Books: Glimpse of Terror

RUSSIA AND HISTORY’S TURNING POINT by Alexander Kerensky. 558 pages. Duell, Sloan & Pearce. $8.95.

Alexander Feodorovich Kerensky is one of the most famous forgotten men of modern times. By history’s stern reckoning, he is also one of the luckiest —and one of the unluckiest. Lucky, because 48 years ago this week he escaped with his life after Lenin’s Bolsheviks deposed him as the first Prime Minister of the Russian Revolution; unlucky, because for nearly half a century he has been the archetype of all political exiles: stateless, often dependent on the hospitality of friends, sometimes hounded by enemies and attacked by onetime followers, a forlorn wanderer between London, Paris and New York before finally settling in this country for good in 1940 and becoming a sometime lecturer and writer on Russian affairs.

Bayonet Rule. Now, still alert and spry at 84, Kerensky has written a book that is part autobiography, part a narrative history of how he rose to power and ruled Russia for 31 fleeting months before he was overthrown. Three months later Red sailors forced their way into the Constituent Assembly and overthrew the elected government. His “turning point” is not the usual, lumped-together Russian Revolution as a whole; rather, it is the catastrophic overturn of his humanist, basically democratic regime by what turned out to be the brutal, wholly totalitarian Bolsheviks. It is a point the world has never fully grasped.

Unhappily, the kind of contradictions that have marked Kerensky’s life also mar his book: while it is not a failure, neither is it a triumph. Judged solely as history, it tells nothing that cannot be found in any good standard text on Russia. As an autobiography, it dwells lovingly enough on Kerensky’s childhood and student days, but once he reaches maturity itbecomes exasperatingly vague; he never discusses his home life or makes reference to his friends. As an eyewitness to and a participant in the greatest social upheaval in history, Kerensky is even more disappointing. There is no account of the conniving and maneuvering that brought him from the status of a modest provincial lawyer to the leadership of Russia’s first revolutionary government. Although he and Lenin were both born in Simbirsk (now Ulyanovsk) and his schoolmaster father had Lenin for a pupil, he met Lenin only once, and then only long enough to hear Lenin demand his dismissal and his arrest. He never knew Stalin or Trotsky. In general, personal insights are missing.

Royal Manners. The only exception is when Kerensky tells of visits he paid Nicholas II after the Czar and his family were placed under house arrest in the Aleksandrovsky Palace. Kerensky has always contended that the Czar and his family could have been saved if the British government had not reneged on its original offer to send a cruiser to transport them to England. His government made prolonged efforts to arrange for their departure, and he now charges that the offer of asylum was withdrawn by King George V because of the indignation that arose among leftist M.P.s and in newspapers when the invitation became known. Kerensky then did what he could for the royal captives. He sent them off to Tobolsk for safekeeping, sat up all night to see them aboard the train. But two months later, Kerensky himself was in flight, and the whole royal family was methodically slaughtered on Lenin’s orders the following year.