Alexander Kerensky Dies Here at 89 (Published 1970) (2024)

Alexander Kerensky, who led the first phase of the Russian Revolution in 1917 until he was overthrown in the Bolshe vik coup, died yesterday of arteriosclerotic heart disease at St. Luke's Hospital. He was 89 years of age.

The former Premier en tered the hospital April 24 to recover from a broken elbow and pelvis sustained in a fall, according to Countess Sira llin ska, a longtime confidante.

For a brief and metcoric moment Alexander Fyodorovich Kerensky, 36 years old and a lawyer, was at the vortex of the Russian Revolution, the greatest social, political and economic convulsion since the French Revolution. The com plex forces that generated that event overwhelmed him, and the power he exercised for little more than four months dribbled from his grasp to be picked up and held onto by the Commu nists. For the remainder of his life he was the epitome of failure in a revolution, a man derided by the victors, an exile from his country who was a curi osity in his adopted land and who passed his time in fulmi nations against the Soviet State and attempts to justify his ac tions in the Provisional Gov ernment of 1917.

Fortuitously involved in the drama of the revolution, Ker ensky (pronounced KAY‐ren ski) seemed to some, in per spective, to deserve Leon Trot sky's verdict: “Kerensky was not a revolutionist; he merely hung around the revolution.” Nevertheless, from July to No vember, 1917, when he was head of the Provisional Gov ernment that followed some 300 years of autocratic rule by the Romanov Czars, the eyes of the world were upon him as the giant seeking to bring stability and a measure of dem ocratic rule to the vast domain of Russia and her 170 million people.

Described by a British writer in those months as “a frail young man with a sul len mouth, deadly serious and endowed with that gift of tongue which is bestowed only on prophets and world mov ers,” Kerensky appeared to many of his countrymen and to many abroad to personify Car lyle's “Ablest Man,” the hero of a “new” Russia. Yet so swiftly did the engines of revolution run that by early November he had fled Petrograd, then the capital of Russia, never to re turn as the man in charge. His historical moment had con cluded.

Born in Same Town

The man who took his place and who fashioned the world's first Communist revolution was Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, the hardy, professional Bolshevik leader known as Lenin. Like Kerensky, Lenin was a law yer; but the supreme irony was that the two men shared the same birthplace, Simbirsk (now Ulyanovsk), a sleepy pro vincial town on the middle Volga; and that Kerensky's father was the director of the gymnasium from which young Lenin graduated. (Indeed, Fyo dor Kerensky had praised the youth's academic and personal record and had been close enough to the family to offer advice on his university educa tion.) There is no evidence, however, that Kerensky met Lenin, 11 years his senior, in Simbirsk or later.

Lenin was harsh in his judg ment of his benefactor's son. Kerensky, Lenin wrote during the revolution, was a “loud mouth,” an “idiot” and “ob jectively” an agent of Rus sian bourgeois imperialism.

Kerensky's assessment of Lenin was scarcely less cordial. In his “Russia and History's Turning Point,” published by Duell, Sloan & Pearce in 1965, the former Russian leader in sisted that Lenin was a paid agent of the German General Staff who had thwarted the Provisional Government “with a stab in the back.”

“Lenin,” he wrote, “had no moral or spiritual objection to promoting the defeat of his own country.” He argued that “Lenin's chief aim [in 1917] was to overthrow the Provi sional Government as an essen tial step toward the signing of a separate place [with Germany].”

Rightists Blamed

Kerensky denied that he was unaware of Communist peril, but in his summing up of events in 1965 he contended that attacks from Rightist mili tary men and political leaders had undermined his Govern ment and had opened the way for Lenin's success. Kerensky put it this way:

“I feel it is very important to the cause of freedom every where to ascribe the main rea son for the defeat of Russian democracy [in 1917] to this attack from the Right instead of to the foolish myth that Russian democracy was ‘soft’ and blind to the Bolshevik danger.”

In 1917 Kerensky was a moderate Socialist, a mem ber of the Social Revolutionary party. He was, however, not a doctrinaire, but fitted rather the description of him by George F. Kennan, an Ameri can authority on Russia, as “a Socialist of sorts.” His po litical convictions were molded by his experience in the tur bulence of Russia, starting with the Revolution of 1905.

Born April 22, 1881, to a family of some station (his father was a school su perintendent and his mother was an army officer's daugh ter), Kerensky was reared with considerable privilege. In his youth he wanted to be a mu sician or an actor (he was then living in Tashkent), but when in 1899 he entered the university in St. Petersburg (later Petrograd, now Lenin grad), it was to study history, classical philology and juris prudence.

