Alexander Kerensky
Alexander Kerensky was the Minister of Justice of the Provisional
Government that was legitimised, by the manifesto written by Michail
Alexandrovich Romanov, on March 3, 1917. Kerensky was with Michail,
in St. Petersburg, where the writing of this manifesto was to
take place. He advised Michail at that time that he could not
guarantee his personal safety. When Michail left a meeting room
to write his manifesto Kerensky asked him if he was going to talk
to his wife. Michail smiled and replied that his wife, Natasha,
was not with him. Kerensky was apparently afraid of what advice
Michail's "revolutionary" wife would give. In April
of 1917 Alexander Kerensky took on the job of Minister of War
and Navy. With the Army and Navy in revolutionary anarchy, Kerensky
was forced to use some of Michail's Caucasian soldiers as his
only security when he visited the Romanian Front. These two hundred
cavalry soldiers were still taking orders from their officers.
Later that summer Kerensky requested that the Third Corps Cavalry,
with the exclusion of the Caucasian Division, provide security
for the capital of St. Petersburg. He felt it would look bad to
have the capital guarded by these "foreign troops".
This attitude dissolved any further trust between these soldiers
and Kerensky. On September 2, 1917, without the formal declaration
of a Constituent Assembly, Kerensky with the title Minister-President,
proclaimed Russia a Democratic Republic. Michail Alexandrovich
in his diary that morning would ask the question "Is it not
all the same, whatever the shape of the government, so long as
there be order and justice for everybody?". Alexander Kerensky
said to the government and the soviet that he wasn't going to
be the "russian Marat" when they spoke about the last
Czars destiny. Kerensky wanted them out of the country, for their
own safety, and when they couldn't get exile in England they were
moved to Tobolsk, because it have no railroad connection, they
would be safe there, for a while at least. On October 25th, the
"rule without reigning" Provisional Government fell.
Alexander Kerensky avoided arrest by the Soviets by being followed
by a car flying the American flag and escaping from St. Petersburg.
He fled to Gatchina where he was forced to flee again while dressed
as a Danish sailor. The uniform and car at this time were provided
by the "servants" of the Romanov family. He left Russia
on a British boat in June of 1918. Kerensky fled to England and
then to France, and in 1940 he moved to the United States. He
wrote many books explaining his role in the revolution, and lived
out his later years at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution
and Peace, at Stanford University, in Palo Alto, California. He
died in 1970, at age 89, in New York.
