Isaac Deutscher 1966
Source: Marxism in Our Time, The Ramparts Press, Berkeley, 1971. This review of The Kerensky Memoirs: Russia and History’s Turning Point, by Alexander Kerensky (Cassell, London, 1966), was originally published in the Times Literary Supplement in June 1966. Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.
The Kerensky Memoirs are an essential part of the historical documentation on the Russian Revolution; and their publication on the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of the fall of tsardom is to be welcomed. True, this volume is, as critics have pointed out, largely a rehash of the author’s earlier Prelude to Bolshevism and Crucifixion of Liberty. But those books, published in 1919 and 1934 respectively, have long been out of print; and young readers have now their first opportunity to acquaint themselves with the self-portrait of the man whose name has been the symbol of the ‘February regime’ of 1917 and with his account of ‘History’s Turning Point’. The fact that Mr Kerensky, now in his middle eighties, does not try to startle us with new revelations, but repeats the version of events which he gave when his memory of them was fresh, speaks in his favour. And although he is not by any means an outstanding writer this is a readable book: it still has the breath of great events about it. It contains vivid scenes and character sketches, those for instance of the tsar and the tsarina, of ministers of the ancien régime, and of a few Conservative and Cadet leaders – though, characteristically, none of the men of the left ever comes to life. And although there is no lack here of heavy emotional overtones, the Memoirs are not quite as overloaded with polemical and stylistical excesses as was The Crucifixion of Liberty – whoever has done the pruning has rendered the author a good turn.
For all that, the present volume is not likely to enhance Mr Kerensky’s historical reputation. His name remains the epitome of utter failure in revolution. Of all the men whom the great wave of 1917 raised up, none had been less prepared for his role in the drama and none was more fortuitously involved in it. The early, strictly autobiographical chapters confirm Trotsky’s verdict: ‘Kerensky was not a revolutionist; he merely hung around the revolution.’ A revealing incident shows the author at the opening of his legal career, just before the 1905 revolution:
To be called to the Bar one had to give the names of three references... I put down a former Governor, a former Prosecutor... and... a member of the State Council... But I had made a mistake... these highly-placed references were unacceptable to the Board of Junior Barristers... I was rejected on the grounds that my references were from higher bureaucratic circles.
And this is how the author describes the mood in which he received the tsar’s October Manifesto of 1905, with its spurious promise of freedom:
I spent the rest of that night in a state of elation. The age-long bitter struggle of the people for freedom... seemed to be over... A wave of warmth and gratitude went through my whole being, and my childhood adoration for the Tsar revived.
He was disconcerted by the fact that not only the workers’ deputies of St Petersburg but even Professor PN Miliukov, the Liberal leader, rejected the manifesto with the words: ‘Nothing has changed; the struggle continues.’ Kerensky was elated even by the so-called Bulygin Duma, the State Consultative Council, a parody of parliament, which the whole opposition boycotted.
Yet before the year was out the young lawyer became disillusioned with the tsar and volunteered to participate in an attempt on his life. But ‘my requests had been turned down because I had no experience of a revolutionary and could not therefore be relied upon’. The political volatility, the proneness to illusion and gesture and the lack of political sense he exhibited in this prelude to his career were ominous. After a brief imprisonment in 1906, he kept aloof from politics for years, except that he acted as counsel of defence in political trials, and so as a lawyer he was in some touch with clandestine socialist circles. In 1912, almost fortuitously, he entered the Fourth Duma:
I had never given much thought to the future and I had had no political plans. My only desire, since the beginning of my political life, had been to serve my country. As a result I had been taken unawares when... asked... to consent to stand for election to the Fourth Duma as a Trudovik candidate.
The Trudoviks were semi-liberals and semi-populists. It was not Mr Kerensky’s fault that the Fourth Duma was the least representative and the most discredited of the tsar’s pseudo-parliaments; but it was through its rusty door that he was to enter the stage of revolution.
As an historian, no less than as a politician, he rides incessantly on the high horse of moral principle in a flood of sentimental phrases, and hardly ever has the time to put two and two together. Relating the outbreak of the First World War, he proclaims categorically his ‘contention that the Great War was absolutely contrary to the national interests and aims of Russia in 1914'; and he is unaware that in saying this he is politically knocking the ground from under his own feet. After all, the wicked Bolshevik defeatists said nothing else, only they acted on their conviction, whereas Mr Kerensky speaks in the same breath of the nation’s sacred patriotic duty to wage the war that was so ‘absolutely contrary’ to its interests. ‘I felt’, he confesses, ‘that the battle we had been waging against the remnants of absolutism could now be postponed.’ ‘On my way back to St Petersburg I worked out a plan of action for the war, based on a reconciliation between the Tsar and the people’, a plan of which the men of the Duma did not even want to hear. As late as in the days of the Rasputin affair, he still believed that ‘the best solution to the problem’ would be that the tsar should save his throne by ‘sending the Empress away to the Crimea or to England’. Who would have thought that this loyal though discontented subject of Nicholas II would turn so soon into the very embodiment of republican virtue?
