The Quest for Freedom: A life of Alexander Kerensky the Russian Unicorn

By Peter Alexander Thompson

The Quest for Freedom, a biography of Alexander Fyodorovich Kerensky published in June 2020, commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of the death of the great socialist reformer who personified the Russian Revolution of February 1917 and yet who is remembered today, if at all, as 'the man who lost Russia'. In the first biography of Kerensky for more than thirty years, award-winning author Peter Alexander Thompson uses interviews with two of Kerensky's grandchildren, the Kerensky Family's private papers and Kerensky's own words to weave a compelling narrative that not only spans the entire revolutionary period but also covers World War I, the Russian Civil War and World War II.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jun 11, 2020
• ISBN: 9781098319694

Book preview

earlier.

Prologue

The Russian Unicorn

In the summer of 1963, a few months before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy at the hands of a pro-Soviet former United States Marine armed with a $19.95 rifle, an elderly man dressed for an earlier time in a three-piece tweed suit, his white hair cut in the style known in France as en brosse but which was popular in America as the crewcut, turned up at a party for newspaper and publishing people in the Manhattan apartment of Anthony Delano of the London Daily Mirror. ‘I forget who brought him and I didn’t know who he was,’ Tony Delano says. ‘He was introduced to me as Alexander Kerensky and he spent the evening sitting quietly in an armchair until it was time to go home.’¹

Ah, yes – Alexander Fyodorovich Kerensky, the Socialist Revolutionary who personified the February Revolution, the great reformer who led the Provisional Government for one hundred days and who is best remembered today, if at all, as ‘the man who lost Russia’.

In 1963 Kerensky was in his eighty-third year, half-deaf, blind in one eye, his bearing slightly stooped, his complexion sallow from a kidney condition and needing his bone-handled walking stick to get around. All of these failings indicated decrepitude and yet, as the publication of his final book of memoirs showed, he was still capable of great passion.

At first hand he had witnessed the slaughter of liberty - the liberty that Marx cherished – under Lenin and Trotsky, and then, in exile, he had seen Stalin take the Soviet system to grotesque new depths. Reviewing Russia and History’s Turning Point (Duell, Sloan & Pearce 1965), Malcolm Muggeridge concluded, ‘Despite his years of exile, Kerensky remains indomitably and admirably a Russian democrat and patriot, embittered and infuriated, as well he might be, by the feebleness and asininity of many of those outside Russia who were nominally on his side.’²

Kerensky was living on the top floor of a redbrick townhouse at 109 East 91st Street, the home of Helen Simpson, widow of his great friend and political ally Kenneth F. Simpson, a United States Congressman and Republican leader of New York County. Survival had been a Pyrrhic victory. While Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin enjoy a global multimedia afterlife as historical celebrities, Kerensky has been reviled and is all but forgotten.

He was frequently reminded that it would have been easy for him to have retained power in 1917 had he betrayed Russia’s Allies in World War I and signed a separate peace with Germany, as Lenin did a few months later; had he turned a blind eye to the illegal seizure and partition of farmland instead of pleading with the peasants for patience until the necessary legislation could be passed; and, above all, had he executed Lenin and Trotsky for treason when he had the chance.³

Kerensky refused to take extreme measures to defeat the Bolsheviks and the consequences of that refusal proved irreversible until 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed under the weight of its own deficiencies. But, as the New York Times noted, there was a glimpse of forces at work during the Provisional Government’s brief existence ‘seeking to turn the vast land into a democracy, and to create a new society whose citizens would enjoy both freedom and prosperity’.⁴

Lenin’s genius was to transform Marxism into a fighting creed that had but one aim: total power. Instead of ‘peace, bread, land’ in a Communist Utopia, as he had promised, the Russians got civil war, starvation and seven decades of the most crushing autocracy of modern times.

In 2016 so many books were in production to mark the Centenary of the Russian Revolution in 2017 that it proved impossible to find a publisher for this one. Typical of numerous rejection notices, one leading British publisher wrote, ‘As publicity is so crucial these days, the fact that the Provisional Government failed makes it hard for us to make real claims for Kerensky’s place in history.’ This sort of evaluation isn’t unusual. Kerensky has no historic value today because the Bolsheviks destroyed the Provisional Government and smashed the Russian Republic he had established on 1 September 1917.

When the books were published, they invariably supported this view. Yet the fact that Kerensky failed in his mission could be viewed in an entirely different light: that it ranks as one of the greatest and most tragic misses of all time. The fact that his failure owed much to the hostility of Lloyd George, Balfour, Churchill and Clémenceau, and the indifference of Woodrow Wilson makes it even more imperative that he should be given a hearing today.

In his massive work on the Revolution, Leon Trotsky consigned Kerensky to his proverbial ‘dustbin of history’. ‘Kerensky was not a revolutionist,’ he said, ‘he merely hung around the revolution.’ Lenin was equally dismissive. ‘Kerensky,’ he sneered, ‘is a balalaika on which they play to deceive the workers and peasants.’⁵

The Marxist-Leninist view of Soviet hagiographers was that the Bolshevik Party had been at the vanguard of all three Russian revolutions: the ‘dress rehearsal’ of 1905, the overthrow of the Tsar in February 1917 and ‘the Great October Socialist Revolution’ later that year. Any historian who deviated from that line was denounced as a ‘bourgeois falsifier’.⁶ The Bolshevik influence in the 1905 Revolution was, in fact, minimal and neither Lenin nor Trotsky, much less Stalin, Zinoviev, Kamenev or any of the other ‘professional revolutionaries’, were anywhere to be seen when the Romanov Autocracy collapsed virtually overnight in February 1917 (Old Style).

Alexander Kerensky, a thirty-five-year-old member of the State Duma, the lower house of the Russian Parliament, seized the moment. As an excited crowd of revolutionary citizens and mutinous soldiers approached the Tauride Palace, the Duma’s home beside the River Neva, he shouted to his colleagues, ‘May I tell them that the State Duma is with them, that it assumes all responsibility, that it will stand at the head of the movement?’

Getting no coherent answer, he dashed outside and addressed the troops. ‘Citizen Soldiers,’ he cried, ‘on you falls the great honour of guarding the State Duma…. I declare you to be the First Revolutionary Guard!’

He had committed the Duma to the Revolution.⁷

By any standard, Kerensky’s hubris-inducing career in 1917 was phenomenal. As the Petrograd Soviet’s only member in the Provisional Government’s first cabinet, he was Minister of Justice (March-May) and in the second cabinet War and Naval Minister (May-September), then Prime Minister (July-August), Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces (August-October), and Minister-President (September-October).

‘There is no other statesman living whose accession to the Premiership would fill us with the same enthusiasm and hope,’ the Irish nationalist Robert Lynd wrote of Kerensky in the London Daily News in July 1917. ‘He is the representative of the world’s hope. With his defeat, the light of the world would go out.’

