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.
