Читать книгу Comrade Kerensky - Boris Kolonitskii - Страница 11

In 1917 information about Kerensky’s past life was obtainable from the minister’s own testimony and reminiscences of his contemporaries. Mention of his career was made by politicians, journalists and those drafting resolutions. From these tesserae of the mosaic, people in Russia were able to piece together a reasonably convincing picture of the man. Of particular importance was writing undertaken specifically to familiarize society with Kerensky’s biography.

There were quite a few reasons why writers and journalists, members of committees and generals might choose to bring up details of Kerensky’s life, to quote his speeches and to recall his actions in the past. Some wanted to bolster the new leader’s authority; others were responding to public demand (there was great curiosity about this suddenly popular politician). Nor can we overlook more mercenary considerations: publishers were prepared to commission writing on a hot topic, and Kerensky was selling like hot cakes. The minister could not directly control every project relating to his biography, but, as we shall see, he and his inner circle did often themselves initiate such writing, helped it on its way, and facilitated its distribution.

Kerensky was good with the press, and his staff knew when and how to release information to influential journalists hungry for news. Despite being overworked, he would find time to converse with publishers and journalists, writers and editors, to brief them on how he saw the changing situation and make recommendations. He periodically declared that he did not read items about himself in the newspapers, but without letting slip that he did study the reviews of the periodical press which his staff constantly provided.

Kerensky set up press and propaganda sections in the departments he oversaw: first in the Ministry of Justice and later in the Ministry of War. These had many shortcomings, and Russian wartime propaganda was overall inferior to that of the Germans and British, but, compared to others, Kerensky and his staff acted energetically and proactively to influence the press and get feedback about the state of public opinion.²

After the revolution, as minister of justice, Kerensky found himself in possession of a major asset. Order No. 1, signed by the new minister in February 1917, delegated Academician Nestor Kotlyarevsky to remove from the Police Department all papers and documents he might deem necessary and deliver them to the Academy of Sciences.³ The Okhrana security department had secret files with sensitive information about many contemporary figures, and it was important that they should be stored securely. Actually, they were not all removed to the Academy of Sciences: the file on Kerensky, which went back to 1905, was delivered to the Ministry of Justice.⁴

Journalists were shown the documents and allowed to quote from them. There were also fairly extensive publications in the newspapers which drew on Okhrana materials about Kerensky.⁵ The press likewise reported on researches undertaken by local activists in provincial police archives.⁶

The Central Committee of the Trud [Labour] Group in the Duma, to which Kerensky belonged, published a pamphlet containing excerpts from his file and two police circulars dating from 1915. The print run of 50,000 copies was large for the time⁷ and indicates that the project received substantial funding. The publishers claimed that this collection of documents, prepared by political surveillance professionals, made possible an objective estimate of the scale of Kerensky’s revolutionary activities: ‘The reports of Okhrana agents and the police were written before the revolution and come from the enemy camp, so they tell the story more objectively than we could.’ The preface stated: ‘He did not come to the revolution as something already accomplished but spent days and months preparing the coup whose protagonist he was destined to become.’⁸ The documents showed informers and analysts of the Security Department detailing Kerensky’s pre-revolutionary activities. They attributed acts to him which he had not committed, but now, in the circumstances of the revolution, even these exaggerations, ‘confirmed’ by the intelligence agents of his political opponents, contributed to boosting the authority of the minister formerly at the centre of their attention. It seems clear that this publication appeared with the assistance of the minister or his staff.

Several collections of Kerensky’s speeches and orders were published, including the texts of pre-revolutionary speeches. Attention focused particularly on those previously banned, and here too we may assume Kerensky was personally involved in preparing them for publication. There were sometimes acknowledgements that he had provided the publishers with authentic transcripts of his speeches to replace the edited versions which had appeared in official publications. Supporters of Kerensky would now preface the text with a brief biography, placing him in the historical pantheon of famed ‘champions of freedom’. In the preface to a collection issued by the Socialist Revolutionaries, his name was placed alongside such predecessors and heroes of the party as the Narodnaya volya [People’s Will] volunteers and members of the SRs’ Combat Organization, and his career was presented as an important part of the history of the revolutionary movement.⁹ Other publications brought together facts about Kerensky’s life with excerpts from his most famous speeches.¹⁰

In 1917 the life of politicians in general became a matter of public interest, but no other leader found himself on the receiving end of as much biographical writing as Kerensky. This resulted from the public demand for information about him personally, from the considerable financial resources invested in building him up, and also from the political needs of the forces supporting him. Finally, this famous politician had many supporters among writers and features writers, and they willingly and creatively extolled him, receiving commissions and possibly soliciting them.