That light was indeed extinguished.

By definition the Provisional Government was a stop-gap measure to tackle Russia’s most pressing problems and, inevitably, those problems overwhelmed it. His grandson Stephen Kerensky says, ‘It is remarkable that the anti-Kerensky case made by politicians and historians, both in London and Saint Petersburg, is still founded on the idea that the Provisional Government should have solved all the social, political, economic and military disasters resulting from Nicholas II’s rule within six months of taking office.’

The biggest problem was the war. Attempting to revive morale in the Russian Army (and to aid Russia’s Allies on the Western Front) Kerensky planned an offensive for spring 1917. However, a power struggle between the government and the Petrograd Soviet delayed the start of the operation until 18 June, with fatal results for the Russian Army and the nascent Russian democracy.⁸

Then, as Prime Minister in August, Kerensky was confronted with a rightwing revolt from the Army’s new Supreme Commander, General Lavr Kornilov. It was Kerensky’s defeat of Kornilov’s forces with Soviet (and Bolshevik) help that fatally weakened his support among the military. When Red Guards and Baltic Fleet sailors attacked the Winter Palace on the night of 25-26 October, officers and soldiers alike sat back and did nothing as he was driven from office. Forced into hiding, he was lucky to escape with his life. Louise Bryant, an American journalist and a socialist, lamented his fall in her book Six Months in Red Russia:

I had a tremendous respect for Kerensky when he was head of the Provisional Government. He tried so passionately to hold Russia together, and what man at this hour could have accomplished that? He was never wholeheartedly supported by any group. He attempted to carry the whole weight of the nation on his frail shoulders, keep up a front against the Germans, keep down the warring political factions at home.⁹

So what had he achieved in those months? As Minister of Justice, Kerensky signed decrees that granted women full civil and political rights, including the right to vote, and established equality for all religions and ethnicities. This edict officially terminated ‘the Pale’ - the iniquitous Pale of Permanent Jewish Settlement, the territory in Western Russia to which 95 per cent of the Empire’s Jewish population were confined by imperial order after 1791 - thus giving Jews the right to live wherever they pleased, including Moscow and Petrograd (as wartime Saint Petersburg had been renamed). Henceforth, Jewish children were allowed to attend public schools and universities without being subjected to repressive Tsarist-imposed quotas. He also abolished the death penalty and he banned the whipping of prisoners and the use of straitjackets to restrain them.

For the rest of his life, Kerensky argued that the Bolsheviks’ celebrated victory was not what it seemed. There was no popular uprising in Russia in October 1917 but rather a coup by an armed, anti-democratic minority. The real revolution – the one that had been the dream of the Russian masses for centuries, the one that had deposed the Tsar and ended the autocracy – had started six months earlier on 23 February/8 March 1917, with Nicholas’s abdication following eight days later.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the author who did more than any other human being to bring the Soviet Union to its knees, acknowledged this fact in an interview in 2007. ‘The October Revolution is a myth generated by the winners, the Bolsheviks, and swallowed whole by progressive circles in the West,’ he said. ‘On 25 October 1917 a violent twenty-four-hour coup d’état took place in Petrograd. It was brilliantly and thoroughly planned by Leon Trotsky - Lenin was still in hiding then to avoid being brought to justice for treason. What we call the Russian Revolution of 1917 was actually the February Revolution.’¹⁰

Nevertheless, the Bolsheviks took control of the capital and other key cities in October-November that year and used brutal methods, including summary executions, to enforce their will on the population. They then rewrote history to legitimise the takeover. ‘There was only one Russian Revolution, which brought Kerensky to power,’ says the author Vladimir Nabokov. ‘Communism, what has it given us? Well-organised police.’ Indeed, Russia became an even more brutal police state than it had been under the Romanovs.¹¹

In early 1918 Lenin destroyed all meaningful opposition when he turned the dictatorship of the proletariat (a phrase borrowed from the French economist Jérôme-Adolphe Blanqui) into the dictatorship of a single political party: the All-Russian Communist Party. Lenin did not invent the Gulag but he used it mercilessly. Within six months of the coup, he demanded that ‘unreliable elements’ be locked up in concentration camps.

Lenin’s victims included many of the people who had fought valiantly to bring down the autocracy. He then attacked the clergy with medieval ferocity. Bishops, priests, monks and nuns were tortured and murdered. Women were raped, men castrated. Many were disembowelled, buried alive, crucified upside down, or, in mid-winter, simply drenched with water and frozen solid like grotesque statues.

The Communist state became a rigid theocracy with its own dogma, saints and heretics. The ‘bogus’ Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries were suppressed with the venom of religious zealots. Dissidents were denounced as ‘counter-revolutionaries’, a crime that led to imprisonment or a bullet in the back of the head. To be ‘burzhui’ – a derivation of ‘bourgeois’ - was enough to damn any man or woman, irrespective of their political beliefs.

Literature was heavily censored. Lenin hated Tolstoy, the former artillery officer-turned-pacifist, because he preached a peaceful revolution through universal brotherhood, while his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, campaigned to have Pushkin’s books banned from public libraries. Under the Communists truth was mutilated, language perverted and power abused. Pravda, whose name means Truth, published absurd distortions similar to George Orwell’s doublethink slogans in 1984: ‘War is Peace/ Freedom is Slavery/ Ignorance is Strength’.¹²

Through the whole of 1917 Alexander Kerensky, the main obstacle to Bolshevik supremacy, was a sick man. In April 1916 he had had a tubercular kidney removed and throughout the revolutionary period relied on injections of intravenous morphine to keep himself going. Even in robust good health, he could never have matched the unbounded ferocity and single-minded fanaticism of Lenin or the dynamism and ruthlessness of Trotsky - few people could – but he was not the ‘weak’ man of numerous academic studies.

On the contrary his downfall owed much to the weakness and folly of his colleagues in the Provisional Government, to the hostility of Bolshevik enablers in the Petrograd Soviet, to the wiles of his Allies in the Triple Entente and to the superiority of German generals who inflicted horrific losses on the Russian Army without ever annihilating it.i ¹³

Despite numerous setbacks in the decades that followed, Kerensky’s belief in the inherent decency and goodness of the Russian people never wavered. No matter how often he was attacked – sometimes physically – he maintained his dignity and never played the victim or the spurned hero. His criticisms were reserved for Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and his other political enemies. Always, he insisted, his argument was with the Soviet rulers and not with the Russian people.

