as a tragic duel between an honest, idealistic lawyer and an all-powerful system, a duel whose outcome was predetermined.
Kerensky had again to contend with that stone wall. The court chairman did not let him speak, cutting him off in mid-sentence when his accusations were becoming too near the mark. He kept threatening to have him removed from the court and made vitriolic remarks during the course of the trial. The shocked courtroom witnessed the heroic struggle of a man unarmed with one who was armed, a battle between lawfulness and brute force, a struggle whose outcome was – alas! – a foregone conclusion.79
This style of writing about Kerensky’s legal career was at odds with the actual history of the trial but in tune with the general climate of denouncing the old regime, which was a major component of Kerensky’s own speeches. The image of a valorous, uncompromising champion fighting a pitiless system was grist to the mill of those aiming to promote him.
There were occasions when Kerensky’s success in the role of tribune of the people had an adverse effect on the fate of those he was defending. His colleagues warned: ‘If you want him to defend the revolution, he will do so brilliantly, but if it is the defendant you want defended, go to someone else because the revoutionary always takes precedence over the lawyer in Kerensky. The military judges hate him!’80 This testimony has the ring of truth, although, as we have seen, Kerensky did have his successes in court. What is perhaps more to the point here, however, is that his biographers believed their readers would be more taken by the description of a lawyer who gave priority to the revolution rather than to defending his client. In 1917 it was the image of the fiery revolutionary lawyer which was effective in underpinning his authority.
Some defendants, indeed, wanted just such a defence lawyer who shared their radical beliefs, and Kerensky’s reputation had revolutionary activists seeking him out. Yevgenia Bosh, a Bolshevik arrested in 1912, was eager to be defended by such a lawyer. Her mother wrote to Kerensky, ‘She does not want to be defended by a lawyer in whom she could not have total confidence and respect for his previous work and very much wishes to ask you to defend her.’81 She was not the only revolutionary to appeal for support to the radical barrister.
Sensational trials were widely reported in the press, and Kerensky’s reputation and influence in radical circles grew. Even in August 1917, such an opponent of the head of the Provisional Government as Sergo Ordzhonikidze recalled the Kerensky ‘who at one time, acting as a defence lawyer, forced all Russia to heed his ardent speeches.’ The prominent Bolshevik was contrasting Kerensky the earlier radical lawyer with Kerensky the minister.82 The political lawyer had been respected by left-wing Social Democrats too, and it is striking that, when later they were attacking Kerensky as head of the Provisional Government, they respectfully recalled this earlier period in his life.
A further contribution to spreading Kerensky’s fame across the nation was made by the events at the Lena goldfields, on which nearly all his biographers dwell. In April 1912 police and troops opened fire on strikers there and 250 people were killed. There was a public outcry and a government commission was sent to investigate. The opposition in the Duma insisted, however, that a special commission, independent of all government departments, should be established, and the money to pay for it was raised by public subscription. The commission, consisting of a number of lawyers from Moscow and Petersburg, was headed by Kerensky. The lawyers helped the workers conclude a new agreement with the company. Armand asserts that his colleagues on the commission described Kerensky as ‘a wonderful young man, but hotheaded. It is difficult to conduct an investigation if you are burning with indignation.’83 Leonidov does not see this as negative, and many readers in the revolutionary era also viewed it positively. Society’s radically inclined members endorsed Kerensky’s strident denunciation of the perpetrators, even if their guilt had not been legally established. His image as a fiery tribune of the people unmasking the regime helped to establish his reputation as a politician, both before the revolution and, to an even greater extent, after it.
The investigation contributed to his reputation, even if his achievement is sometimes plainly overstated. ‘Kerensky forced the government to admit its responsibility for the atrocity, and before the truth proclaimed by Kerensky even the most dedicated servants of the fallen regime had to bow their heads,’ Leonidov declares.84
His public speeches made the young lawyer a true celebrity, as the leaders of the Trud group noted. Some had been clients of Kerensky when he made the case for the defence in the trial of the All-Russia Peasant Union. In the autumn of 1910 prominent Trudoviks suggested he should run for election to the State Duma. Despite his links with the Socialist Revolutionaries, Kerensky accepted their suggestion and was elected as a deputy from the second municipal curia of Volsk in Saratov province, which had a reputation as a radical town.85 Kiriakov, who is keen to emphasize the Leader’s links with the Socialist Revolutionaries, stresses that his election to the Duma was forced on him. ‘He had to go underground, to camouflage himself.’86 His biographers try hard to demonstrate that, even as a deputy, Kerensky remained a radical. ‘In his speeches on agrarian issues, as well as those concerning workers, budgets and other matters, he was always vigilant in the interests of democracy and openly declared himself a socialist.’87
Kerensky’s status as a member of the Duma strengthened his authority in radical circles and opened up new opportunities for political action. The young politician could never have played such a role in the February Revolution had he not been a deputy, but, within a few months of the overthrow of the monarchy, the Duma, elected on a ‘qualified’ franchise, was losing popularity with the masses, who were moving to the left. Some of Kerensky’s biographers prefer to describe his ‘parliamentary’ period as forced upon him, and even as an ordeal: ‘He felt fettered by his work in the Duma, and the need for constant interaction with the bourgeois parties was burdensome and irritating.’ They emphasize that his speeches, which sounded ‘trenchant and bold’ within the walls of the Tauride Palace, met with ‘hostility from the vast majority of those elected to the restricted-franchise Duma’ but elicited ‘a fervent response from the ranks of democracy’.88 Kerensky’s Odessan biographer highlights his unique situation in the Duma, contrasting the radical politician with the other deputies.
He became the conscience of the Fourth Duma, one of its few bright spots. At moments when Russia’s prematurely born parliament was crushed by contempt and arrogance from the ministerial box, when the tsar’s lackeys from the podium of the State Duma derided the people’s representatives with such maxims as the notorious ‘that is how it was, and that is how it will be!’, only one voice rang out invariably firm, invariably bold and confident. That was the voice of A. F. Kerensky….
The five years of Kerensky’s battle for freedom and truth are all that can redeem the five years of lassitude and impotence of the Fourth State Duma.89
The members of the Provisional Government, the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, and the former deputies of the State Duma – Mensheviks, Trudoviks, progressives and Constitutional Democrats – would hardly have concurred with that judgement. Nor would anyone who read the Duma reports attentively. Nevertheless, some readers of the era of revolution who were only just beginning to take an interest in politics might well have believed that Kerensky was the only real representative of the people in the restricted-franchise and ‘bourgeois’ Duma.
During the revolution, Kerensky himself described his work in the State Duma as a constant struggle against the enemies of the people. ‘For five years from this rostrum I battled with and denounced the old government. I recognize enemies of the people and I know how to deal with them,’ he declared in his speech of 26 March to the soldier’s section of the Petrograd Soviet.90
The young lawyer very soon became the Trudoviks’ principal speaker. His meteoric rise caused alarm to some of the old guard of the Trudovnik group. Armand mentions that they periodically discussed plans to mount resistance to ‘Socialist Revolutionary domination’, but Kerensky’s authoritativeness, she claims, frustrated this. ‘His forcefulness won naturally, without tension.’91
Kerensky’s Duma speeches were quite dissimilar to