the destruction of the regime. ‘Our relations should be direct and clear: you want to overthrow tsarism to gain a victory over Germany, while we are working for the international revolution of the proletariat.’¹¹⁹ As we see, the possibilities for a broad front of the forces of the opposition which Kerensky was trying to create could have included the Bolsheviks. The experience of negotiations during the war, even those which were unsuccessful, did influence the behaviour of its members during the February Days and what they had to say about each other. The initial restraint shown by some of the Bolsheviks in their criticism of Kerensky may have gone back to joint initiatives in the years before the revolution.

      During 1917, other Bolsheviks recalled their contacts with Kerensky. For example, at the end of August, Ivan Skvortsov-Stepanov published an article in which he touched on the career of Kerensky, who by then was already the head of the Provisional Government. The Bolshevik recalled a meeting with him in November 1916, by which time Stepanov believed the Trudovik leader had moved to the left. Nevertheless, he claims, Kerensky believed the hand of the Okhrana and imperial court, which he considered Germanophile, was behind workers’ unrest.¹²⁰ We might take this as an attempt by a prominent Bolshevik to discredit the head of the Provisional Government by suggesting Kerensky had failed to understand the real mood of the workers, and hence was questioning the democratic credentials of the leader of the February Revolution. The article can, however, be read in a different way, with even Kerensky’s political opponents, the Bolsheviks, acknowledging his involvement in the activities of the illegals. This could only be to the benefit of his standing.

      Other actions during the war redounded to Kerensky’s credit. Well informed about the mood among the illegals, he urged the liberals to give no quarter in the fight against the regime and insisted that the country was on the brink of revolution. Most of them thought he was being overly optimistic,¹²¹ but after the downfall of the tsar the Trudovik leader’s surmises were sometimes treated as infallible predictions.

During the war years Kerensky’s popularity grew steadily, aided by his speeches in the Duma. Banning them from publication only drew attention to them, and they were distributed in handwritten copies or as typewritten texts. Illegal organizations issued leaflets quoting them. After February 1917 the speeches were printed, and boosted his reputation as an opponent of the old regime, endowed moreover with the gift of prophecy.

      In 1915 a former police officer, Sergey Myasoyedov, was executed. He had been falsely accused by the General Headquarters of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief of spying for Germany. It was intended that the spymania campaign, instigated by the High Command, would divert public opinion from the bungling of the military leadership.¹²² The Myasoyedov Affair – and people from all parts of the political spectrum were convinced of his guilt – unleashed a deluge of conspiracy theories which proved a helpful propaganda asset. Right-wingers emphasized that Myasoyedov was married to a Jewish woman and had business connections with Jewish entrepreneurs, while left-wingers pointed to the officer’s past in the police. Kerensky successfully exploited the Myasoyedov Affair to denounce ‘treason at the highest levels’. As a deputy, he wrote to the chairman of the Duma, Mikhail Rodzyanko, demanding the immediate reconvening of the Duma. Without providing any evidence, Kerensky wrote that ‘treason has built its nest’ in the Interior Ministry, where, he alleged, ‘a robust organization of full-blown traitors were calmly and confidently at work.’ These forces, he declared, were attempting to ‘stymie a successful conclusion of the conflict abroad in the interests СКАЧАТЬ