The monarchy was already in ruins and the Petrograd Soviet was forming, yet Kerensky still tried to induce the men of the Duma to make some move. ‘From the very beginning’, he remarks, ‘my relations with the leaders of the Soviet were strained’, although those leaders were the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries who supported him. He considered that ‘the Duma was the only national centre of power’, the Duma whose rapid fading away in impotence and ignominy he himself describes. As, in one of the last days of February, masses of revolted soldiers and workers converged upon the building of the Duma, he suddenly felt in himself an upsurge of subversive energy similar to that which had led him once to volunteer for an attempt on the tsar’s life:
Without stopping to put on a coat, I ran out through the main entrance to greet those for whom we had been waiting so long. I hurried through the centre gate and shouted some words of welcome on behalf of the Duma... I urged the soldiers to follow me into the Duma building in order to disarm the guard and defend the building in case of attack by troops loyal to the government.
For a moment the young lawyer, all legalistic scruples gone, was carried by the whirlwind. He ordered the arrest of various tsarist dignitaries, among them of Shcheglovitov, former Minister of Justice and President of the Imperial Council. Prince Lvov offered him the portfolio of Minister of Justice in the first Provisional Government:
It was not until I reached home that the full impact of recent events hit me. For two or three hours I lay in a semi-delirious state, then suddenly the answer to my problem came to me in a flash: I must telephone my immediate acceptance of the government post... Oddly enough, my decision... was strongly influenced by the thought of the prisoners in the Government Pavilion. If any Minister from the Progressive Bloc could succeed in protecting them from the fury of the mob and keep the revolution free from bloodshed, it was I.
In a different context he states: ‘I had no use for people who could not genuinely accept the fait accompli of the revolution.’ He himself had certainly accepted what he thought was the fait accompli. It was his misfortune that he mistook the prologue of the revolution for its epilogue.
What then brought the young political dilettante so soon to the top, as Minister of War and Premier of the Provisional Government? His personal qualities? Yes, to some extent. The upheaval brought out in him unsuspected gifts, an ability for political manoeuvring, oratorical talent and a flair for ‘projecting his image’. But behind these qualities there was neither genuine revolutionary conviction nor conventional realistic statesmanship. His declamatory speeches intoxicated the masses while they were in a holiday mood, rejoicing rather prematurely in their triumph and unaware of the grave issues posed by the fall of tsardom. Of that holiday mood Kerensky was the sonorous mouthpiece, pouring forth generalities and pious wishes which for a moment sounded meaningful, even sublime, and brought bliss to many. Yet it is impossible to quote a single memorable phrase of his, a phrase of the kind that springs from deep feeling or thought. His audiences mistook his self-intoxication with his own slogans and appeals for sincerity and revolutionary fervour.
From the moment of the collapse of the monarchy... [he says] I found myself in the centre of events. I was, in fact, their focal point, the centre of the vortex of human passions and conflictive ambitions which raged around me in the titanic struggle...
On the face of things this is true; in a deeper sense it is an illusion. He was the ‘focal point’ and ‘the centre of the vortex’ for as long only as the ‘passions and ambitions’ were in a state of unstable equilibrium and relative rest. In all parties, on the left and the right, there were men of incomparably greater weight and stature: Kerensky loomed large while they were marking time. He moved with panache, before the blows came down, between anvil and hammer, kicking the anvil, shaking his fist at the hammer, and imagining himself to be in control.
When Mr Kerensky became Prime Minister he took over a hopeless legacy. The summer offensive of the Russian army had ended in appalling disaster, and Petrograd had just lived through the convulsion of the ‘July Days’. The Bolshevik party was being denounced for demoralising the troops and was driven underground. Lenin, branded as a traitor and a paid agent of the German General Staff, had gone into hiding. Trotsky and most Bolshevik leaders were imprisoned. Even now Mr Kerensky echoes volubly the old anti-Bolshevik accusations, although he also states that ‘the main reason for the failure of the offensive... was that the Russian army was opposed by first-class German troops’ and that two-thirds of the Russian infantry had been killed or wounded during preceding years. Not surprisingly, he relies heavily on the recently published German diplomatic archives for ‘incontrovertible evidence’ that the German General Staff had indeed financed Lenin and the Bolsheviks, as he, Mr Kerensky, had known all along.