Introduced to politics as a university student, Kerensky was first drawn to the mod erate agrarianism of the Narod nik (Populist) movement, and his sympathies for those op pressed by Czarism were lively. Indeed, after being admitted to the bar in 1904 he began his professional career by giving free legal advice to poor urban workers in St. Petersburg.

He was quickly caught up in the Revolution of 1905. After the “Bloody Sunday” mas sacre in January of that year, when a workers' procession petitioning the Czar was cut down by troops, Kerensky was one of a committee that aided the massacre's victims and their families. His displeasure with the Czar evaporated in October, however, when Nicholas II pro claimed a moderate constitu tional reform that included a Duma, or parliament. Writing in 1965 of his feelings on hear ing the Czar's manifesto, Ker ensky said:

“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 Czar revived.”

His mood shifted, however, and the volatile young man volunteered to help assassinate Nicholas. His offer was re jected “because I had no ex perience of a revolutionary and could not therefore be relied on.” After a brief im prisonment In 1906 (he was convicted of possessing revolu tionary literature), he eschewed politics until he was elected to the fourth (and most spurious) of the Czar's Dumas in 1912.

In the interval he accumu lated celebrity throughout Rus sia as an eloquent defense lawyer. He defended Estonian peasants charged with sacking a baronial estate; he was counsel to striking workers, mutinous soldiers, rebellious peasants and revolutionary in tellectuals.

Kerensky's most famous le gal exploit occurred in 1913 when Mendel Beiliss, a Jew, was tried on charges of hav ing committed a ritual mur der of a Christian boy. Keren sky was one of the chief spon sors of a resolution of the St. Petersburg bar that assailed the trial as “a slanderous at tack on the Jewish people.” His action won him acclaim in the Jewish community and among enlightened Christians. Nonetheless, he was sen tenced to eight months' de tention in 1914 for his role in attacking the Czarist judicial system.

Kerensky's election to the Duma, through whose creak ing doors he was to enter his tory, was adventitious.

“I had never given much thought to the future and I had no political plans,” he wrote later. “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 for the Fourth Duma as a ??dovik [semi‐Liberal and semi‐Populist] candidate.”

In the Duma Kerensky sup ported World War I and urged “a reconciliation be tween the Czar and the peo ple.” “I felt,” he said, “that the battle we had been wag ing against the remnants of absolutism could now be post poned.” (In later years, how ever, he contended that “the great war was absolutely con trary to the national interests and aims of Russia.”)

‘Flashes of Lightning’

In the course of the war Czarist repression increased and Kerensky became progres sively disenchanted with the regime. His speeches in the Duma took on greater passion. In one of them he said:

“Have you fully understood [that] the historic task of the Russian people . . . is the abolition of the medieval re gime immediately at any cost? If you refuse to listen to the warning voice, you, gentlemen, will meet facts instead of warn ings. Behold the flashes of lightning that are already flar ing here and there across the skies of the Russian Empire!”

Toward the beginning of 1917, reverses in battle against the Central Powers shook the already fragile Ro manov court. Adding to dis content at the front were war weariness at home, economic privation, industrial dislocation and bureaucratic rigidity. Criticism of the Czar, his fam ily, his ministers mounted daily; and reflecting this with in the Duma was a bloc of Liberal and Leftist deputies that by the end of February controlled 240 of that body's 402 votes.

But what touched off the one‐week rising that was the February Revolution was a strike of 90,000 St. Petersburg workers that began Feb. 23 and by the following day in volved 200,000 workers. Sketching how this unrest was transformed into a revolution, Prof. Adam B. Ulam, an au thority on Russia, wrote in “The Bolsheviks” (Macmillan, 1965):

“Strikes were followed by street manifestations and dis orders. What transformed the riots into a revolution was the behavior of the garrison of Petrograd. Called upon to help the police quell the disorders, the soldiers refused, and in some cases fired upon the po lice.

“... The Czarist regime dis integrated . . . Confronted by events it could not control or even understand, it simply stopped functioning . . . What took its place were several authorities, which tried to dis charge the task of governing the vast country, sometimes working together, sometimes at cross purposes, but increas ingly powerless in the face of growing defeat and anarchy and finally conquered by them.”

Two Governments

Initially, two improvised governments appeared in Pet rograd, the capital. One rep resented the Duma, which, refusing to disband on the Czar's order, set up an emer gency committee that formed the nucleus of the 11‐member Provisional Government. Head ed by Prince Georgi Lvov, it included Kerensky as Minister of Justice.