Kerensky’s first biographer was Vasiliy Kiriakov (1868–1923), who had known him for many years. His articles in 1917 were prepared and published with Kerensky’s assistance. A rural teacher, active in teachers’ associations and well known as a literary commentator in radical circles, Kiriakov came to prominence at the All-Russia Peasant Union in 1905 and was elected to the Second State Duma.¹¹ When the leaders of the Peasant Union were arrested and put on trial, Kerensky, as a lawyer, defended Kiriakov. They stayed in touch. In 1917 Kiriakov wrote for the Trudoviks’ publications, and in the autumn he edited the Petrograd newspaper Narodnaya pravda [the People’s Truth], which was published by supporters of Kerensky with American funding.¹²

In May 1917, Kiriakov wrote a feature on Kerensky for the popular illustrated magazine Niva.¹³ The story in the magazine stopped short of the present, and readers were informed that Kiriakov was preparing a booklet about the life story of the champion of freedom for the publishing house Narodnaya vlast’ [Power of the People], which had been set up by the right wing of the Socialist Revolutionary Party. This was to detail also the doings of the minister ‘in these radiant days of the revolution, as the genius of Russia’s freedom’.¹⁴ Kiriakov duly published the pamphlet, whose first chapters were a revised and abridged version of the Niva feature. In it he included his reminiscences of meetings with Kerensky and newspaper articles and documents from the police archives (evidently provided by the minister’s staff). Kiriakov quotes some of Kerensky’s speeches, and indeed at times this stylistically heterogeneous biography turns into a dense assemblage of quotations.

As Kiriakov describes him, Kerensky is ‘the first citizen of free Russia, the first people’s socialist tribune, the first people’s minister of justice, the minister of truth and fairness’. For Kiriakov, Kerensky is not only the principal leader but also an important symbol of the revolution – ‘a noble symbol of the noble Great Russian Revolution’.¹⁵

Compared with other 1917 biographies of Kerensky, Kiriakov’s is the most Narodnik [Populist] and moralizing. In it we find the theme of ‘a debt for which there can be no recompense’ which the intelligentsia owes the common people, romanticization of the long-suffering people, the narod, and the cult of champions of freedom. Kerensky’s life is described as part of the history of the revolutionary movement as seen from a right-wing Socialist Revolutionary perspective. Kiriakov criticizes not only the Bolsheviks but also some moderate socialists, including fellow party members. He describes Kerensky as a Narodnik with a rare gift of leadership which enables him to establish a special connection with the people. ‘A. F. Kerensky has the ability to see into the very soul of the people and to quicken with his speeches all the latent greatness and holiness there, to merge himself with it creatively, and thereby draw it to himself forever.’¹⁶

Kiriakov particularly notes Kerensky’s energy and devotion to the revolution. ‘Tempestuous and impulsive in his movements and his speech, he is fired by revolutionary emotion. His close friends say of him, “He does not walk, but runs; he does not speak, but bombards you.”’¹⁷ The hero in Kiriakov’s narrative is even endowed with the gift of prophecy, which is what has made him the Leader of the revolution. ‘A feature of A. F. Kerensky’s psychology is a nervous sensibility for political events which often extends to foreseeing them.’¹⁸

Kiriakov was also the author of popular biographies of other veterans of the Narodnik movement who supported Kerensky in 1917.¹⁹ In these sketches he makes use of the same techniques: through idealized biographies of the heroic Yekaterina Breshko-Breshkovskaya and Nikolai Chaikovsky, the author traces the history of the revolutionary organizations. He lays particular emphasis both on the special emotional connection between his heroes as they fulfil their moral duty and on the Russian people they are seeking to liberate. This theme of the reciprocated love of the revolutionary liberators and the people was prominent in the well-developed genre of Narodnik political hagiography within which Kiriakov was working. It is the same theme he develops in his description of the life of Kerensky.

Another pamphlet about Kerensky comes from the pen of Oleg Leonidov (Shimansky, 1893–1951), a prose writer, poet, dramatist, translator, critic and essayist who later became famous as the scriptwriter of renowned Soviet films.²⁰ During the revolution Leonidov was serving in the army, apparently mainly as a propagandist. His military service did not prevent him from frequently appearing in print. Leonidov bases his pamphlet principally on police documents but writes also about his meetings with Kerensky, so it is more than likely that the latter assisted with publication of the biography. The Leader of Freedom, A. F. Kerensky was brought out by a Moscow publishing house in an edition of 24,000 copies. This was evidently well received, because a second edition appeared shortly afterwards with additional paragraphs reflecting Kerensky’s latest actions, by now as the minister of war.