This is hardly the place to go into that ‘new evidence’ – the reviewer intends to do so in a special study. Here it will be enough to say that the German documents (handy though they came in, a few years ago, to propagandists of the Cold War) have not done anything at all to substantiate the accusation against the Bolsheviks. What the documents show is what had long been known anyhow, namely that the German government spent during the war much money on propaganda and espionage in Russia (though it appears that they spent there only one-tenth of their expenditure in other Allied countries); that, having been made aware by the notorious Parvus – Helphand of the importance of Lenin’s party, they sought to establish contact with it; that Parvus, whom Lenin had denounced in 1915 as one who had ‘sunk to the gutter of German social imperialism’ and who subsequently had no connection whatsoever with the Bolsheviks, bluffed the German diplomats and generals, in truly Falstaffian manner, about his influence with the Bolsheviks, promising to work miracles in Petrograd and pocketing meanwhile millions of marks for himself. But not a single piece of evidence has been found in the German archives to show that Lenin and his party ever entered into any secret contact with the Kaiser’s government or accepted any money from it. (There is enough evidence from other sources to show that they never did anything of the sort.) Mr Kerensky now produces various conflicting sets of figures about the German ‘secret funds for propaganda and special expeditions’ with so triumphant a mien that one might think that he produces receipts from Bolshevik headquarters. If not as an historian and political leader, then at least as a lawyer, he might have spared us such hocus-pocus. He is understandably concerned with justifying his action in prosecuting the Bolshevik traitors in 1917. But what a peculiar lack of historical sense, if not of elementary respect for his own nation, he exhibits when he still maintains that all the upheaval that Russia has been undergoing for half a century now was set in motion by the German secret service and a few Russian criminals and spies.
Mr Kerensky’s next historic quarrel was with General Kornilov and the general’s sponsors and adherents. His account of that conflict is very instructive indeed. If Lenin aroused in Mr Kerensky the most intense animosity and suspicion from the outset, Kornilov inspired him with the utmost confidence. In the early days of the February regime he entrusted the general with responsibility for the tsar’s detention; and no sooner had he himself become Prime Minister than he appointed him Commander-in-Chief of Russia’s armed forces. Almost at once the general began to work for the overthrow of Mr Kerensky’s government and for the suppression of the Soviet and the parties of the left. Mr Kerensky leaves us in no doubt that Kornilov, who looks here like a prototype of Spain’s General Franco, was backed by many influential Russian bankers, industrialists and generals, and also by the Allied embassies in Petrograd. What Mr Kerensky says about this agrees with what the Bolsheviks, who did not know the ‘inside story’, were saying in 1917; and reading his account of the affair, one sees very well why even Mr Kerensky’s Menshevik and Social Revolutionary supporters suspected him of complicity with Kornilov in the early stages of the plot. The military coup was defeated without the firing of a shot, because Kornilov’s soldiers refused to fight for him and because the workers rose en masse. The Provisional Government was saved, but only for a few weeks. As Mr Kerensky rightly points out, Kornilov’s defeat had set the stage for the Bolshevik insurrection.
About the October dénouement, the author has nothing of historical interest to say; he can only curse it. He concludes with several melancholy chapters describing his last months in Russia, spent in hiding; his escape on board a tiny British trawler; and his experiences in Western Europe. Here and there in these pages there is a touch of tragic pathos, but under Mr Kerensky’s pen it resolves into melodrama. He describes, for instance, how in January 1918, he came from hiding to Petrograd, just at the moment when the Constituent Assembly was convened, and he volunteered to address the assembly. His closest political friends, however, did not want him: ‘The situation in Petrograd has changed radically [they warned him]. If you appear at the assembly it will be the end of all of us.’ The author has the honesty to relate this – or is it that in his self-righteousness he does not realise what devastating verdict on him these words implied? He hints that he intended to commit suicide while the assembly was in session; but: ‘I did not cross the Rubicon of death.’ No less disheartening were his later meetings with Lloyd George and Clemenceau, who, having in the meantime put their stakes on Admiral Kolchak, Kornilov’s successor, had no longer any use for the democratic ex-Premier.
Behind this tale of woe there looms, of course, the fundamental question of whether a bourgeois democracy could have been established in the Russia of 1917 or of subsequent years. Mr Kerensky is convinced that he would have established it, if only he had not received so many ‘stabs in the back’ from Miliukov and Kornilov, from the industrialists and bankers, from Lenin and Trotsky, from the Mensheviks, from his closest political associates, and from the Allied embassies. But do not all these ‘stabs in the back’ add up to the conclusion that a parliamentary democracy had no chance of survival in Russia’s political and social climate? It took the nations of Western Europe centuries, during which revolutionary convulsions alternated with long, slow and organic growth, to develop their parliamentary democracies, of which outside the Anglo-Saxon countries few were really stable. It was the height of naïveté to imagine that Russia, having in the middle of a war emerged from centuries of autocracy, with a shattered semi-feudal structure, with a land-hungry peasantry, with an underdeveloped bourgeoisie, with the national minorities in uproar, and with a highly dynamic, Marxist-oriented and ambitious working class, could be charmed into the mould of a constitutional monarchy or a liberal republic. No doubt, Russia is now sick with the terror and bureaucratic dictatorship of recent decades and appears to be laboriously groping towards some kind of freedom, perhaps towards a socialist democracy. Of that democracy, however, Mr Kerensky is not likely to be the tutelary spirit.