Simultaneously, the city's workers organized the other improvised government, the Petrograd Soviet (Council) of the Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies. Its Provisional Ex ecutive Committee included Kerensky as one of its two vice chairmen, and he acted as intermediary between the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet for some time. Both groups professed to speak and act in the name of all the Russian people.

With the almost immediate abdication of Czar Nicholas H, Kerensky became in fact, if not in name, a dominating figure in Russian affairs. His comparative youth, his talents as a popular declamatory ora tor, his seeming grasp of the popular mood, his quick mind brought him to the fore.

“From the moment of the collapse of the monarchy . . I found myself in the center of events,” he recalled in 1965. “I was, in fact, their focal point, the center of the vor tex of human passion and con flicting ambitions which raged around me.”

In the first days of the revo lution there was a degree of harmony between the Provi sional Government and the Petrograd Soviet. In this pe riod Kerensky was responsible for initiating such democratic reforms as freedom of speech, assembly, press and religion, equal rights for women and, universal suffrage.

As significant as these re forms were, they did not go to the core of popular demands for peace and for breaking up the landed estates. Indeed, the first fragmentation of the Pro visional Government's author ity appeared when it decided to carry on the war. The sec ond element sapping its precar ious strength was the grass roots democracy of the Petro grad Soviet: It, more than the Government, held the con fidence of the workers; and it, more than the Government, exercised effective control among the troops. The So viet's Order No. 1, for exam ple, sought to make every mil itary unit in Russia subject to it; and to an increasing de gree troops harkened to the Soviet.

In the convulsive events of February and March the Bol sheviks played a minor role. They had no representatives in the Provisional Government and only a few in the Soviet. The Social Revolutionaries, of whom Kerensky was then one, and the Mensheviks (left‐of center Socialists) were in control of the Soviet, while even more moderate elements composed the Government.

This inherently unstable bal ance of forces was tipped left ward, starting in April, when Lenin returned to Petrograd from exile in Switzerland short ly after other Bolshevik leaders, including Josef Stalin, were re leased from Czarist detention.

More Soviets Set Up

Shortly afterward, Lenin and his Bolsheviks began to put forward a Communist revolu tionary program — seizure of land by the peasants, control of industry by the workers, ces sation of the war and concen tration of state power in the soviets. Lenin's central slogan— “All Power to the Soviets!”— eventually caught the imagina tion of key sections of the pub lic, especially as more soviets were established throughout Russia. And in the months that followed, Bolshevik influence in these soviets (and in the Petro grad Soviet in particular) in creased measurably.

Although Lenin was the furiously busy mastermind of the Bolsheviks, one personality stood out then as the embodi ment of the revolution to come. Describing his role, Harvard's Professor Ulam has written:

“In May there returned an other political exile, Lev Trot sky. . . . With his arrival the tempo of Bolshevik activity quickened. . . . From the be ginning, Trotsky, his old quar rel with Lenin laid aside, sup plied the missing element in Bolshevism. He was unmatched as a revolutionary orator and agitator.”

In May also there was a grave ministerial crisis in the Provi sional Government when the Foreign Minister resigned at Kerensky's insistence. The is sue was Pavel N. Milyukov's espousal of annexationist aims in the war. In the resulting shifts Kerensky became Minis ter of War and the Navy. The Cabinet, in which Kerensky was definitely the strongest man, still agreed to continue the war and called for “a general demo cratic peace.”

To revive shattered discipline among the armed forces and to instill patriotism in the troops, Kerensky toured the battle fronts and exhorted the men to fight on. He would cry in his mighty voice:

“The destinies of the country are in your hands, and she is in great danger. We have drunk liberty and we are slightly in toxicated. However, we do not need intoxication but the great est soberness and discipline. We must enter history so that on our graves it will be written: ‘They died but they were never slaves’”

But words were not enough. The massive offensive that Ker ensky ordered late in June against German and Austrian forces ended in disastrous de feat for the Russians. The only winners were the Bolsheviks, and their insistent appeals for peace and bread.

Nonetheless, there was a dra matic reversal of Kerensky's fortunes in mid‐July, when a Bolshevik adventurist attempt to seize power in Petrograd was suppressed (although Kerensky barely escaped being captured) and a number of Communist leaders, Trotsky among them, were jailed. The Provisional Government's ordeal in quelling the uprising intensified conflicts within the Cabinet, and Prince Lvov, its nominal but shadowy Premier, resigned his office to Kerensky.

Through August apparent calm returned to the surface in Russia. Some discipline was re stored in the armed forces, democratic reforms were pushed and the influence of the soviets seemed to be abat ing. With Lenin in Finland, the Bolsheviks appeared to be in retreat. A party congress, how ever, claimed a membership of 240,000, a startling increase from the 50,000 in April.