This is the most literary of the Kerensky biographies published in 1917. Leonidov made an effort to write in a vivid, lively manner. He stays with Kiriakov’s theme of a special connection between the Leader and the people but adopts a different style from the canonical Narodnik extolling of the champion of freedom. Kerensky is not a heroic martyr but a heroic victor. Leonidov hybridizes the genre of Narodnik hagiography with mass-media techniques of the early twentieth century for writing up celebrities, creating memorable portraits of Kerensky and graphically evoking his manner as an orator. The description of him as Leader in his title is significant and was obviously of significance also for both author and publisher. If the Socialist Revolutionary Kiriakov depicts Kerensky as a faithful member of the SR Party and a successor of the Narodnik tradition, Leonidov characterizes him as a national Leader, a Leader of the whole of the Russian people. This pamphlet is perhaps the most ‘leaderish’ of all Kerensky’s biographies, and in this respect it departs from the canonical Narodnik description of a hero. For Leonidov, Kerensky is not only the ‘finest son of the people’, the ‘true tribune of the people’, but also, ‘by the will of God, the Elect of the people’.²¹ It is probably going too far to see in this the direct influence of monarchist tradition, but Leonidov’s biography is hardly the product of a fully fledged democrat. In the additions made in the second edition, the themes of trust and devotion to the Leader, even of becoming identified with him, are yet more pronounced. ‘Kerensky is as one with the Russian people and the Russian people is as one with him’; ‘But for as long as we have Kerensky we have, and should have, faith in our future’; ‘Our future is in the hands of the people for as long as it remains with Kerensky, the universally acknowledged Leader of freedom.’²²

Like Kiriakov, Leonidov describes Kerensky as a hugely important political symbol, but he goes even further in developing that image, employing rhetorical devices to glorify the Leader which were later to be applied to Soviet leaders. ‘The name of Kerensky has already become a legend among men. Kerensky is a symbol of truth and the guarantor of success. Kerensky is a lighthouse, a beacon to which the arms of swimmers who are exhausted are outstretched, and from his fire, from his words and appeals they receive an ever renewed infusion of strength to continue the great struggle.’²³

In characterizing the personality of the Leader, Leonidov particularly emphasizes the amazing sincerity of this ardent enthusiast of the revolution. It is noticeable that the word ‘enthusiast’ constantly recurs in the text.²⁴ Describing Kerensky’s appearance, Leonidov devotes special attention to his gaze, returning again and again to the Leader’s ‘steely, unwavering eyes’, his ‘steely gaze’, his ‘stern, fixed stare’. The Leader may be physically weak, even ill (Leonidov writes about a frail, puny, tired man), but in his eyes there is willpower, insight and masterfulness. ‘Kerensky glowers, projecting a dark, masterful look of indignation.’ The political leader gives the person opposite him an ‘incisive, authoritative gaze it is difficult to withstand.’²⁵ With this kind of pen portrait Leonidov builds up the image of a strong-willed politician.

An individual in early twentieth-century Russia reading the pamphlet might have recalled a number of writings prophesying the appearance of a ‘new kind of person’. Leonidov was not the only author to present Kerensky in this light, as we shall see.

In Odessa, Vlast’ naroda published a pamphlet titled A. F. Kerensky, the People’s Minister.²⁶ Kerensky’s Odessan biographer was a sympathizer of the Socialist Revolutionary Party. We may speculate that he drew on Kiriakov’s writings. At all events, here too the biography is tied in with the history of the Socialist Revolutionaries, and both pamphlets are similar in style and in their choice of material. Like Kiriakov, the author quotes Kerensky’s speeches at length. He makes use of both documentary publications of 1917 and family photographs. In this biography too there are pen portraits made by someone who has been present when Kerensky was giving speeches. The final paragraph is devoted to Kerensky’s personality. His Odessan biographer is confident that the people’s minister will go down in history as the creator of a new social system and as the personification of the revolution.

