KERENSKY, THE MYSTERY MAN
It is unfortunate that nothing has ever been written about Kerensky
except eulogies. However deserved they may be, eulogies have the fault
of not being informative. Who is Kerensky? What kind of a man is he?
Why hasn’t he restored order in Russia? If he cannot restore order,
discipline the army and make it fight, why doesn’t he step aside and
let somebody else try? These questions have been asked on all sides.
I may not be able to answer all or any conclusively. But I was in
Russia three months, and I watched Kerensky progress from Minister of
War to Minister-President of the Provisional Government and virtual
President of the Russian Republic. I can tell my own observations of
the man, and I can present the evidence of events, allowing the reader
to draw his conclusions. I saw Kerensky frequently, heard him speak
several times, and, like almost every one else, I went through a period
of extreme enthusiasm for him. A certain enthusiasm I have retained. I
still think he has achieved marvels in keeping a government together
and remaining for nearly six months at the head of that government.
In fact Kerensky, whatever else is said of him, for a time at least
kept before the wild-eyed, liberty-mad masses of the Russian people
the certain fact that governments must be, that the state cannot exist
without leaders.
There was apparently no other man in Russia who could do this thing.
The old theory that great events always produce great men seems to
have failed in this case. The most stupendous event in modern history,
the Russian revolution, has as yet produced no great, or even, when
Kerensky is left out, no near-great men. The first provisional
government contained able men like Lvoff and Miliukoff. But they could
no more cope with the situation created by the fall of autocracy in
Russia than so many children could operate a railroad system.
These men thought that they had helped to bring on a political
revolution. They little knew their Russia. There was just one man of
ability in that first ministry who knew the truth, and he knew only
part of it. Alexander Feodorovitch Kerensky, the socialist who was
appointed Minister of Justice, knew that what the world was about to
witness in Russia was a social revolution. But he, too, was blind to
the task before him. At the very outset of his career as Minister of
Justice, Kerensky insisted on abolishing the death penalty. “I do not
wish that this shall be a bloody revolution,” he declared. In one
sentence he showed how little he, too, knew his Russia.
There was some excuse for ignorance on the part of most of the other
ministers. Prince Lvoff, for example, was a large estate owner, a man
who lived in the country a great deal of the time, one who had been
active in the affairs of his zemstvo or county council, a friend and
adviser of peasants, but always the great gentleman, the aristocrat.
Miliukoff was a university professor, a man of books, an amateur of
music. And so on through the list.
But Kerensky was no aristocrat. He was an obscure lawyer, one who
specialized in cases of men and women accused of political offenses. He
defended with fiery zeal young students whose revolutionary activities
drew them within the tiger claws of the autocracy. He was the friend
of the poor. He was one of the executive council of the Social
Revolutionary party, largely made up of peasants. Why did he not know
and understand his countrymen? Why could he not have known that the
abolishment of the death penalty at that hour of supreme crisis would
drench the revolution in blood?
Kerensky was in the beginning an extreme idealist, a preacher, a
prophet. He changed a great deal between February and November, 1917.
But events, I think, on the whole, prove him an extreme idealist, a
dreamer instead of a doer. Such men and women are never really great as
leaders. They can stir up an enormous enthusiasm, send the crowd to the
highest pitch of inspiration, even make it do monumental things for a
time. But the dreamer’s usefulness stops there.
Somewhere in Russia, in one of the universities perhaps, in some
farmhouse or on some lonely steppe, there lives a big, hard-fisted
strong-brained ruthless boy who can and will some day do the kind of
ruling and guiding Kerensky talks about and would have enforced if he
could. Perhaps that boy got his inspiration from hearing Kerensky talk.
But the boy is a real leader. He will stretch out his hand to the mob
and the mob will obey his indomitable will.
Did the mob ever obey Kerensky’s will? Take the army situation, for
example. The day I arrived in Petrograd, May 28, I had a talk with the
then American consul, Mr. North Winship. He told me what he had seen
of the revolution, and spoke gravely and apprehensively of the future.
The sedition in many regiments at the front was, to his mind, the most
sinister single menace that had yet developed. “Kerensky, the new war
minister, has just been sent down to the front,” he told me. “He will
save the situation if any living human being can. His influence over
the Russians is enormous. He can sway them like the tides with his
eloquence.”
Kerensky, who all the world knows is a sickly man, spared himself no
whit during those critical days. He tore all over the front in motor
cars. He made scores of speeches, thrilling speeches. Every one reading
in the newspapers of his wonderful speeches breathed more freely and
whispered, “We are saved.” But were they?
One incident. It may have been cabled to the American newspapers. On
one front where Kerensky was speaking a soldier, doubtless deputed
by the less brave in the regiment, stepped forward and said: “It is
all very well to urge us to fight for liberty, but if a man is killed
fighting what good is liberty to him?” Instantly Kerensky’s wrath
poured out in a torrent of eloquence. He denounced the man for a
traitor and a disgrace. The man who would think about his miserable
skin when the freedom of his mother country was threatened was unfit
to live with brave men. Turning to the colonel of the regiment, he
demanded that the soldier be degraded and immediately turned out of the
army, sent home a branded coward.
The colonel replied that there were others in the regiment who might,
with justice, receive the same treatment. But no, said Kerensky, one
man disgraced was enough. He would be a symbol of dishonor. The Russian
army needed nothing more. The unfortunate man is said to have fallen in
a swoon. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was so. But he was probably
glad enough after he recovered that he was sent home. Nor was the
symbol of dishonor enough for the Russian army. It continued to desert.
