Comrade Kerensky

Historia Rossica

by Boris Kolonitskii

As one of the heroes of the 1917 February Revolution and then Prime Minister at the head of the Provisional Government, Alexander Kerensky was passionately, even fanatically, lauded as a leader during his brief political reign. Symbolic artefacts – sculptures, badges and medals - featuring his likeness abounded. Streets were renamed after him, his speeches were quoted on gravestones and literary odes dedicated to him proliferated in the major press. But, by October, Kerensky had been unceremoniously dethroned in the Bolshevik takeover and had fled to Paris and then to the US, where he would remain exiled and removed from his former glory until his death. The breakneck trajectory of his rise and fall and the intensity of his popularity were not merely a symptom of the chaos of those times but offer a window onto a much broader historical phenomenon which did not just begin with Lenin and Stalin – the cult of the leader. In this major new study of the Russian leadership cult, Boris Kolonitskii uses the figure of Kerensky to show how popular engagement with the idea of the leader became a key component of a cultural re-imagining of the political landscape after the fall of the monarchy. A parallel revolution was taking place on the level of creating a resonant political vocabulary where one had not existed before, and it was in the shared exercise of bestowing and dissolving authority that a politicised way of seeing began to emerge. Kolonitskii plots the unfurling of this symbolic revolution by examining the tapestry of images woven by Kerensky and those around him, and, in so doing, exposes his vital role in the development of nascent Soviet political culture.

This highly original portrait of a revolutionary sheds new light on the cult of Kerensky that developed around this charismatic leader during the months following the overthrow of the tsar. It will be of value to students and scholars of Russian history and to those interested in political culture.

Genres: History, Russian Revolution, Russia

450 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2017

About the author

A specialist in the 1917 Russian Revolutions, Boris Kolonitsky is professor in the department of history at European University at St. Petersburg, He has been a visiting professor at the University of Illinois, Princeton, and Yale (USA), as well as the universities of Tartu, Helsinki, and Tübingen. He is the recipient of scholarships and grants for Eastern European Studies from Trinity College in Cambridge, the Russian Foundation for Humanities Research, the Open Society Institute, the Volkswagen Foundation, the Lev Kopalev Foundation, the Kennan Institute, the Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation, and the Oxford-Russia Foundation.

Reviews

[Owen Hatherley · Rating 4 out of 5]

A dense and sometimes dry but very unusual and very rich study of the 'deep structure' of Russian revolutionary politics via its famous nearly-man, and especially the construction of a shortlived cult around his person in 1917, which would be un-made almost as quickly as it was made.