Kolonitskii, Boris ‘Tovarishch Kerenskii’: Antimonarkhicheskaia revoliutsiia i formirovanie kul'ta ‘vozhdia naroda' mart–iiun’ 1917 goda (review)

Abstract

SEER, 96, 4, OCTOBER 2018 788 Kolonitskii, Boris. ‘Tovarishch Kerenskii’: Antimonarkhicheskaia revoliutsiia i formirovanie kul´ta ‘vozhdia naroda’ mart–iiun´ 1917 goda. Historia Rossica. Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, Moscow, 2017. 511 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Index. R611.00. As the leading figure in the Provisional Government, Kerenskii has received a raw deal in both Western and Russian studies ever since 1917. In an obvious sense, of course, he failed, and historians have tended to see him as personally responsible for that failure through his mercurial temperament, his ‘hysterical’ play-acting, his feverish but often uncoordinated activity. It is time for a reassessment, and Kolonitskii’s book is a landmark in that process. His basic thesis is that, although the monarchy had fallen, the monarchical mentality had not disappeared with it. The new leaders needed to project themselves as heroes, albeit of a new, anti-monarchical type. Hence the watchwords by which Kerenskii became known: ‘the people’s chosen one’, ‘the hero of the revolution’, ‘fighter for freedom’, ‘the people’s tribune’, ‘the first citizen of free Russia’. Kerenskii fostered such appellations, but they also came to him spontaneously, in newspapers, pamphlets and resolutions of public associations. In the chaotic circumstances the public needed to feel they could look up to a strong and reliable leader. He had laid the basis for his reputation before 1917 through his activity as a barrister defending political prisoners and as a fiery oppositional speaker in the State Duma. As the only joint member of both the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet, Kerenskii represented both the ‘bourgeoisie’ and ‘democracy’, hence as broad a coalition of ‘revolutionary’ activists as possible. Kerenskii burnished his democratic image on his very first day in office, by shaking the hands of all the doormen and attendants in the Ministry of Justice as he arrived. In fact, hand-shaking became such an obsession that he contracted an inflammation of the right hand. In May Kerenskii became War Minister, and immediately set about restoring the unity and discipline of the army. At the centre of his programme was a Declaration which confirmed the civil rights of the soldiers and their committees, but also stressed that in combat conditions military officers had full rights of command, including to discipline their men if necessary by armed force; this tacitly restored the death penalty, whose abolition had been a flagship achievement of the revolution’s first stage. At the same time he announced an offensive to drive the enemy out of all Russian territory. He followed these statements up with a number of visits to units at the front, where he applied his oratorical talent to convince officers and men that they were fighting together for the greatness of the ‘new, free Russia’. Partly because of the injury to his right hand, he adopted a Napoleonic pose, with his right arm thrust through the left breast of his tunic. REVIEWS 789 Kerenskii was greeted with rapture on many of his meetings with front-line soldiers, some of whom gave him their old-regime St George medals to melt down and help finance the offensive. Yet it was here that the general admiration for Kerenskii began to falter. The generals disapproved of the confirmation of full civil status for soldiers, which in their view would further weaken discipline, while a number of left wing politicians and soldiers’ committees condemned the restoration of full military discipline in combat. However, the successful early phase of the offensive brought Kerenskii’s general acclamation to its apogee. All the same, as the offensive subsequently faltered, it gradually became obvious that he was trying to reconcile the irreconcilable. It is strange that Kolonitskii does not follow up his depiction of the June offensive’s aftermath with an account of the Kornilov affair, as a result of which the coalition of all parties which Kerenskii had endeavoured to create finally fell apart, leaving him a much reduced figure, isolated between the right and left wings of politics. This was the real culmination of the story of Kerenskii’s image, which Kolonitskii has hitherto traced meticulously. The theoretical backdrop to Kolonitsii’s exposition is a little ambiguous. At times he asserts that Kerenskii’s...