At the heart of his message was the conviction that the enforcement of Bolshevik power was nothing less than a continuation of Tsarist autocracy in a different, more brutal form. ‘The history of Europe,’ he wrote in 1934, ‘knows no dictatorship more reactionary, more absolute, more disastrous for the people and the country, than the dictatorship of the Bolsheviks.’¹⁴

Dr Jonathan Smele, Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at Queen Mary University of London, afforded Kerensky a backhanded compliment when he described him as ‘one of the most famous forgotten men in history’.¹⁵ As if to prove the point, one author claimed in his 2017 opus that ‘Kerensky remained in hiding inside Russia or in Finland throughout the Civil War that followed, hoping for a triumphal return to Petrograd. Eventually he accepted it would be unlikely to happen and left for Berlin in 1922, and subsequently Paris…’

The reader was thus denied any knowledge of Kerensky’s hair-raising escape to Scotland in a British Secret Service trawler in June 1918; his meeting with Lloyd George at 10 Downing Street; his trip to Paris to see Clémenceau; and his efforts to be recognised at the 1919 Paris Peace Talks as the last legitimate head of the Russian state before the Bolshevik apocalypse. All the while the bloodhounds of European and Russian security agencies, Red and White, followed him around Europe, scoured his mail and interviewed his enemies for evidence of conspiracy, or espionage, or some other crime – any crime - for which he might be prosecuted or declared persona non grata.

All of this happened to Alexander Kerensky, though you would never know it from many of the books on the Revolution. The main charges against him were that he was ‘all impulse and emotion’, that he had ‘Bonapartist ambitions’, that he was undone by ‘weakness of will’. Kerensky actually detested Bonaparte for his brutality and it is difficult to imagine Napoleon sans grapeshot. Stephen Kerensky told this author:

My grandfather is still being written off as an idiot, lost in folie de grandeur and Napoleonic delusions, who had no idea at all what he ought to be doing. Worse still is the impression that he floundered about like a bad actor in a melodrama, spouting torrents of overemotional and empty rhetoric.

His great strength was his mandate from the people, which developed during his legal work from 1905 to 1917. In particular, he became a national hero for his attacks on Nicholas following his Duma-appointed investigation into the massacre of 200 miners on the Lena Goldfields in Northern Siberia in April 1912.

He knew how to appeal to revolutionary peasants and even mutinous troops, but, even so, the Russian people at large had either read Dostoyevsky’s description of nihilistic anarchists like Lenin, or had heard them being read out in the regular village-hall meetings that were such a feature of rural life.

Lenin’s espousal of mass-murder ran contrary to the Russian Orthodox version of Christianity, which did not celebrate Christmas with an orgy of food and drink but centred on Easter and its emphasis on poverty, compassion, forgiveness and the sacrifice of one`s own life for the good of others - watchwords of the vast majority of the revolutionary movement.

It is the most unbelievable arrogance of Western Europeans to say that the Russian people’s hero was a weak-kneed fool who, like Ophelia, was ‘incapable of [his] own distress’.

Robert Bruce Lockhart, the British diplomat and secret agent, judged Kerensky ‘a kind and, above all, a humane man with a deep sense of decency’. ‘I had been one of the first, if not the very first, British official to meet Kerensky,’ he says. ‘I had known him in the days of his greatness. I had seen him in the years of adversity and of dwindling hope. I had never once noticed the smallest change in his demeanour or heard from his lips one word of criticism of those who had sought his favour in success and had cursed him in his failure.’¹⁶

To the Russian symbolist poet Zinaida Hippius, Kerensky was ‘the first love of the Revolution’. To his first wife, Olga Kerenskaya, he was ‘a dedicated and brilliant man […] there was never anything tawdry or Bonapartist about him’. To his second wife, the Australian poet and journalist Nell Tritton, he was ‘my beloved unicorn’ for his uniqueness of character and his vulnerability to extinction. And in the estimation of his biographer, Richard Abraham, he could be ‘an irresistibly lovable person’.¹⁷

Nevertheless, as his family learned to their cost, he could also be headstrong, self-centred and unfaithful. Olga Kerenskaya, the abandoned mother of his two sons, Oleg and Gleb, could not forget the hardship and terror she suffered following the Bolshevik coup of 1917. After fifteen years in Britain, she wrote in her 1935 autobiography that these memories ‘still torture me and I spend sleepless nights crying’.

Her son Gleb said in an introduction to the memoirs, ‘Being back in Russia was the subject of her nightmares. Russia was a desecrated cemetery of friends, hopes and ideals. It was Russian culture and Russian ambiance that she loved but in England there were few Russians and most were hostile because the Revolution had turned into a disaster.’ Olga suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and without any kind of therapy it remained untreated for the rest of her life.

Kerensky’s married lover, Elena ‘Lilya’ Baranovsky-Birukova, also experienced hunger and persecution following the Bolshevik coup. She broke off all contact with him in the 1920s and brought up their child, Irena, under her deceased husband’s name.

Bernard Butcher, who met Kerensky when he taught at Stanford University in the 1960s, posed the key questions: ‘Looking back, should we consider him - and the Provisional Government in which he played such a prominent part - merely a footnote to history? Or was there a chance that this frail old man could, in his prime, have led Russia toward a constitutional democracy? Was perhaps the most pivotal development of the Twentieth Century, Russia’s long experiment with totalitarian communism, really inevitable?’¹⁸

Those questions are examined here and the answers are neither straight-forward nor exculpatory. In 1945, in Melbourne, an Australian reporter asked Alexander Kerensky whether he had any regrets.

Well, he replied, someone had once said that he should have done away with his enemies while he ruled Russia. But that was not his way. He believed that a great pity and kindness were what bound humanity together and how, believing this, could he approve bloodshed and the ruthless liquidation of his enemies?¹⁹

Alexander Kerensky died of heart disease in a New York hospital on 11 June 1970 in his ninetieth year, making him one of the longest-living Russian politicians of his generation. To the very end, he considered himself the legal head of the Russian state. He was the humane face of Russian socialism, the romantic who loved too many women and the humanitarian who refused to murder his opponents. Ridiculed and then forgotten, he deserves more than the passing references granted him during the Revolution’s hundredth anniversary year.

_______________

i It was the Soviet’s Order Number 1, published on 2 March 1917, that effectively destroyed the Russian Army’s discipline and attacking capability.

PART I

RESISTANCE

(1854-1914)

1

The Doomed Dynasty

The Russia that Alexander Kerensky grew up in was a nation of dangerous uncertainty, suspicious of the future, uncomfortable in the present and with one foot planted firmly in the past. The exploits of Peter the Great in extending the rule of Muscovy to the Baltic and Alexander I’s glorious victory over Napoleon’s Grande Armée in 1812 were seared into the national conscience.i It took the defeat of Alexander’s successor, the incorrigibly tyrannical Nicholas I, in the Crimean War to persuade his son, Alexander II, of the simple truth that free men fight harder than slaves.