Often after one of Kerensky’s speeches he would call on the troops to
declare whether or not they would fight. Always they roared out that
they would, to the death. Sometimes they did, it is true, but sometimes
also they didn’t. At present no one can tell whether any soldiers,
except the Cossacks and the women, are going to go forward when
commanded.
When the army demoralization, fraternization and desertions began to
assume recent frightful proportions Kerensky issued a manifesto telling
the soldiers what he was prepared to do to deserters. They would not be
shot--no, the death penalty was for all time abolished in Russia. But
deserters would be treated as traitors. Their families would receive
no soldiers’ benefits, and they would not be allowed to participate in
the redistribution of land. The Minister-President, for by this time
Kerensky was at the head of the Provisional Government, would give the
deserters time to get back to their regiments. He named a date about
three weeks in advance. But on that day, at the extreme limit, all
soldiers must be back in their regiments. This manifesto was issued
not once, but three times, as I have stated. Three separate dates were
given, three ultimata pronounced. But none of them was even noticed by
the demoralized soldiers. On one date, June 18, it is true, Kerensky’s
order to advance was obeyed. At all events, the troops advanced on that
day and fought a victorious fight. It may have been in response to
Kerensky’s order, or it may have been a coincidence.
Kerensky’s idealism began to suffer. He began to see his people as an
unruly, unreasoning, sanguinary mob. But he loved the mob and could
not bring himself to do it violence even for its own good. In July he
agreed that Korniloff should be made commander-in-chief of the army,
with power to shoot deserters in the face of battle. Korniloff’s demand
for full command of the army, both at the front and in the reserve,
with power to shoot all slackers, Kerensky would not agree to. However,
in that same month of July, 1917, Kerensky had progressed so far that
he told the world that he was prepared to save Russia and Russian unity
by blood and iron, if argument and reason, honor and conscience, were
not sufficient. Apparently they were not sufficient, but where was
the blood and iron? Beating Russia into submission would be a big job
for anybody just then, and it would be interesting to know just how
Kerensky thought he could do it. He was the only man of first rate
ability in his ministry, the only strong force. He would have had to
have some backing, and where could he get it?
The Soviets? They have over and over, after fierce fighting, voted to
give Kerensky support. Once they voted to give him supreme power. But
they were never in earnest about it, and Kerensky knew it very well.
They proved that they were insincere, it seems to me, by their action
in October in refusing to support any ministry not made up exclusively
of Socialists, and then making such a body subject to criticism and
control.
“The Germans are at our very gates,” Kerensky told those men. “While
you sit talking here, and are refusing to listen to words of reason
from your commander-in-chief, your revolution is in danger of
destruction. Are there no words of mine to make you see it?”
Words, words, words! Hurled passionately from a burning heart into
a whirling void. That seems to me to typify Alexander Feodorovitch
Kerensky talking to the Russian revolutionary mob.
The French revolution offers no parallel to this. Each one of the
successive leaders of that mob accomplished something good or bad.
Mirabeau led the mass as far as a constituent assembly. Marat and
Danton got rid of the king. Robespierre imposed his will on Paris
until the end of the reign of terror. Robespierre, “the sea-green
incorruptible,” is the nearest parallel to Kerensky that the French
revolution offers. He led the mob in the direction it wanted to go.
Kerensky followed it in a direction it wanted to go, begging it with
all his eloquence to turn around and follow him. The mob applauded
him, adulated him, wove laurels for his brow, but it would not follow
him.
He could not turn the mob. Perhaps nobody could have done so. Perhaps
what had happened in Russia was inevitable, the only possible reaction
from three centuries of Romanoff rule. To have it otherwise Kerensky
has all but laid down his life. He suffers from some kind of kidney
disease, and shortly before the February revolution he underwent an
operation which nearly finished him. His right hand is incapacitated
and is usually worn in a sling or tucked inside his coat. He is thin,
hollow of chest and walks with a slight stoop.
A man of thirty-seven, Kerensky is about five feet eight in height. He
has thick brown hair, which bristles in pompadour all over his finely
shaped head. His myopic eyes are blue, or grey, according to his mood.
You see those eyes in Russia, deep, beautiful blue at times, steel grey
at others. Kerensky’s eyes look straight at you and give you confidence
in his candor. Sometimes when he is suffering physically the eyes seem
to sink in his head and lose all their brightness. When he is tired or
discouraged they burn like somber fires. His face is pale, and even
sometimes an ashen grey, and the face is deeply lined and scarred with
troubled thought. The nose is big and strong, the mouth deeply curved,
and the strong chin is cleft, with a deep line, rather than a dimple.
Kerensky’s speeches, to my mind, read better than they sound. He is
intensely nervous on the platform, jerking, moving from side to side,
striding up and down, thrusting out his chin--a kind of delivery I
especially dislike. His gestures are all jerky and nervous. His voice
is rather shrill. But in spite of all this he is a really eloquent
speaker, and he rouses his audiences to a point of enthusiasm I have
seen only one man equal. Of course I mean Theodore Roosevelt.
Kerensky was formerly a model family man, I heard, but something went
wrong, and last summer Mme. Kerenskaia and her two small sons, nine and
seven, lived alone in the modest home. Kerensky lived in a suite in
the Winter Palace and drove in the Czar’s motor cars and was waited on
by a whole retinue of faithful retainers. No disparagement to him is
intended in the statement. The Winter Palace was his headquarters, and
as for the motor cars he had a right to drive in them, and every right
in the world to be waited on and cared for.
The parents of this fated child of revolution were well educated and
fairly well circumstanced. The elder Kerensky was a school inspector
and was able to give his son a university education. Rumor persistently
states that Kerensky’s mother was a Jewess, but I do not know whether
this is true or not.