Kerensky, Alexander

Born Apr. 22 (May 4), 1881, in Simbirsk; died June 11, 1970, in New York. Russian bourgeois political figure and head of the bourgeois Provisional Government.

The son of a nobleman, Kerensky graduated from the juridical faculty of the University of St. Petersburg in 1904, after which he practiced law. From 1912 to 1917 he was a deputy to the Fourth State Duma from Vol’sk, Saratov Province, heading the Trudoviki (Toilers) group. During World War I he was a “defensist,” supporting the war on the grounds of national defense. After the February Revolution of 1917, Kerensky was chosen vice-chairman of the Petrograd Soviet and a member of the Provisional Committee of the State Duma. He became a Socialist Revolutionary in March 1917. In the Provisional Government, Kerensky served as minister of justice (March-May 1917) and minister of the army and navy (May-September), assuming the post of minister-president on July 8 (21) and that of commander in chief on August 30 (September 12).

Kerensky was responsible for the June Offensive of 1917 at the front, the reprisals against workers and soldiers during the July Days of 1917, and the persecution of the Bolshevik Party. On the day of the October Uprising in Petrograd (October 25 [November 7]), Kerensky fled the capital for the front and headed the Kerensky-Krasnov Rebellion of 1917. On November 1 (14), after the rebellion was suppressed, he fled to the Don. In 1918 he emigrated to France, and after 1940 he lived in the USA. Kerensky took an active part in the anti-Soviet efforts of the White émigrés, editing the newspaper Dni (Days) from 1922 to 1932. His memoirs and books on the October Revolution are written from an anti-Soviet position.