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The publication of this series was made possible with the support of the Zimin Foundation.

Boris Kolonitskii, Comrade Kerensky

Sergei Medvedev, The Return of the Russian Leviathan

Maxim Trudolyubov, The Tragedy of Property

Boris Kolonitskii

Translated by Arch Tait

polity

Originally published in Russian as Б.И. Колоницкий, “Товарищ Керенский”: антимонархическая революция и формирование культа “вождя народа” (март–июнь 1917 года) © Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, Moscow, 2017

This English edition 2021 © Polity Press

The Translator asserts his moral right to be identified as the Translator of the Work.

The translation of this work was funded by the Zimin Foundation.

James Manteith’s translation of Leonid Kannegiesser’s ‘On Review’ originally appeared in Cardinal Points , vol. 7 (2017), edited by Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski.

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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3366-4

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In memory of Rafail Sholomovich Ganelin

The writing of this book has been a long and tortuous process, and my enthusiasm for it was not shared by all my colleagues. One distinguished scholar suggested that, if I was going to write a biography, Tsereteli was a more interesting and thoughtful personality. But it was not Kerensky’s life I wanted to study. I have never seen myself as someone else’s biographer. What interested me was what had been written and said, what words had been used, about Kerensky and other political leaders during the 1917 revolution, because I believe that brings out important aspects of how the revolution proceeded.

The topic captured my imagination in the mid-1980s, the historical sources themselves propelling me in that direction. I was astonished by how the rapturous language used to describe the revolutionary leaders in 1917 anticipated the extolling of the Soviet leaders in the 1930s, and I thought it could not simply be written off as evidence of coercion. Zinaïda Gippius’s Blue Book made a powerful impression. It is based largely on the author’s diary and illustrates the changing attitude of a section of the intelligentsia towards Kerensky. People who in spring 1917 were busily and creatively contributing to the cult of a Leader and saviour were, by the autumn, reviling the very leader they had set up: Kerensky was now the main, if not, indeed, the sole, culprit for the political crisis. They appeared quite unaware of any responsibility on their part for the actions of their anointed.

I had a similar reaction when I heard the recrimination in the late perestroika period. ‘I so loved Gorbachev,’ one good lady in Moscow told me with a sigh. She sounded like a young girl disenchanted with the object of her infatuation. She sounded like those people who see their way out of a crisis by bestowing on some new messianic Leader all manner of powers and authority, only later to berate him as they absolve themselves of all blame. I have been publishing since 1991 on Kerensky’s various public images and have been gratified that some of my research has struck readers as having a bearing on the present.