According to Alexander Kerensky, the fall of Sevastopol disclosed to the world the bankruptcy of the Romanov Dynasty. After a siege lasting 336 days, the collapse of the great naval base on the Black Sea threatened to bring down the three pillars of Romanov rule - Autocracy, Orthodoxy and Nationality.ii ‘Sevastopol was the price of thirty years of tyranny,’ he says. ‘Like some terrible thunderbolt from the gods, it brought Russia out of her stupor.’¹

‘Nicholas the Flogger’ had turned Russia into a police state. ‘I cannot permit that any individual should dare defy my wishes,’ he warned. Any perceived challenge to the autocracy was met with an atavistic fury involving whips, chains, dungeons and the scaffold. Siberia, which comprised roughly seventy-five per cent of his kingdom, presented him with a dumping ground for dissidents and criminals, while katorga, or forced labour, in its forests, mines and fisheries enriched his treasury.iii ²

After the suppression of the Polish uprising of 1830-31, no fewer than 180,000 Polish patriots joined the miserable caravansaries heading east. The people condemned to this hellish existence included the Decembrist conspirators, Catholics, moderate politicians and suspect writers.iv Fyodor Dostoevsky, author of Crime and Punishment, served four years shackled hand and foot in a cramped communal barracks at Omsk in south-western Siberia for his involvement in the Petrashevsky Circle, a reading group that met secretly in Saint Petersburg to study the work of the French socialist Charles Fourier. He described the Tsarist heart of darkness thus: ‘Here was a world all its own, unlike anything else; here were laws unto themselves, manners and customs unto themselves, a house of the living dead, a life unlike anywhere else, with distinct people unlike anyone else.’³

Punishment for breaking the camp rules included flogging, extended sentences, solitary confinement and banishment to an even more inhospitable place. Women were bartered and prostituted. The cruelty of Nicholas’s regime alienated more liberal European countries to the point of Russophobia. Since time immemorial the most common adjectives applied to Russia were ‘barbarous’, ‘Asiatic’ and ‘despotic’. It was not on the grand-tour itinerary and very few visitors from ‘civilised’ Europe ever travelled there. The vast distances, unreliable transport and poor accommodation were powerful deterrents.

However, the Marquis de Custine, the celebrated French traveller, ignored all of these difficulties and embarked on a fact-finding visit to Russia in 1839. He was appalled at the inhumanity he encountered. After meeting the Tsar in Saint Petersburg, he decided he was two-faced like Janus and that the face hidden from view would be engraved ‘Violence, Exile, Oppression, or their equivalent, Siberia’.

Receiving Nicholas at Windsor Castle in the summer of 1844, Queen Victoria thought his profile ‘beautiful’, though she found that ‘the expression of the eyes is formidable, and unlike anything I ever saw before’.⁴

He is stern and severe – with fixed principles of duty which nothing on earth will make him change: very clever I do not think him, and his mind is an uncivilised one; his education has been neglected; politics and military concerns are the only things he takes great interest in; the arts and all softer occupations he is insensible to, but he is sincere, I am certain, sincere even in his most despotic acts, from a sense that it is the only way to govern.⁵

Nicholas had been raised to believe that Holy Russia had a God-given right to reclaim the legacy of the Byzantine Empire and seize Constantinople (Tsargrad to the Russians) the spiritual capital of the Orthodox Church. It was also his ambition to open up the Turkish Straits – the Bosphorus, the Sea of Marmara and the Dardanelles - and thus enable his Black Sea Fleet to enter the Mediterranean and join Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Portugal in exploiting the treasure-houses of the Middle East.

He conceived a clumsy plan to divide the territorial assets of the ailing Ottoman Empire among the Great Powers. In February 1853 he asked the British Ambassador in Saint Petersburg, Sir Hamilton Seymour, whether Britain would be satisfied with Cyprus and Egypt. ‘We have a sick man on our hands, a very sick man,’ he said. ‘It would be a pity if he slipped away before we had made arrangements for his funeral.’⁶

While the real casus belli was Nicholas’s determination to carve up the Ottoman Empire, hostilities broke out over Russia’s demand that the Sultan find in favour of the Orthodox Church in a squabble with French Catholics over protection of the Holy Places in Palestine, and a second demand that the Sultan recognise Russia’s right to protect all Orthodox subjects living under Turkish rule. As this second demand affected Turkey’s sovereignty and opened the way to Russian intervention in Turkish affairs, possibly leading to the occupation of Constantinople, it brought a strong reaction from Britain and France who were determined to keep Russia out of the Mediterranean.⁷

Through self-interest, an Anglo-French coalition rallied to the aid of the Sublime Porte. The coalition had to make do without Prussia when King Friedrich Wilhelm IV refused to attack his friend, Tsar Nicholas, a refusal that intensified anti-German feeling towards the House of Hanover that ruled the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The Queen, three-quarters German, and her husband Prince Albert, wholly German, were hissed as their carriage conveyed them down Whitehall to the Palace of Westminster for the State Opening of Parliament in January 1854.v ⁸

Two months later Britain was at war with Russia, though it was early September before the British Expeditionary Army landed at Calamita Bay on the west coast of the Crimean Peninsula in the Black Sea. On paper, the Russian Army of 1.75 million men enjoyed a huge numerical advantage over an Allied force one-fifth that size; in reality, the battle-worthiness of the Tsar’s troops was greatly exaggerated. The vast majority were serfs - peasant conscripts who were poorly trained and badly armed. Their officers were incompetent and often corrupt, while the Russian musket was inferior to French and British rifles in terms of range and rate of fire.⁹

Once Lord Raglan, the sixty-five-year-old British Commander, had been reminded he was fighting Russia and not France, the armies clashed at the Alma and then at Balaclava (which saw the notorious Charge of the Light Brigade) and finally at Inkerman. These battles ended in stalemate and the front settled into the long-running Siege of Sevastopol, leading to horrendous privation on both sides.¹⁰

In December 1854 Count Leo Tolstoy, a twenty-six-year-old artillery officer, took charge of a battery in the Fourth Bastion, the most exposed point of the Sevastopol defences. He watched ‘doctors with their arms blood-stained above the elbow, and with pale, stern faces’ going about their work in a makeshift hospital:

You see the sharp, curved knife enter the healthy, white body, you see the wounded man suddenly regain consciousness with a piercing cry and curses, you see the army surgeon fling the amputated arm into a corner… you behold war, not from its conventional, beautiful, and brilliant side, with music and drumbeat, with fluttering flags and galloping generals, but you behold war in its real phase - in blood, in suffering, in death.¹¹

It was scenes like this amputation that inspired Tolstoy to write about the miserable lot of the Russian peasant. To Nicholas’s ‘sincere, uncivilised mind’, however, the Russian Army was the supreme expression of the Russian State – it was the autocracy made flesh – and he found its failure to expel the invaders unbearable. After declaring, ‘My successor must do as he pleases; for myself I cannot change,’ he expired in the Imperial Family’s official residence, the reddish-brown Winter Palace on the south bank of the River Neva, on 2 March 1855. Officially, he died of pneumonia but it was rumoured he had committed suicide.

