Inside the Russian Revolution

by Rheta Childe Dorr

CHAPTER XXI 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.