- 03 Feb 2005 03:34
#563511
The link contained at the end of this thread, will take you to a discussion of Kerenksy's time at Stanford University. I thought I would post a short excerpt from the "historical" section of the article, as well as a link to the entire article, in the hope of spurring on a discussion of Kerensky's role in 20th century history. And, also, with the hope of gaining insight into your views of the man, the myths, and his historical role.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A Doomed Democracy
by Bernard Butcher
Alexander Kerensky was born in 1881 in a sleepy town on the mid-Volga River called Simbirsk--the birthplace 11 years earlier of one Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Lenin. Ironically, Kerensky's father, then the equivalent of a high school principal, reportedly wrote a quite positive college recommendation for his son's future adversary. In 1889, the family moved to the frontier of the Russian empire--the dusty town of Tashkent, in Central Asia--where the father became superintendent of schools. Family photos show the Islamic milieu in which Alexander grew up, with Russian officials in their starched white uniforms surrounded by dark-skinned schoolchildren and their turbaned fathers.
Kerensky's radical antipathy to the absolute rule of the Romanovs was nurtured during his university days in St. Petersburg. He was an intellectual interested in all aspects of Russian history, culture and literature in addition to politics. By the spring of 1904, he had graduated with a law degree, married the daughter of a Russian general and begun to prosecute high-profile cases designed to embarrass the monarchy. When, two years later, Czar Nicholas II finally allowed the election of a parliament, an elated Kerensky thought the country was finally on the road to democracy.
As the czar dissolved one parliament after another, however, Kerensky grew disillusioned. An exceptional orator, he successfully ran for the Fourth State Duma, or lower house, in 1912 as a Labor Party representative. Kerensky used this platform to criticize the government, conduct inquiries into officials' abuses and disseminate revolutionary propaganda. He later joined the peasant-based Socialist Revolutionary Party and tried, from his minority position, to radicalize the Duma and prepare it for a revolutionary role.
But World War I derailed any evolutionary progression toward a constitutional democracy. Russia entered the conflict at its outset in 1914, holding down a vast Eastern Front against Germany, Austria-Hungary and Turkey. The war ground on for three years, diverting huge amounts of manpower, causing serious food and fiber shortages and generating charges of gross mismanagement against the czar and his bureaucracy.
Strikes and army desertions had become commonplace by the winter of 1917, but no one--from the czar at army headquarters to Lenin in Swiss exile--was prepared for the events of March 8 through 12 in Petersburg. That the 300-year Romanov reign would simply evaporate overnight was as unthinkable then as the dissolution of the Soviet Union would be 74 years later. Street protests against food shortages, usually suppressed by the police and military, took a dramatic turn in March when the Petersburg garrison soldiers began to refuse orders and joined the crowd marching toward the Duma chambers in the Tauride Palace...Kerensky's finest hour came with his decisive actions during the chaotic events that followed.
As the tide of revolution turned on March 12, Kerensky was one of the few who truly recognized the significance of the moment. Other members of the Duma were milling about the palace, torn by their oath of allegiance to the czar, who had ordered the legislature to dissolve. As the crowd approached the palace, Kerensky shouted to his colleagues: "May I tell them that the State Duma is with them, that it assumes all responsibility, that it will stand at the head of the movement?" Getting an ambivalent response, he rushed outside and addressed the rebellious troops. "Citizen soldiers," he cried, "on you falls the great honor of guarding the State Duma. . . . I declare you to be the First Revolutionary Guard!" He had committed the Duma to the Revolution, despite itself.
Later that day, students and soldiers began rounding up members of the old regime and bringing them to the palace. The Duma president recognized an old friend among them, the czar's ex-minister of justice, and calmly invited him into his office for a chat. At this point, Kerensky seized control of the situation, arresting the ex-minister in the name of the Revolution. Kerensky's proclivity toward dramatic gestures and his take-charge style--which would later work against his ability to compromise--were exactly what this chaotic situation required. As Browder comments, by averting violent retaliation he had "established the precedent that the Revolution would not corrupt its goals by murder and emphasized that the Duma had dissolved its ties with the old regime."
Yet even after the surprise abdication of the czar three days later, the full Duma failed to reconvene. Instead, an informal group of party leaders--mostly center and center-right, but with a few socialists like Kerensky--met to select a provisional government as an interim step to a full constituent assembly, or constitutional convention. But the parties of the left, always underrepresented in the Duma, were quick to exploit the shaky legitimacy of the new government. They immediately summoned delegates from all the local factories and military units to a separate room in the Tauride Palace. There they formed the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies. A soviet can be thought of as a loose combination of a giant labor union and a New England town meeting. It was the establishment of these popular forums in Russia's major cities that created the critical post-czarist problem of dual power centers.
By exerting authority without accepting responsibility, the soviets helped to foment anarchy. The Petrograd Soviet quickly became an unwieldy shouting match, with some 3,000 members all wanting their say. But soon true power devolved to an executive committee, and Kerensky was elected one of its two vice chairmen. The committee voted to remain completely separate from the new provisional government, but the Duma leaders wanted to reach out to the Soviet by naming Kerensky minister of justice. In the early morning of March 14, near exhaustion, he went home to consider his personal dilemma. Should he cast his lot with his leftist Soviet colleagues or with the more establishment provisional government, or should he try to do both?