Such was Russia’s technical backwardness that his successor, Alexander II, had to rely on news reports telegraphed to Saint Petersburg from Paris and London to find out what was happening at the front. Sevastopol fell six months after his father’s death.¹²

The Treaty of Paris, which ended the Crimean War in March 1856, closed the Black Sea to all warships and demilitarised the Crimean coastline. If Russia were to survive as a Great Power, she would have to undertake the painful process of modernising along Western lines until she was strong enough to overturn the treaty and rebuild her Black Sea Fleet.

On 19 February 1861 Alexander celebrated the sixth anniversary of his succession by signing the Liberation Statute emancipating Russia’s serfs, the slaves who constituted about one-third of the population and almost half the peasantry. At the stroke of a pen more than twenty-three million people ceased to be the chattels of their masters, to be bought and sold, given as gifts, offered in payment for debts or simply worked to death. ‘It is better to abolish serfdom from above,’ the Tsar declared, ‘than to wait for the time when it will begin to abolish itself from below.’¹³

The Liberation Statute, coupled with other legal and temporal reforms over the next few years, earned Alexander the title of ‘The Liberator’, though at heart he was no less autocratic than his father. His primary purpose in making concessions was to save his Empire from disintegration.¹⁴

The Tsar introduced an independent judiciary, trial by jury for serious criminal offences (though not in Poland, the Caucasus, Central Asia or Siberia) and an autonomous Bar. Flogging was abolished for soldiers, while the period of service was reduced from twenty-five years to fifteen years’ active service and ten years’ ‘leave’. Elected local councils (the zemstvos in rural districts, the dumas in the towns and cities) were set up to provide roads, schools and medical services funded by local taxes. Most importantly for Russia’s educated class, the lifting of restrictions on the press meant that new magazines and newspapers could flourish.

Despite these reforms, the monarchy itself remained innately medieval and stubbornly autocratic. Alexander had enraged the aristocracy and the landed gentry to whom most serfs had been bonded. This tiny but powerful minority demanded so many exemptions from the new laws that many of the newly liberated serfs, who believed they had a God-given right to the land (‘We are yours but the land is ours’), found themselves worse off than under serfdom.

Keeping the best farmland for themselves, the landlords of the great estates sold off inferior plots to the peasants through the commune or mir, the village assembly of all male heads of households. Not only did the serfs get the worst farmland but by far the greater part of the land that changed hands between 1861 and 1905 went not to peasants but to townspeople. There were many anomalies. State serfs received more land than privately-owned serfs, while serfs employed inside manor houses received none at all. Overall, the agrarian peasant’s average holding was thirteen per cent smaller than the one he had previously cultivated.¹⁵

While struggling to feed themselves, the peasants had to keep up with crippling mortgage repayments spread over forty-nine years, which meant that an entire generation and their children were lumbered with a massive burden of debt. Alexander Kerensky conceded that the villages had been freed from the power of the landlord but the peasant still had no defence against the grain merchant and the land jobber, an iniquity that led to ‘poverty, sorrow and tears’.¹⁶

Indeed, the peasant, or muzhik, innately conservative, deeply religious and highly superstitious, was still a slave of his mir and he could be birched at the discretion of the rural district courts. Nor did the zemstvos provide much relief for the poor and underprivileged for the simple reason that suffrage was restricted to the wealthy, whose overriding concern was to maintain the status quo. The final bitter blow was that the nobility and the clergy were exempt from taxation and it was the peasant who provided about five-sixths of the state’s revenue in taxes collected through his mir.¹⁷

Such was the anger over these blatant injustices that outbreaks of peasant disorder, mostly disturbances aimed at the landlords, increased alarmingly in the provinces. Local police easily suppressed these uprisings but the peasants remained angry and unhappy, and their plight attracted the makers of revolution. Some of the most alienated peasants were given permission to leave their mir and join the new urban class of industrial workers who were herded into unhygienic barracks and treated abominably. The barracks and the factories in which they laboured, many of them owned by British, French and German investors, provided an even richer breeding ground for socialist agitators than the villages, where troublesome strangers were often handed over to the police.¹⁸

‘Alexander the Liberator’ was no more humane than his father in curbing dissent. Political suspects could be incarcerated indefinitely before being charged with an offence, after which a secret commission would decide their fate. Many were held in underground dungeons beneath the Fortress of Peter and Paul, Saint Petersburg’s Bastille, on tiny Zayachy Island off the north bank of the Neva. Thick stone walls kept the Tsar’s enemies quiet and the golden spire of its cathedral marked the resting place of his ancestors. The Marquis de Custine noted the twin identities of the fortress as both prison and tomb, and added that ‘the dead appeared to me to be freer than the living’.¹⁹

Half of the ‘politicals’ – prisoners of conscience - were arrested on the word of a spy, or for simply knowing a revolutionary. Some would be released after one or two years when the authorities could find no evidence to charge them with any crime; others were not so fortunate. One of the unluckiest was Nikolai Chernyshevsky, a priest’s son and a disciple of Charles Fourier, who wrote and published his revolutionary novel What Is To Be Done? in 1863 while imprisoned in the fortress. Born in Saratov on the Volga in 1828, Chernyshevsky was a gentle, thoughtful, mild-mannered man and yet his book ignited revolutionary fires. After two years in the fortress, he was exiled to Siberia, first as a prisoner and then in almost life-long banishment.

In What Is To Be Done?, the author presented the mir as the birthplace of a socialist society in which men and women had equal rights and all nationalist and religious prejudices were abandoned. One of the characters, Rakhmetov, was a dedicated revolutionary. Ascetic in his habits and ruthlessly disciplined, he became a role model for many young men and women. Indeed, the novel was regarded as the bible of the narodniks, or Populists, in the pre-Marxist era. Its influence was so great that many historians credit Nikolai Chernyshevsky with being the true founding father of Bolshevism.²⁰

After the underground dungeons were closed in the 1860s, the casemates of the Trubetskoi Bastion, the triangular fortifications at the front of the fortress, were rebuilt into a two-storey political prison consisting of sixty-nine cells. Prince Kropotkin, the anarchist son of an ancient land-owning family, was imprisoned there for revolutionary activism in 1874.vi He described his treatment in the Trubetskoi Ravelin:

This room of mine was a casemate destined for a big gun and the window, cut in a wall five feet thick and protected by an iron grating and a double iron window frame, was an embrasure. The prisoner hears no human voice and sees no human being, except two or three jailers, deaf and mute when addressed by the prisoners. …You never hear a sound, excepting that of a sentry continually creeping like a hunter from one door to another to look through the ‘Judas’ into the cells. You are never alone, an eye is continually kept upon you; and yet you are always alone. The absolute silence is interrupted only by the bells of the clock which ring a change every quarter of an hour, each hour a canticle and each twelve hours ‘God Save The Tsar’. The cacophony of the discordant bells is horrible and I do not wonder that nervous persons consider these bells one of the plagues of the fortress.²¹

The most glaring omission among the Great Reforms was Alexander II’s failure to create an elected parliament. This was largely due to the anti-democratic rigidity of his legal adviser Konstantin Petrovich Pobedonostsev, Professor of Civil Law at Moscow University, who considered the reforms a ‘criminal error’. Pobedonostsev’s father, an Orthodox priest, had drilled into him the belief that man was by nature ‘weak, vicious, worthless and rebellious’. Starting from that negative premise, his son denounced any sort of progressive thinking and preached ‘Land, Family and Church’ as the three legs of stable government. To him, Fourier was an ‘inspired madman’ whose socialist teaching ‘incites the people to infamous misdeeds’.²²

He also defended Russia’s rule over her conquered minorities and advocated their cultural and political Russification, a self-defeating policy that weakened rather than strengthened the bonds of empire. Strict censorship prevented dangerous ideas being imported from those sinks of iniquity, republican Paris and democratic London. In 1872, however, three thousand copies of the Russian edition of Karl Marx’s classic work, Das Kapital, were permitted to enter Russia after the censors decided it was a ‘strictly scientific work that very few people in Russia will read and even fewer will understand’.²³

The book sold out within a matter of months. It was indeed ‘scientific’ but the censors had failed to realise that what it preached was ‘scientific socialism’. Marx’s theory that capitalism must inevitably collapse interested one unlikely reader in Princess Victoria, the eldest daughter of Victoria and Albert, who was married to the Crown Prince of Germany. After reading Das Kapital in 1878, she sent an emissary to meet the London-based author, who had moved out of proletarian Soho and was living among the bourgeoisie of Belsize Park.

Sir Mountstuart Elphinstone Grant Duff, a Liberal Member of Parliament, invited him to the Devonshire Club, an old Whig establishment in Saint James’s, on 31 January 1879. The next day Grant Duff reported on his mission in a letter to the Princess in which he described Marx, a Jewish atheist, as ‘a short, rather small man with grey hair and beard which contrast strangely with a still dark moustache’.

The face is somewhat round, the forehead well shaped and filled up - the eye rather hard but the whole expression rather pleasant than not, by no means that of a gentleman who is in the habit of eating babies in their cradles - which is, I daresay, the view which the Police takes of him.

He looks, not unreasonably, for a great and not distant crash in Russia; thinks it will begin by reforms from above which the old bad edifice will not be able to bear and which will lead to its tumbling down altogether. As to what would take its place he had evidently no clear idea, except that for a long time Russia would be unable to exercise any influence in Europe.

To reassure the Princess that the monarchies were in no imminent danger, he concluded optimistically, ‘[His] ideas about the near future of Europe are too dreamy to be dangerous; there was no trace of bitterness or savagery - plenty of acrid and dissolvent criticism but nothing of the Marat tone. I would gladly meet him again. It will not be he who, whether he wishes it or not, will turn the world upside down.’vii

Eight months after that meeting, in October 1879, the People’s Will (Narodnaya Volia), the most extreme political group Russia had seen so far, was formed in Saint Petersburg. Its aims were to destroy the Tsarist state through acts of violence and give birth to a people’s republic. Its members were young revolutionary socialist intellectuals who had broken away from an earlier terrorist group, Land and Liberty (Zemlya I Volya), which had decided to pursue a more moderate, evolutionary course under Georgi Plekhanov, one of the first Russian Marxists.

On the afternoon of Sunday 1 March 1881 Sofia Perovskaya, the terrorist daughter of a former Governor-General of Saint Petersburg, waved a white handkerchief by the side of the Catherine Canal. This was the signal for a fellow terrorist, Nikolai Rysakov, to throw a bomb under the horses’ hooves of Alexander II’s bulletproof carriage as it passed him on its way from the Winter Palace to the capital’s main street, Nevsky Prospekt.viii

The explosion killed the horses and mortally wounded one of the Tsar’s Cossack escorts. It also killed a butcher’s boy who happened to be passing on his way to deliver an order to a customer. It was then 2.15 pm. The Tsar was unharmed but insisted on leaving his carriage to check on the wounded.

‘Are you all right, Sire?’ one of his aides inquired.

‘Yes, thank God!’ Alexander replied.

‘It’s too early to thank God!’ yelled Rysakov’s Polish comrade, Ignacy Hryniewiecki, throwing a second bomb, which exploded with great force, killing the bomb thrower instantly. Colonel Adrian Dvorzhitsky, who was travelling in a sleigh in front of the royal carriage, recalls that moment:

I was deafened by the new explosion, burned, wounded and thrown to the ground. Suddenly, amid the smoke and snowy fog, I heard His Majesty’s weak voice cry, ‘Help!’ Gathering what strength I had, I jumped up and rushed to the Emperor. His Majesty was half-lying, half-sitting, leaning on his right arm. Thinking he was merely wounded, I tried to lift him but the Tsar’s legs were shattered and blood poured out of them.

Twenty people, with wounds of varying degree, lay on the sidewalk and on the street. Some managed to stand, others to crawl, still others tried to get out from beneath bodies that had fallen on them. Through the snow, debris and blood you could see fragments of clothing, epaulets, sabres and bloody chunks of human flesh.²⁴

‘Take me to the Winter Palace,’ Alexander gasped before drifting into unconsciousness. He was bleeding to death but instead of rushing him to hospital the faithful colonel complied with his master’s command. Alexander was carried to the palace and placed on the divan in his study. Priests gave him communion and administered the last rites, while his physician, Dr Sergei Botkin, tried to stop the bleeding.

The Tsar’s twelve-year-old grandson, Nicholas Alexandrovich, whom he called ‘my sunray’, dashed to the palace:

My parents were already in the study. My uncle and aunt were standing near the window [Nicholas says]. Nobody said a word. My grandfather was lying on the narrow camp bed on which he always slept. He was covered with the military greatcoat that served as his dressing gown. His face was mortally pale; it was covered with small wounds. My father led me up to the bed. ‘Papa,’ he said, raising his voice, ‘your sunray is here.’

I saw a fluttering of his eyelids. The light blue eyes of my grandfather opened. He tried to smile. He moved his finger, but could not raise his hand and say what he wanted, but he undoubtedly recognised me.