When the peaceful life of the nations in obedience to the unseen operation of the laws of history bursts in full flood, people appear on the crest of the foaming waves of a turbulent sea whose names are later preserved with love and pride in the memory of the people. The great Russian Revolution has already brought forth a man so intimately identified with it that at times you are hard pressed to tell whether he is directing events or events are directing him That man is Alexander Fyodorovich Kerensky, the first love of free Russia.²⁷

In this text, too, the author, writing about a unique Leader and saviour, brings in the themes of love, first love, and the merging of the Leader with the people.

Spring 1917 saw the appearance in Petrograd of a weekly magazine titled Heroes of the Day: Biographical Essays. It was intended that it would include articles on the lives of prominent contemporaries. The names mentioned were the Swedish politician Karl Branting; the ‘Grandmother of the Russian Revolution’ Yekaterina Breshko-Breshkovskaya; General Alexey Brusilov; the revolutionary publisher Vladimir Burtsev; the Belgian socialist Emile Vandervelde; US President Woodrow Wilson; the writer Maxim Gorky; Kerensky’s predecessor as minister of war, Alexander Guchkov; the radical German Social Democrat Karl Liebknecht; the anarchist Peter Kropotkin; the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin; the British prime minister David Lloyd George; and other Russian and foreign political and public figures.²⁸ The first issue of this publication, A. F. Kerensky: the Love of the Russian Revolution, was devoted to the revolutionary minister.²⁹ This is clear testimony to Kerensky’s popularity. The author, ‘Tan’ (Vladimir Bogoraz, 1865–1936), had been a member of the People’s Will circles and became famous as an ethnographer, linguist and writer. Tan, like Kiriakov, was active in the All-Russia Peasant Union and the organization of the Trud (Labour) Group, so was acquainted with and politically close to Kerensky.

The theme of political love for Kerensky, which Tan featured in his title, is found in other popular biographies but is particularly stressed by Tan. ‘I would call him “the Revolution’s love”, that first virginal love.’ He returns to the theme at the end of his study. ‘The Russian Revolution will have many favourites and special intimates, but that first, virginal love of the young revolution will never fade, never be forgotten.’³⁰ Like other biographers, Tan reminded the reader of Kerensky’s Socialist Revolutionary allegiance and pointed out the special place he had in the party: ‘Kerensky is the highest type of SR. He is a dazzling member of that heroic generation of heroes who threw at the struggle their personal fearlessness, their indomitable spirit and their sublime heroism.’³¹ This endorsement from a veteran of the revolutionary movement would have carried special weight with readers, although it is unlikely that all the Socialist Revolutionary leaders would have gone along with it. Like other biographers, Tan writes of his subject’s ‘prophetic insights’ and calls him ‘the Leader’ and even ‘the spiritual focus of Russia’. He too writes about Kerensky’s singular hard gaze: ‘There is something leonine in the depths of those wide-open eyes.’³²

After the July Crisis,³³ when Kerensky became prime minister of the Provisional Government, the Moscow Educational Commission of the Provisional Committee of the State Duma brought out another biography of him. Its author, a certain Lieutenant Vysotsky, hailed the achievements of the ‘tamer of the unquiet spirits of the rank-and-file soldiers’. ‘The army obeyed him. It obeyed him as its Leader.’³⁴

However, this is the only biography published in 1917 which contains some cautious criticism of Kerensky. Vysotsky felt that some of the reforms in the armed forces were unrealistic and that Kerensky, as the minister of war, had been too slow to recognize the need to fight Bolshevism. It was, nevertheless, on Kerensky that Vysotsky pinned his hopes for stabilization of the situation in the country. Even while criticizing him, Vysotsky laid the blame for the army’s collapse on ‘leading circles of Russia’s democratic forces’ – that is, the leaders of the moderate socialists.³⁵ This could be read as a call for Kerensky to distance himself from the leaders of the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries.

Vysotsky notes both the extreme fatigue of an ‘ill and exhausted’ Kerensky and the inspired vitality of ‘the great enthusiast’ and ‘romantic’, which exercises an almost hypnotic effect on the masses. This writer too points out the special relationship between the Leader and the people, the emotional connection between the minister and his audiences. ‘Outbursts of that same inspiration and delight thunder towards him, reciprocation of the enthusiasm by which the speaker is himself possessed.’ ‘The people “feel” Kerensky, and Kerensky feels the people.’ ‘The people itself creates Kerensky, itself creates around him an atmosphere of boundless trust and love, in which his every word can assume almost biblical power.’³⁶ Like some of Kerensky’s other biographers, Vysotsky sees the source of Kerensky’s influence not only in his ability to mesmerize his listeners but also in the need of the people for a strong ruler. ‘Additionally there is alive in [the people] a longing for Kerenskys, for someone to believe in, to whom it can surrender its soul, whom it would want to follow, into whose hands it could surrender its power in order then to submit to him.’³⁷ This interpretation of the relationship between the Leader and the people may be in line with Leonidov’s writing, but it is far from the Narodnik canon of praise of famous heroes as practised by Kiriakov.

