Oleg Alexander Kerensky, 16 April 1905 - 25 June 1984

Abstract

Oleg Alexander Kerensky was born in St Petersburg on 16 April 1905 into a well-to-do middle-class family. His father was the Alexander Kerensky who, after the February 1917 revolution in Russia, became a member of the Provisional Government formed by the Duma, first as Minister of Justice, then as Minister of War and of the Navy. In July of that year he headed the reorganized government as Prime Minister until the Bolsheviks took over power in the October Revolution. Before then Alexander Kerensky had been a barrister and, from 1912, a member of the Duma, where he had become leader of the Trudoviki group, the moderately left opposition to the Tsarist régime. In the male line, Oleg’s great-grandfather was an orthodox priest. Oleg’s paternal grandfather, Feodor M. Kerensky, not wishing to follow the family tradition of becoming a priest, went to the University of Kazan and became first a teacher, then a school inspector, and then headmaster of two high schools in Simbirsk, one for boys and the other for girls. Feodor’s wife was a general’s daughter and the niece of a professor of divinity in the University of Kazan. When Alexander Oleg’s father, was nine years old, Feodor was further promoted to be the Inspector of Education for the then very recently acquired province of Turkestan, so the family went to live in Tashkent and the children did not see European Russia again until the time came to go to university in St Petersburg.