His Imperial Majesty was able to swallow a little of the holy wine before he breathed his last. At 3.30 that Sunday afternoon his personal standard was lowered from the mast of the Winter Palace and the hopes and dreams of the reformers sank with it. The surviving members of the plot were rounded up and Sofia Perovskaya and four other terrorists, including Nikolai Rysakov, went to the gallows on 3 April 1881 without knowing that the assassination would achieve the exact opposite of what they had intended.

Ironically, on the day he was murdered, Alexander II had signed a modest first step towards a constitution, which would have permitted elected representatives of the people to collaborate with the government in reviewing the Great Reforms. This initiative died with him. His murder proved to his son, Alexander III, that greater freedom had failed to stabilise the Empire. The new Tsar disclosed his feelings in a letter to his wife, the Empress Maria Fyodorovna: ‘All the scum burst out and swallowed all that was holy. The guardian angel flew away and everything turned to ashes, culminating in the dreadful incomprehensible of the first of March.’ His grief would manifest itself in an all-consuming rage against liberalisation. Like a malevolent phoenix, the autocracy would rise again over the Winter Palace and spread disunity, hardship and terror among his subjects.²⁵

_______________

i Peter the Great founded Saint Petersburg on the Neva marshes in 1703 as a bastion against Swedish, Polish, Lithuanian, Finnish and German invaders. Local people have always referred to their city as ‘Peter’.

ii ‘The Triad of Official Nationality’ was the creation of the Minister of National Enlightenment, Sergei Uvarov (1786-1855), in an 1833 circular letter to subordinate educators. Nicholas loved the idea and embraced it.

iii In 1845 Nicholas abolished the knout, a vicious whip of multiple metal-tipped rawhide thongs inherited from the Tatars. He replaced it with the pleti, a whip with three thongs tipped with pleated leather in place of metal talons. The number of lashes was limited to one hundred.

iv The Decembrists were a small clique of noble officers who failed to overthrow Nicholas I on his accession to the throne in December 1825. The leaders were thrown into the Alekseyevsky Ravelin in the western part of the Peter and Paul Fortress. Five were executed and thirty-one were sentenced to hard labour in Siberia.

v Albert had no official position in the Kingdom but possessed a talent for interference. His unpopularity did not stop him from complaining to the beleaguered Prime Minister, Lord Aberdeen, about the rude behaviour of certain cabinet ministers towards his wife.

vi Kropotkin renounced his princely title aged twelve and was known thereafter as Peter Kropotkin. As a geographer, he discovered that the Ice Age ended far more recently than previously supposed.

vii Indeed, Marx’s years in London had persuaded him that Britain could perhaps evolve towards socialism without a violent revolution.

viii Nevsky Prospekt was named after Prince Alexander Nevsky, the warrior-saint who defeated the Swedish invaders at the Neva River in 1240 and, two years later, beat the Teutonic Knights in ‘the Battle on the Ice’ at Lake Peipus.

2

The Sons of Simbirsk

Three weeks after Alexander II’s assassination Fyodor Mikhailovich Kerensky, a staunch supporter of the monarchy and a devout communicant of the Orthodox Church, celebrated the birth of his first son, Alexander. Through a trick of fate, Alexander Fyodorovich Kerensky and his nemesis, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, a.k.a. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, were born within a few hundred yards of one another in Simbirsk, an ancient hillside town overlooking the Middle Volga. According to the Julian calendar, their birthdays both fell in April - Lenin on 10 April 1870 and Kerensky eleven years later on 22 April 1881.

Fyodor Mikhailovich, a tall, broad-shouldered man, with an enormous head, close-cropped hair and intelligent eyes set in a massive forehead, belonged to a Russian clan with monks and priests in its bloodline. The family name was derived from Kerensk, a settlement on the River Kerenka, 300 miles southeast of Moscow, with the stress on the first syllable: Kérensky. ‘My parents met in Kazan, where my father held his first teaching post after leaving university,’ Kerensky says. ‘My mother was one of his pupils and they were married shortly after she left school.’¹

Apart from their common birthplace Lenin and Kerensky shared another connection: their fathers were friends who worked closely together to advance the prospects of Simbirsk’s younger generation. ‘My father was principal of the two local gymnasiums, one for boys and the other for girls,’ Kerensky says. ‘Lenin’s father, Ilya Ulyanov, was inspector of elementary schools. All his children were educated in the local high schools under my father’s supervision.’²

Alexander, ‘Sasha’ to his family, was the Kerenskys’ fourth child. His older sisters were Elena (Lyolya), Anna (Nyeta) and Nadezhda (Nadya), and his younger brother was Fyodor (Fedya). They had no Jewish ancestry but that didn’t stop Alexander’s enemies from claiming he was Jewish to discredit him in the eyes of the antisemitic Court and the antisemitic Russian masses. Henry Ford’s newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, would claim in 1920 that Jewish propaganda had falsified Kerensky’s paternity:

His name is Adler. His father was a Jew and his mother a Jewess. Adler, the father, died, and the mother married a Russian named Kerensky, whose name the young child took. Among the radicals who employed him as a lawyer, among the forces that put him forward to drive the first nail into Russia’s cross, among the soldiers who fought with him, his Jewish descent and character have never been doubted.i ³

This mishmash of malice and make-believe emanated from the fact that Kerensky’s mother, Nadezhda Alexandrova Adler, was the daughter of General Alexander Adler, a Tsarist officer who had fought with distinction in the armies of Nicholas I. She was also the niece of the Professor of Divinity at the University of Kazan. The Alder name was correct but the Jewish connection was untrue, as Kerensky’s grandson Stephen Kerensky confirmed to The Times of Israel.ii

Lenin’s father, Ilya Nikolaevich Ulyanov, was born at Astrakhan, the illustrious port-city on the Caspian Sea, into a family of former serfs of Russian and Kalmyk descent. Throwing off the shackles of the past, he graduated in physics and mathematics at the University of Kazan and then trained as a teacher. His wife, Maria Alexandrovna Blank, born in Saint Petersburg, was the daughter of a wealthy German-Swedish Lutheran mother and a Russian Jewish father whose family had converted to Christianity.

In 1869, six years after their wedding, Ilya Ulyanov was appointed Inspector of Popular Schools in Simbirsk and five years later he was promoted to inspector for the whole province, with the immense task of founding some 450 primary schools as part of the government’s plans for modernisation. His dedication earned him the Order of Saint Vladimir, giving him the status of an hereditary nobleman.

Ilya Ulyanov was a God-fearing member of the Orthodox Church and his younger son Vladimir, known as ‘Volodya’, was baptised in that faith six days after his birth. There were six surviving children: Anna, Alexander, Vladimir, Olga, Dmitri and Maria. Vladimir’s head was so large and his legs so weak that he often toppled over. He used to bang his head on the floor, making his mother, Maria Alexandrovna, worry that he might be retarded. Maria had been raised a Lutheran but, in adulthood, she had become largely indifferent to Christianity, an attitude that turned some of her children – certainly Vladimir - against organised religion.

