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.
CHAPTER XXII THE RIGHTS OF SMALL NATIONS
One of the main contentions of the extremists of the Russian revolution concerns the self-governing rights of the states, large and small, which make up the empire. I met no one in Russia who did not agree that each one of the states had a right to local autonomy, but I met many who feared greatly lest the empire should be dismembered and should fall apart into a number of small, weak states. Especially disastrous would this be, both to Russia and to the Allies, if it happened during the war. That Germany is doing everything in her power to bring about this end is proof enough that it would be disastrous to the Allies. Germany’s army and navy and German diplomacy are working overtime to separate the Russian states. The enemy forces are working now to isolate the Baltic states and Finland, and German agents are busy all over the empire spreading the propaganda of secession.