That evening, his decision made, Kerensky climbed onto a table at a mass meeting of the full Soviet and launched into another of his impassioned orations. "Comrades!" he declared. "Allow me to return to the provisional government and declare to it that I am entering its ranks with your agreement, as your representative." In the end, he convinced the full membership to overrule its leadership. "When I jumped down from the table," Kerensky recalled in his memoirs, "I was lifted on the shoulders of the delegates and carried to the very door of the Provisional Government. I was triumphant."
full: http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/maga ... ensky.html
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A Doomed Democracy
by Bernard Butcher
Alexander Kerensky was born in 1881 in a sleepy town on the mid-Volga River called Simbirsk--the birthplace 11 years earlier of one Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Lenin. Ironically, Kerensky's father, then the equivalent of a high school principal, reportedly wrote a quite positive college recommendation for his son's future adversary. In 1889, the family moved to the frontier of the Russian empire--the dusty town of Tashkent, in Central Asia--where the father became superintendent of schools. Family photos show the Islamic milieu in which Alexander grew up, with Russian officials in their starched white uniforms surrounded by dark-skinned schoolchildren and their turbaned fathers.
Kerensky's radical antipathy to the absolute rule of the Romanovs was nurtured during his university days in St. Petersburg. He was an intellectual interested in all aspects of Russian history, culture and literature in addition to politics. By the spring of 1904, he had graduated with a law degree, married the daughter of a Russian general and begun to prosecute high-profile cases designed to embarrass the monarchy. When, two years later, Czar Nicholas II finally allowed the election of a parliament, an elated Kerensky thought the country was finally on the road to democracy.
As the czar dissolved one parliament after another, however, Kerensky grew disillusioned. An exceptional orator, he successfully ran for the Fourth State Duma, or lower house, in 1912 as a Labor Party representative. Kerensky used this platform to criticize the government, conduct inquiries into officials' abuses and disseminate revolutionary propaganda. He later joined the peasant-based Socialist Revolutionary Party and tried, from his minority position, to radicalize the Duma and prepare it for a revolutionary role.
But World War I derailed any evolutionary progression toward a constitutional democracy. Russia entered the conflict at its outset in 1914, holding down a vast Eastern Front against Germany, Austria-Hungary and Turkey. The war ground on for three years, diverting huge amounts of manpower, causing serious food and fiber shortages and generating charges of gross mismanagement against the czar and his bureaucracy.
Strikes and army desertions had become commonplace by the winter of 1917, but no one--from the czar at army headquarters to Lenin in Swiss exile--was prepared for the events of March 8 through 12 in Petersburg. That the 300-year Romanov reign would simply evaporate overnight was as unthinkable then as the dissolution of the Soviet Union would be 74 years later. Street protests against food shortages, usually suppressed by the police and military, took a dramatic turn in March when the Petersburg garrison soldiers began to refuse orders and joined the crowd marching toward the Duma chambers in the Tauride Palace...Kerensky's finest hour came with his decisive actions during the chaotic events that followed.
As the tide of revolution turned on March 12, Kerensky was one of the few who truly recognized the significance of the moment. Other members of the Duma were milling about the palace, torn by their oath of allegiance to the czar, who had ordered the legislature to dissolve. As the crowd approached the palace, Kerensky shouted to his colleagues: "May I tell them that the State Duma is with them, that it assumes all responsibility, that it will stand at the head of the movement?" Getting an ambivalent response, he rushed outside and addressed the rebellious troops. "Citizen soldiers," he cried, "on you falls the great honor of guarding the State Duma. . . . I declare you to be the First Revolutionary Guard!" He had committed the Duma to the Revolution, despite itself.
Later that day, students and soldiers began rounding up members of the old regime and bringing them to the palace. The Duma president recognized an old friend among them, the czar's ex-minister of justice, and calmly invited him into his office for a chat. At this point, Kerensky seized control of the situation, arresting the ex-minister in the name of the Revolution. Kerensky's proclivity toward dramatic gestures and his take-charge style--which would later work against his ability to compromise--were exactly what this chaotic situation required. As Browder comments, by averting violent retaliation he had "established the precedent that the Revolution would not corrupt its goals by murder and emphasized that the Duma had dissolved its ties with the old regime."
Yet even after the surprise abdication of the czar three days later, the full Duma failed to reconvene. Instead, an informal group of party leaders--mostly center and center-right, but with a few socialists like Kerensky--met to select a provisional government as an interim step to a full constituent assembly, or constitutional convention. But the parties of the left, always underrepresented in the Duma, were quick to exploit the shaky legitimacy of the new government. They immediately summoned delegates from all the local factories and military units to a separate room in the Tauride Palace. There they formed the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies. A soviet can be thought of as a loose combination of a giant labor union and a New England town meeting. It was the establishment of these popular forums in Russia's major cities that created the critical post-czarist problem of dual power centers.
By exerting authority without accepting responsibility, the soviets helped to foment anarchy. The Petrograd Soviet quickly became an unwieldy shouting match, with some 3,000 members all wanting their say. But soon true power devolved to an executive committee, and Kerensky was elected one of its two vice chairmen. The committee voted to remain completely separate from the new provisional government, but the Duma leaders wanted to reach out to the Soviet by naming Kerensky minister of justice. In the early morning of March 14, near exhaustion, he went home to consider his personal dilemma. Should he cast his lot with his leftist Soviet colleagues or with the more establishment provisional government, or should he try to do both?
That evening, his decision made, Kerensky climbed onto a table at a mass meeting of the full Soviet and launched into another of his impassioned orations. "Comrades!" he declared. "Allow me to return to the provisional government and declare to it that I am entering its ranks with your agreement, as your representative." In the end, he convinced the full membership to overrule its leadership. "When I jumped down from the table," Kerensky recalled in his memoirs, "I was lifted on the shoulders of the delegates and carried to the very door of the Provisional Government. I was triumphant."
full: http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/maga ... ensky.html
"That rifle hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or labourer's cottage is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there." George Orwell, in 1984
- By annatar1914
- By Unthinking Majority
- By Godstud
- By FiveofSwords