persistently, if not always successfully, to reconcile fundamentally different political forces in order to enable them the better to fight their common enemy, the existing regime. He kept his position on the most controversial issue – his attitude towards the war – unclear, and at times in front of different audiences described it in different ways or with different emphases. It would, nevertheless, be a mistake to classify Kerensky as a centrist. His behaviour was more a matter of pragmatic ideological flexibility, sincere if bordering on opportunism. This ambiguity prevented him from becoming the leader of any one party, but it also meant he was welcome in very diverse circles, which was crucial for someone attempting to broker interparty agreements and who saw his mission as being to build a broad coalition of oppositionists.
It is not easy to assess Kerensky’s actual contribution to organizing the underground. Michael Melancon, a historian of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, believes the clandestine revolutionaries used Kerensky and the resources he controlled but rejected him as a leader.118
Other illegals also discussed relations with Kerensky, whose influence was on the increase. Revolutionaries were no doubt also attracted by the money at his disposal. Alexander Shlyapnikov seems to have raised the question of possibly making use of these resources with Vladimir Lenin. In his reply in September 1915, the Bolshevik leader characterized Kerensky as a ‘revolutionary chauvinist’ with whom it was impossible to enter into any alliance but with whom there could be cooperation in technical matters. Lenin’s letter can be interpreted both as a recommendation to make use of Kerensky’s resources and as a call for joint action to achieve the destruction of the regime. ‘Our relations should be direct and clear: you want to overthrow tsarism to gain a victory over Germany, while we are working for the international revolution of the proletariat.’119 As we see, the possibilities for a broad front of the forces of the opposition which Kerensky was trying to create could have included the Bolsheviks. The experience of negotiations during the war, even those which were unsuccessful, did influence the behaviour of its members during the February Days and what they had to say about each other. The initial restraint shown by some of the Bolsheviks in their criticism of Kerensky may have gone back to joint initiatives in the years before the revolution.
During 1917, other Bolsheviks recalled their contacts with Kerensky. For example, at the end of August, Ivan Skvortsov-Stepanov published an article in which he touched on the career of Kerensky, who by then was already the head of the Provisional Government. The Bolshevik recalled a meeting with him in November 1916, by which time Stepanov believed the Trudovik leader had moved to the left. Nevertheless, he claims, Kerensky believed the hand of the Okhrana and imperial court, which he considered Germanophile, was behind workers’ unrest.120 We might take this as an attempt by a prominent Bolshevik to discredit the head of the Provisional Government by suggesting Kerensky had failed to understand the real mood of the workers, and hence was questioning the democratic credentials of the leader of the February Revolution. The article can, however, be read in a different way, with even Kerensky’s political opponents, the Bolsheviks, acknowledging his involvement in the activities of the illegals. This could only be to the benefit of his standing.
Other actions during the war redounded to Kerensky’s credit. Well informed about the mood among the illegals, he urged the liberals to give no quarter in the fight against the regime and insisted that the country was on the brink of revolution. Most of them thought he was being overly optimistic,121 but after the downfall of the tsar the Trudovik leader’s surmises were sometimes treated as infallible predictions.
During the war years Kerensky’s popularity grew steadily, aided by his speeches in the Duma. Banning them from publication only drew attention to them, and they were distributed in handwritten copies or as typewritten texts. Illegal organizations issued leaflets quoting them. After February 1917 the speeches were printed, and boosted his reputation as an opponent of the old regime, endowed moreover with the gift of prophecy.
In 1915 a former police officer, Sergey Myasoyedov, was executed. He had been falsely accused by the General Headquarters of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief of spying for Germany. It was intended that the spymania campaign, instigated by the High Command, would divert public opinion from the bungling of the military leadership.122 The Myasoyedov Affair – and people from all parts of the political spectrum were convinced of his guilt – unleashed a deluge of conspiracy theories which proved a helpful propaganda asset. Right-wingers emphasized that Myasoyedov was married to a Jewish woman and had business connections with Jewish entrepreneurs, while left-wingers pointed to the officer’s past in the police. Kerensky successfully exploited the Myasoyedov Affair to denounce ‘treason at the highest levels’. As a deputy, he wrote to the chairman of the Duma, Mikhail Rodzyanko, demanding the immediate reconvening of the Duma. Without providing any evidence, Kerensky wrote that ‘treason has built its nest’ in the Interior Ministry, where, he alleged, ‘a robust organization of full-blown traitors were calmly and confidently at work.’ These forces, he declared, were attempting to ‘stymie a successful conclusion of the conflict abroad in the interests of the enemy.’ Kerensky was not making the accusation against a particular group of top officials in the ministry but denouncing this extremely powerful ministry as a whole. ‘The leading circles of the Interior Ministry are in very close touch with a highly influential political tendency in Russia which considers it a matter of the utmost urgency to restore swiftly a close unity with the government in Berlin.’ To save the country was the duty of those elected by the people. ‘The State Duma must do everything to defend the nation from a shameful stab in the back.’123 Kerensky’s letter gained widespread distribution, with some people writing it out in full in their diaries. According to the police, the letter was the subject of lively debate in politically engaged student circles, leaflets with the text were distributed at Petrograd University, and left-wing student groups – social democrats and internationalist Socialist Revolutionaries – tried to use it as anti-war propaganda.124 Even the Bolsheviks published it.125 It was distributed in Moscow, Kharkov, Kiev, Kronshtadt and at the front, and it was also translated into Estonian.126
The climate of increasing spymania and xenophobia during the war caused competing conspiracy theories to spring up. Almost all the political parties made use of Germanophobia for their own purposes, although right-wing theories were tinged with anti-Semitism and Anglophobia. The opposition talked ever more insistently about a ‘German party’ at court who were angling for a separate peace, and rumours spread about the ‘empress’s plot’.127 After the revolution, the most far-out conspiracy theories had conferred on them the status of proven fact, and those who had come up with them and spread them assumed the reputation of courageous patriots who had exposed the treacheries of the old regime. Hatred of the police force, which was abolished after the February Revolution, contributed, in the light of Kerensky’s ‘exposure’ of the would-be conspiracy at the Interior Ministry, to further increasing the popularity of the revolutionary minister.
Creating his own version of a ‘stab in the back of the Russian army’, Kerensky discredited the conspiracy theories of his adversaries. During the war, right-wing politicians and high-ranking military officers spread rumours that, at the front line, practically the entire Jewish population was spying for the enemy and, in the Jewish shtetl of Kuzhi, Jews allegedly even opened fire on Russian troops. Kerensky travelled to Kuzhi and conducted an investigation, on the basis of which in the Duma he called the accusation a vile slander.128 One of his 1917 biographers also writes about the Kuzhi investigation.129 A reputation as a defender of national minorities was a considerable asset after February 1917.
During the revolution, journalists supportive of Kerensky recalled another earlier episode. In 1916 many residents of Kazakhstan and Central Asia were conscripted to work in the rear, following which there was an uprising accompanied by bloody ethnic conflicts. It was brutally suppressed by Russian troops. Kerensky, having lived in Tashkent in his youth, and feeling himself a ‘Turkestani’, took these events very much to heart and, together with Duma deputies representing the empire’s Muslim population, travelled to Turkestan.130 On his return to the capital, he talked about his trip at a closed session of Duma deputies. Giving his interpretation of this complex conflict, he ascribed all the region’s ills to the foolish actions of the tsarist