Republic Proclaimed

Taking advantage of the lull, Kerensky sought to give his Government a wider constitu ency among the various seg ments of society by convoking a National State Conference in Moscow, by proclaiming Russia a republic and by convening a pre‐parliament, the Council of the Republic.

But the fatal shortcoming of all these exertions was that Ker ensky and his colleagues held only the shadow of power in a succession of explosive events in which no single group or organization exercised con tinuing authority. Cessation of the war was the imperative that Kerensky and his associ ates declined to undertake.

Many historians consider that Kerensky lacked understanding of the basic forces with which he was dealing and that his policy errors stemmed from intellectual shallowness. His worst error, in the opinion of many writers, was his appoint ment of Gen. Lavr G. Kornilov as supreme commander of the army and his early champion ship of him. The general, ac cording to a fellow officer, had “the heart of a lion and the brains of a sheep.” He became disgruntled with the regime and lent himself to those who be lieved that a military dictator ship could save Russia from the muddle she was in.

In early September Kornilov, believing he had Kerensky's se cret personal support, marched on Petrograd in an attempt at a coup detat. To counter this threat to the Government, Kerensky was obliged to seek help from the Left. Trotsky and other Communist leaders were released from prison as Keren sky appealed to the soviets and the populace of Petrograd to repulse Kornilov.

Lenin was quick to grasp and to exploit the Kornilov plot. Urging Bolsheviks to fight the general without building up Kerensky, he said, “We shall now show everybody the weak ness of Kerensky.” And instead of winning credit for saving Russian democracy, Kerensky emerged from the coup (which, was easily quashed) as inept. He lost not only the confidence of the officer corps, many of whom backed Kornilov, but also the respect of the main rev olutionary elements; for who had balked Kornilov but the soviets?

Kerensky himself regarded the Kornilov affair as decisive. He argued afterward that fi nanciers, industrialists and Rightists had supported the general and that he had also enjoyed British and French backing.

Beset from the Right and the Left, Kerensky's Govern ment was virtually paralyzed. Two million army deserters symbolized both the sentiment for peace and the regime's lack of authority. Inflation was un curbed in the cities, land re form was faltering in the coun tryside. The result was that Kerensky lost his meager cred it with the Russians, and noth ing he could do could prevent the ineluctable drift to the Oc tober Revolution.

Trotsky in Charge

As power filtered from Ker ensky, the Petrograd Soviet set up a Military Revolutionary Committee, whose actual lead er was Trotsky. To the Soviet and to this committee, power gravitated. This picture of Petrograd in those climactic days emerges in Professor Ulam's study:

“In any other place and time except the fantastic Petrograd of 1917 the setting up of the Military Revolutionary Com mittee and its subsequent coun termanding of the Govern ment's orders would have been taken as the beginning of a mutiny. But in fact nobody got unusually excited . . . Keren sky's Government continued in its peaceful coma.”

The coup de grace by which the Bolsheviks finished off Ker ensky's Government was exe cuted with astonishing dis patch. Carefully planned by Lenin and Trotsky and their close associates, the seiz ure of power took about a day, and it was accomplished Oct. 25 by the Julian calendar, or Nov. 7 by the Gregorian. Troops loyal to the Bolsheviks simply occupied the principal Govern ment buildings, virtually with out opposition, and arrested the ministers. Kerensky fled.

Writing long after the event, he remained persuaded that the toppling of his Government was the result of a conspiracy, between Lenin and the German' General Staff.

“The Germans needed a coup detat in Petrograd to stop Aus tria from signing a separate peace treaty. For Lenin, an im mediate peace with Germany after his accession to power was the only way he could establish a dictatorship,” Ker ensky wrote in 1965 in “Rus sia and History's Turning Point.” Then he added:

“I am firmly convinced that the uprising of Oct. 24–25 was deliberately timed to coincide with the serious crisis in Aus tro‐German relations.”

Kerensky always maintained that he had rejected an offer to be driven out of Petrograd under the American flag and that he had ridden boldly in his own automobile. Many his torians, however, dispute this. William Henry Chamberlain, writing in “The Russian Revo lution” (Macmillan) and citing the American Ambassador in Russia, said:

“About 10 in the morning [of Oct. 25] Kerensky decided that his only hope was to make his way to the front and return at the head of reinforcements. One of his adjutants requisi tioned a car which belonged to Secretary Whitehouse of the American Embassy; and Ke rensky made off in this car, which carried the American flag and, aided by this dis guise, slipped through the nu merous Bolshevik patrols which were already active in the city.”

