of the Duma, just as in court, he passionately denounced the regime and its servants. Kerensky was addressing his speeches not to the deputies and ministers but to the whole of Russia. The speeches were brilliant, emotive, sometimes defiant. Nor was his behaviour in the Duma chamber always in accord with standards of parliamentary decorum. An official observing the sessions noted, ‘The Duma chairman did not react to a whistle, directed at the representative of the government, which echoed round the chamber, although everybody had seen that it was Member of the Duma Kerensky who was responsible.’92 Unsurprisingly, he was regarded as the left-wing enfant terrible of the Duma.93
The right-wingers reacted angrily to Kerensky’s impassioned speeches. There were scenes. Those chairing the sessions interrupted the speaker, deprived him of the right to speak or debarred him for several sessions. His reputation as a troublemaker could mean that quite unforeseen meanings could be read into the most innocent expressions. There was even a joke that the official preamble, ‘Honourable members of the State Duma …’, had caused the chairman to react with, ‘Member of the Duma Kerensky, I am issuing you with a first warning.’ Armand writes proudly about his insubordinate behaviour and the reaction it evoked.94 His aggressive manner only increased respect for Kerensky in radical circles.
It is hardly surprising that his speeches provoked conflict and attracted the attention of the press. Journalists in the Duma who were hungry for sensations often reported them. Kerensky became popular and was much quoted. His influence grew, and he began chairing meetings of the Trudoviks. From 1915 he was officially their leader.95
There were times when Kerensky was perceived as the most prominent and best known of all the left-wing deputies. Nikolai Chkheidze, the leader of the Menshevik group, was a lacklustre orator, incapable of firing up his colleagues or attracting the attention of journalists. His adherence to Marxist orthodoxy prevented him from engaging in tactical negotiations with ‘bourgeois’ groups, and, as a result, the more dynamic Kerensky sometimes conducted negotiations on behalf of both the left-wing groups – a further boost to his standing.
Not everyone was taken by the histrionic style of Kerensky’s speeches, which ran counter to traditional expectations of parliamentary oratory. Senator Nikolai Tagantsev remembered them as ‘demagogic’, and, while not denying that he had a gift for it, considered that his rhetoric was fit only for making speeches at protest rallies.96 In 1917, of course, that kind of rhetoric was just what was needed to enthuse huge rallies. Leonidov lavishes praise on Kerensky’s oratorical style. ‘You will not find exquisite honing in the speeches the present minister made in the Duma, nor will you find oratorical flourishes. Everything is improvised. These are not speeches in the narrow, commonly understood sense: they are the howls of a rebellious, bleeding heart, the great, ardent heart of a true tribune of the people.’97
Popular in radical circles, the Duma deputy found himself invited to all manner of meetings, assemblies and conferences. In 1913 he was elected chairman of the Fourth All-Russia Congress of Trade and Industry Workers,98 which elicited derisive comment from right-wingers. In the Duma, Nikolai Markov characteristically declared, ‘Deputy Kerensky is, to the best of my knowledge, and to yours too, a lawyer. At all events, not just a ledger clerk. Unless a ledger clerk of a Jewish Qahal. But only in a figurative sense … Can we really allow the propaganda of the likes of Mr Kerensky in the whole society [sic] of poorly educated people?’99 In radical circles, such speeches by the hated far-right supporters of the Black Hundreds only burnished the halo of the Trudoviks’ leader. Many people living in Russia saw Kerensky as their own defence lawyer. He received many letters from ‘unimportant people’ exposing abuses and injustices and hoping he would intercede.
Kerensky continued to involve himself in illegal and semi-legal undertakings. He had a fat dossier in the Police Department, where a close eye was kept on him, with informers being infiltrated among those close to him. In 1913 Kerensky worked with the Petersburg Collective of the Socialist Revolutionaries. Okhrana agents based in Paris even reported that he had become a member of the party’s Central Committee. The information was false but indicative of the Interior Ministry’s suspicions about him. In reality, Kerensky declined an invitation from the Socialist Revolutionaries to become their representative in the Duma, aiming instead to unify all the Narodnik groups politically. These police reports were nevertheless published by supporters of Kerensky in 1917, which may have given readers an exaggerated impression of the scale of his illegal activities. This was all to the good as far as his status was concerned.100
On 23 July 1914, on the eve of the First World War, Kerensky was detained in Yekaterinburg at a gathering of teachers which had not been officially sanctioned. He was saved from actual arrest by his immunity as a Duma deputy.101
In 1911 or 1912, the young politician had been invited to join the Great Orient of the Peoples of Russia, a secret society established in 1910 on a basis of Masonic lodges.102 Kerensky played a major role in the organization and became both a member of the Supreme Council of Lodges and, in 1916, its secretary (a position he may still have been holding in early 1917). A historian of Freemasonry even writes of this as Kerensky’s organization, seeing the Great Orient of the Peoples of Russia as distinct from Russian Freemasonry in the preceding period.103
To what extent did the Freemasons contribute to Kerensky’s advancement? The lawyer Alexander Galpern, who replaced him as secretary of the Supreme Council and became the Provisional Government’s principal civil servant, recalled: ‘It was, after all, we ourselves who put him forward and indeed created him, so it is we who bear responsibility for him.’104 If the Masons advanced Kerensky’s career, the popular politician for his part was exceptionally important for the brothers, who were seeking to enrol influential people in their ranks. He was an important figure in the public eye before joining the lodge.
Kerensky’s biographers had nothing to say in 1917 about his being a Mason. There was almost no discussion of Freemasonry at the time, although a febrile public was susceptible to suggestions of conspiracy. All manner of conspiracy theories were, in fact, used by both the left and right wings for political mobilization. The sympathy of foreign Masonic organizations for the anti-monarchist revolution in Russia was well known, and it was even possible to read about ties between the Masons and Kerensky in the newspapers. On 24 May a newspaper of the Ministry of War, which Kerensky by this time headed, published greetings from Italian members of the International Mixed Scottish Masonic Rite to ‘renewed Russia’. The addressee was the Russian minister of war. The Italian Freemasons congratulated the Russian people ‘on their deliverance from traitors to their homeland who had sought to compel Russia to conclude a shameful peace.’ They expressed the hope that the Russian army ‘will make every effort to bring the war to a victorious conclusion’ and invited ‘all our Russian colleagues to join with the Italian Masons for the joint dissemination of our shared ideals.’105
One can only speculate as to why this address from the Italian Freemasons to their ‘Russian colleagues’ was not exploited by Kerensky’s opponents (among whom were ‘brothers’ who were to become the minister’s foes after February and right-wingers who had been furiously decrying ‘Yid Freemason plots’ before the revolution). At all events, the revolutionary minister’s Freemasonry had no obvious impact on his public image in 1917.
Of no small importance to Kerensky’s reputation were some trials in which he was not personally engaged. In 1911–13 Russia was greatly exercised by the case of Menahem Beilis, a Kievan Jew accused of ritual murder. Senior officials in the Interior Ministry and the Ministry of Justice exerted pressure on the investigation, and right-wingers unleashed anti-Semitic propaganda in the Black Hundred press and the State Duma. In such a situation the code of conduct of a radical intellectual called for resolute action.
Leftists, liberals and even some conservatives launched a campaign in defence of Beilis, and Kerensky made a speech in the Duma about the trial on 23 October 1913. That same day a meeting was held of barristers of the St Petersburg Circuit of the Courts of Justice. Radical lawyers turned a routine meeting into a political rally. Having mobilized their supporters, who came to the meeting in large numbers, Kerensky and Nikolai Sokolov insisted on a discussion