Alexander Kerensky has only one memory of his enemy in their Simbirsk days and it is more a fleeting impression than a clear picture:

The school chapel on a festive occasion: the Holy Gates are opened, the priest comes out to administer communion to the children; the headmaster’s two little sons are led up to him: they are in white, with pink bows under their Eton collars; and behind them, from among the orderly rows of schoolboys, dressed in tight-fitting blue uniform with silver buttons, looking at them, is the exemplary pupil (religiously educated and first in his class): Vladimir Ulyanov.’⁴

One week after Alexander Kerensky’s birth Alexander III, guided by Konstantin Pobedonostsev, published the ‘Manifesto on Unshakeable Autocracy’ in which he proclaimed his faith in ‘the justice and power of the autocracy’.iii Through a series of draconian laws, he dragged the monarchy back into the Dark Ages without actually restoring serfdom. The effect of these laws was to place an icy medieval grip on freedom of expression and freedom of worship.

Schools were forced to raise their fees to prevent the poorer classes from receiving an education. The press was heavily censored. Thousands of revolutionaries were sentenced to hard labour in Siberia. Any judge or government official suspected of liberal ideas was instantly dismissed. To limit the growth of Catholicism, the Tsar made it an offence for any of his subjects to convert from the Orthodox Church to another faith. Harsh penalties were reserved for anyone challenging Romanov power. Richard Pipes, who made a study of the autocratic Tsarist regime, wrote:

Politics was declared the exclusive preserve of the government and its high functionaries. Any meddling in them on the part of unauthorised personnel, which included all private citizens, was a crime punishable by law. The enforcement of this principle was entrusted to a Department of Police and a Corps of Gendarmes whose exclusive concern was with crimes against the state. They had the power to search, arrest, interrogate, imprison and exile persons either guilty of political activity or suspected of it.⁵

Germans, Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians, Armenians and every other minority living under Romanov rule in Western Europe, Ukraine and the Caucasus (and later Finland) were required to speak Russian. The Poles, following the brutal suppression of their 1863 insurrection, had to read Polish literature in Russian. Absurdly, it was a crime for two schoolboys to have a conversation in their own language. Moreover, hundreds of thousands of Polish children were declared illegitimate because their parents had been married according to the rites of the Catholic Church.⁶

The Tsar reserved his greatest spite for Russia’s five million Jews, the people he blamed for ‘the murder of Jesus Christ’.⁷ It was the German-born Catherine the Great who had established the Pale of Permanent Jewish Settlement, which stretched from Lithuania in the north to the Black Sea in the south, from Poland in the west to ‘White Russia’ and Ukraine in the east.iv

Ever since the Revolutions of 1848 had swept across Europe and terrified reactionary Christian monarchs, Jewish people had been portrayed as the agents of revolutionary subversion. It was a matter of great concern to the Romanovs that Jews did not see themselves as Russian nationals but as Russian citizens of Jewish nationality, even though no Jewish state existed. ‘Alexander III and his son Nicholas II sowed the seeds of bitter national hatred in every corner of the Empire,’ Alexander Kerensky says. ‘But of all the sins of the last two Tsars, their greatest, unequalled, crime was their fanatical, one may even say maniacal, antisemitism.’⁸

Conspiratorial antisemites spread rumours that the Tsar’s assassins were Jewish and hinted that the government had given the go-ahead for revenge attacks on Jewish communities. The first part was a lie; the second part was fundamentally true. Viacheslav von Pleve, a lawyer-turned-policeman who had arrested many members of the People’s Will in the aftermath of the assassination, was the instigator of pogroms in Ukraine in which hundreds of Jews were killed and wounded, and thousands made homeless.v The most violent attacks took place in Kiev over three days in May 1881 and were described by the authorities as ‘spontaneous demonstrations of an outraged people’, so spontaneous that the local police had been informed in advance that they would take place and trainloads of extreme nationalists were brought in to ensure the maximum carnage.⁹

Pleve, the Chief of the Gendarmerie, and Count Nikolai Ignatiev, the new Minister of the Interior, had no scruples about protecting the autocracy from dangerous alien ideas. More than 600 statutes were drafted to deal with ‘the Jewish Question’ and even Jews who had been permitted to move into Russian towns and cities because they had special abilities or possessed a certain amount of wealth were persecuted.

Ignatiev’s Temporary Regulations banned Jews from owning or managing land, buildings or farms outside the towns of the Pale; forbidding them from trading on Christian holy days including Sundays; and severely restricting Jewish numbers at university. Having been stripped of their businesses and forced to sell their homes at knockdown prices, more than 400,000 Jewish people emigrated from the Russian Empire in the 1890s, many sailing to a new life in the Americas.¹⁰

Alexander III’s antisemitism became an international scandal in 1891 when his brother, Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, refused to accept his appointment as Governor-General of Moscow ‘unless the city is cleared of Jews’. On 28 April that year the Tsar signed the first of a series of laws allowing Sergei to expel the Jews from Moscow. Jewish artisans, distillers, brewers, general craftsmen, workmen and even discharged Jewish soldiers – 20,000 people in all, including wives and children - were deported. Jewish women were allowed to remain in the city only if they registered as prostitutes.¹¹

Leon Trotsky wrote in his biography Young Lenin, ‘Whoever is born on the Volga carries her image through life.’ This was certainly true of Alexander Kerensky. Life would take him to Britain, France, Germany, Czechoslovakia, the United States and Australia but his thoughts would always return to his home town and, in his mind’s eye, he would see the hillside covered in apple and cherry blossom and hear the nocturnal song of the nightingale.

The Kerenskys’ home was a large state-owned apartment on top of the hill in the fashionable part of town known as ‘the Crown’. The apartment had so many rooms that, according to Alexander, the lives of the children ‘were only remotely stirred by the excitement of big receptions’. He went to dancing lessons with elegant little girls and played with ragged, barefoot village boys. His first ambition was to be the church bell-ringer, ‘to stand on a high steeple, above everybody, near the clouds, and thence to call men to the service of God with the heavy blows of a huge bell’.¹²

But it was the mighty river that most captivated him. Aged about seven, he watched the spring thaw:

The Volga freed herself from her icy yoke and in a joyous outburst flooded the meadows on the left bank. The distant roar of the spring waters filled the air and I ran off to gaze at the river. Spellbound by the beauty of the scene, I experienced a sense of elation that grew almost to the point of spiritual transfiguration. Then, suddenly overcome by an unaccountable feeling of terror, I ran away. For me that moment was decisive in choosing the spiritual path that I was