In the autumn of 1917, Lidiya Armand (née Tumpovskaya, 1887–1931) wrote a pamphlet titled Kerensky. She more usually wrote on pedagogy and popularization of culture, and also fiction. The main focus of her writing, however, was the organization of cooperatives and the cultural and educational work they did. In 1917 Armand was on the right of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, and in May the Left Socialist Revolutionaries had labelled her articles ‘social chauvinism’ and ‘social patriotism’.³⁸ In other words, politically she was close to Kerensky. It seems safe to assume this item was published with the support of some grouping of the Right Socialist Revolutionaries.

Like other biographers of Kerensky, Armand includes reminiscences of occasions when she met him: ‘I knew him while he was still a lion cub. In 1906 in Petrograd I met him only in connection with party matters.’³⁹ Armand finished work on the text on 15 September, and it bears the impress of that time. Her main aim is to defend the Leader from increasingly threatening attacks from both the left and the right. ‘The lion is wounded. He has been wounded by slander and demagogy and just about everyone seems to be trying to kick him when he is down.’ The image of Kerensky sacrificing himself for the revolution is sanctified, Armand even comparing him to Christ. ‘Perhaps he is already at the top of his crimson Golgotha. The time will come when the crowds will demand that monuments be erected to Kerensky. They will compose legends and sing songs about him. For the present, however, they are under the spell of the high priests and are yelling, “Crucify him!”’⁴⁰

Armand stoutly defends her political Chosen One from the attacks of his opponents, including some in the ranks of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, who, in her opinion, have delivered ‘the unkindest cut’. If the aim of earlier biographers had been to enhance Kerensky’s influence, Armand’s priority is to put down those questioning the Leader’s authority. She does not deny he has made mistakes but insists on his right to have made them: ‘How could a great man not make great mistakes when he is so in love, with a passion born of despair, with his doomed homeland, and who is so infinitely alone?’⁴¹

The portrait Armand sketches of Kerensky affirms his reputation as an ardent revolutionary. ‘He was tireless in his work, appearing everywhere there was a need for conciliation, soothing, pacifying. Pale, joyfully intense, he was often totally overcome by fatigue and passionate emotion. On more than one occasion he blacked out at the end of a speech. He is ablaze, incandescent.’⁴²

As we see, some of Kerensky’s first biographers were very talented. The names of several are familiar to literary and academic historians. Armand and Kiriakov, Leonidov and Tan knew Kerensky personally and included fragments of reminiscence in their biographical essays. In writing their accounts of the life of the Leader they sometimes quote from published and unpublished documents, including (Kiriakov and Leonidov) materials from the police archives. They make use of the press of the revolutionary period and publish photographs from the Kerensky family archive. Some of them clearly enjoyed Kerensky’s confidence.

Most of these biographies were written in May–June 1917 when Kerensky, after being appointed minister of war, was preparing a military offensive. As we shall see, this was when the major elements of the political cult of the revolutionary Leader took shape. The popular biographies of Kerensky reflected that process.

Those primarily involved in creating these biographies of the Leader were neo-Narodniks, the Labourites [Trudoviks] and, above all, the Right Socialist Revolutionaries. The texts of Kiriakov and Armand reflect intra-party conflicts. They contain criticism of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries and even of some of the ‘centrists’ who had criticized Kerensky. Leonidov and Vysotsky depict their protagonist as a national Leader above party politics, and this is evident in their writing style.

The Kerensky biographies which appeared in 1917 are highly emotional. Their authors were not only seeking to provide the Leader with political support by using his past career as an instrument of legitimation; they also wanted to communicate a needful political emotion to their readers. The theme of love, of the strong, reciprocated love between the people and its Leader, is very much to the fore. Some of Kerensky’s biographers seem, indeed, to have been under his spell themselves.

We should not exaggerate the influence of these popular biographies on public opinion, but they are of interest in helping us to understand how Kerensky’s supporters set about building his image. The biographies reflect certain features of the political culture of the revolutionary period. They are a valuable source for studying efforts both to create the image of a new Leader of a new country and to develop a new rhetoric of political legitimation.