In order to research the phenomenon of revolutionary power, we need comprehensively to examine the authority of leaders, helmsmen, and individuals who underpin their charisma with prophecies which come true or by acts of heroism or extraordinary successes. Charisma is conferred not only by the real or imagined qualities of a leader but also by the extent to which he symbolizes the community recognizing the charisma which legitimizes his actions. The historian needs accordingly to take an interest in the words and deeds of people who, in various ways, contribute to making the Leader authoritative. Studying the tactics and techniques by which leaders are legitimized, and analysing the associated political conflicts, is important if we are to understand the social and political processes which form the background to the building up of the images of leaders.
The leader cults, without which it is impossible to imagine Soviet history, have long been a recognized research topic. Most attention has been devoted to studying the Lenin cult (see the work of Nina Tumarkin, Benno Ennker, Olga Velikanova and others).10 Nevertheless, historians studying the key stages of the formation of the Lenin cult – the assassination attempt in 1918, Lenin’s fiftieth birthday in 1920, his death, his embalming – deal cursorily with the events of 1917, despite the fact that this was an extremely important period in terms of evolving cultural forms for the glorification of charismatic leaders. Benno Ennker’s approach is germane to this study’s objectives. Examining the transformation of the Leader’s charisma into the Lenin cult, Ennker correlates the process with the contemporary political aims of various groups of Bolshevik leaders.
Jan Plamper examines the personality cult of Stalin through images of the Leader.11 I repeat, nevertheless, that those researching Soviet leader cults seem to me to underestimate the significance of changes during 1917 which favoured development of the political culture of the Soviet period.
This study will consider the tactics used both for bolstering and for destroying Kerensky’s authority, together with the representation of his image, and how all these were perceived. I examine the texts and visual imagery, the symbolic gestures and rituals which were used to create, sometimes incompatible, images of the Leader.
This particular politician was chosen because of the authority he initially possessed. The connection between the extraordinary deference shown to Kerensky and the cults of Soviet leaders was noted by Vasiliy Maklakov, a prominent member of the Constitutional Democratic Party, who asserted that, after the monarchy was overthrown, ordinary Russians had ‘a preference for individualized power, a boss’. ‘This feeling provided the foundation for the adulation, first of Kerensky, then of Lenin, and ultimately for the deification of Stalin. I have no wish to compare people so dissimilar in spirit, but in all the regimes which succeeded each other after 1917 there was a latent craving for an authoritarian personality and a lack of trust in institutions.’12
For many contemporaries, Alexander Kerensky was the central figure of the February Revolution. For them he was the personification of that successful coup d’état. By the end of 1917 his opponents were speaking of the eight months of his ‘reign’, meaning from March to October, although Kerensky became prime minister only in July.13
In this book I examine images of Kerensky created by the man himself, by his supporters and allies, and by his opponents and enemies. By ‘image’ is meant a semantically coherent set of characteristics of the Leader, attributed to him in texts and illustrations.
The present book is about the political culture of the revolution and makes no claim to be a new biography of Kerensky. We cannot, of course, differentiate crisply between the biography of a politician and the cultural forms in which he was praised or damned. Our approach will enable us to see Kerensky in a new light, and his future biographers will have our observations and conclusions to draw on. It is not, then, my main purpose to augment the facts of Kerensky’s biography. I attempt, through exploring the different images of the Leader, how they were created and the use that was made of them, to examine the organizations and the people who produced them. Through them I seek insight into the political, cultural and social processes of the revolutionary era.
Kerensky has been unlucky with his historians. Few have portrayed the ‘revolutionary minister’ sympathetically, or even without bias, and that is hardly a surprise. Historians quite commonly side with particular protagonists of the revolution and set themselves against others. The historiography of 1917, for the most part, also continues to settle for parti pris. Often researchers and, to an even greater extent, readers genuinely believe historiography cannot and should not be otherwise. To this day there are different versions of the history of the revolution, liberal and conservative, socialist and communist, nationalist and imperial, ‘red’ and ‘white’. To this day there is a demand for historical narratives derived from the memoirs of participants in the events. It is not absurd to talk of an ‘anti-party line’, with anti-communist historians faithfully reproducing the bias of the Soviet historical narrative, only with the plus signs turned into minus signs and vice versa.
Few people identify with Kerensky now. As we shall see, although officially a Socialist Revolutionary, he did not bind himself to any one party and tried to be someone who brought together, acted as a bridge between, the moderate socialists and the liberals. His manoeuvring initially brought success, but by October the disagreements between the coalition partners had intensified. Kerensky’s support base narrowed and weakened, and the room for manoeuvre became increasingly constricted. None of the leading political forces was giving him wholehearted support. Indeed, virtually all of them, to differing degrees and in different ways, were criticizing him. This coloured the attitude of several generations of partisan historians, the heirs of Kerensky’s political opponents. In their view he was not ‘with us’, and those caught up in today’s political tussles do not identify with him either.
Kerensky fared little better with his autobiographies, which, of course, influenced later biographies. In 1918, already the former head of the Provisional Government, Kerensky published a pamphlet titled The Kornilov Affair. Later he published several versions of his autobiography, rewriting his understanding of the history of the revolution.14 One constant in these writings of different eras is Kerensky’s desire to glorify the February Revolution and immortalize his role in it. Over time he changed his lines of argument and adjusted the narrative. Compared to the leader he actually was in 1917, Kerensky wanted to present himself as having been more modern, more Western, more judicious, far-sighted and confident. And, it has to be said, as a result – less interesting. These official self-portraits, idealizing and romanticizing their painter, overlay like palimpsests the more vivid image of a unique, tough-minded politician whose rise to become the leader of a revolutionary government was by no means a matter of chance, whatever the opinion of many of his contemporaries and of a certain number of historians.
The distortion of history in Kerensky’s autobiographies, which it is tempting to call ‘autohagiographies’, came back to haunt their author. Researchers negatively inclined towards him used his memoirs as a punchbag but, in their polemics with him, tended to follow the outline of his narrative. They caricatured his self-portraits but perpetuated their approach. Kerensky’s memoir campaigning certainly had an impact on the historiography of the revolution, but hardly as he might have intended.
Many historians of the revolution touched on aspects of Kerensky’s career. Censorship during the Soviet period was an obstacle to publication of unbiased research, but Vitaliy Startsev managed to publish a worthwhile book on the autumn crisis of 1917.15 In an innovative project, Gennadiy Sobolev studied the revolutionary consciousness of workers and soldiers.16 In this connection he also examined aspects of Kerensky’s popularity, as well as some features of the socio-psychological climate in which the leader cult appeared and flourished.
The most thorough account of Kerensky’s life was written by Richard Abraham, a British historian.17 He was unable to work in Russian archives at that time, but he carefully studied the press of the era, worked in the archives