I Soviet historians have add ed that Kerensky was garbed in woman's attire.

In any event, Kerensky sought vainly to rally armed support for himself and his Gov ernment, but within days his cause was crushed and he went into hiding. He emerged, brief ly, in January, 1918, when the Constituent Assembly was con vened in Petrograd, and he of fered to address it. His politi cal friends, however, were against the plan. According to Kerensky, they told him:

“The situation in Petrograd has changed radically. If you appear at the Assembly it will be the end of all of us.”

Kerensky said that he con templated suicide, but “I did not cross the Rubicon of death.” Instead, in May, 1918, he made his way out of Russia, departing Murmansk for Lon don on a French cruiser. He I was disguised as a Serbian offi cer.

A Forlorn Cause

In London he called on Prime Minister David Lloyd George and in Paris he saw Premier Georges Clemenceau, who, hav ing pinned their hopes for up setting the Bolsheviks on Adm. Aleksandr V. Kolchak, no long er had any use for the former Premier.

In exile Kerensky pursued a forlorn cause. Until 1940 he lived mainly in Britain and France and made occasional lec ture tours in the United States. In the thirties he edited an emigre paper in Paris, which he left in 1940 for the United States, where he wrote and lec tured.

In 1956 he went to Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., where he studied and classified Russian documents at the Hoo ver Institute of War, Revolu tion and Peace. He also taught seminars at Stanford and lec tured widely at colleges.

From the middle of the for ties until 18 months ago Keren sky lived as the house guest of Mrs. Kenneth F. Simpson, widow of a New York Re publican leader, in her ??pa cious townhouse on East 91st Street. He occupied the fifth and top floor. A longtime friend of the Simpsons, whom he had met in the twenties, he was invited to share the house when he had no other place to live.

He was a familiar figure in the neighborhood. For years, before his sight faded, he walked five or six miles a day, and one of his favorite strolls was around the Central Park reservoir.

Kerensky was easily identi fied in a gathering by his height (5 feet, 10 inches), his erect bearing, his piercing blue eyes, his deeply creased face and his close‐cropped white hair.

Kerensky married twice. His first marriage, in 1904, was to Olga Baranovsky and it ended in divorce in 1939. The couple had two sons, Oleg and Gleb, who lived in Britain. In 1939 Kerensky married Lydia Ellen Triton, daughter of an Aus tralian industrialist. She died in 1944.

Defended His Role

Kerensky's final years were passed in the backwater re served for men shunted aside by historical change. He spent much time attempting to de fend his leadership of what he came to call “the Kerensky revolution.” On its 50th anni versary in 1967, he asserted again that it had made Russia one of the freest countries in the world by establishing polit ical, press and speech liberties for all. He also insisted again that the Bolsheviks had come to power through a coup detat rather than a popular revolu tion.

Nonetheless, the verdict of even his non‐Communist critics was not kind. For example, re viewing “Russia and History's Turning Point,” his last book and his most detailed apologia, The (London) Times Literary Supplement said:

“Behind this tale of woe there looms, of course, the funda mental question of whether a bourgeois democracy could have been established in the Russia of 1917 or of subse quent years. Mr. Kerensky is convinced he would have es tablished it if only he had not received so many ‘stabs in the back’ from Milyukov and Kor nilov, from the industrialists and bankers, from Lenin and Trotsky, from the Mensheviks, from his closest political asso ciates and from the Allied em bassies.

“But do not all these ‘stabs in the back’ add up to the con clusion that parliamentary de mocracy had no chance of sur vival in Russia's political and social climate?

“It was the height of naivete [on Kerensky's part] to imag ine that Russia, having in the middle of a war emerged from centuries of autocracy, with a shattered semifeudal structure, with a land‐hungry peasantry, with an underdeveloped bour geoisie, with the national mi norities in uproar and with a highly dynamic, Marxist‐orient ed and ambitious working class, could be charmed into the mould of a constitutional mon archy or a liberal republic.”

Kerensky is survived by his two sons, Oleg and Gleb, and by four grandchildren.

A Russian Greek Orthodox funeral mass will be said for the former Premier Sunday at 5 P.M, at Frank E. Campbell's, Madison Avenue and 81st Street. Burial will be in Britain.

Tass Reports Death

Special to The New York Times

MOSCOW, June 11 — Tass, the Soviet press agency, re ported the death of Kerensky in a one‐sentence dispatch from New York.

“Today in New York, in the 90th year of his life, died the former head of the Provisional Government of Russia, Alex under Kerensky.” it said