had
in fact become the moment of his triumph. Kerensky was now the only politician with a position in both the government and the Soviet. He was the undisputed leader of the people.41
This was to be the start of the 'Kerensky cult'. His popularity was truly enormous. 'There is only one name that unites everyone', Gippius wrote on I March, 'and that is the name of Kerensky.' During these first weeks of the revolution the workers in their factories, the sailors on their ships and the soldiers in their barracks would ask the question, 'What has Alexander Fedorovich to say?', and invariably the answer would become the final word on any given issue. Kerensky was the darling of the democratic intelligentsia. 'We loved Kerensky,' recalled Gippius. 'There was something alive, something bird-like and childish in him.' With his pale and young-looking face, his bright, keen eyes and his nervous manner, he was the perfect image of the student radical.
This almost universal adulation cannot be explained in terms of the conventional virtues of a politician. Kerensky had few of these. His career in the Duma had not been especially distinguished: he lacked the stature of Miliukov and the style of Maklakov or Fedor Rodichev. And there were other lawyers better qualified to become the Minister of Justice. But Kerensky was the ideal man for February. As Gippius put it, 'He is the right man in the right place.' For one thing, Kerensky was a great orator — not so much in the parliamentary context, which demanded eloquence and intellectual balance, but in the sense that could appeal to the crowds. His speeches were fiery and emotional. They were not concerned with detailed policies but with moral principles and spiritual values. They often sounded more like the preachings of a priest than the prescripts of a politician. In his youth Kerensky had wanted to become an actor. His speeches were full of dramatic pathos, theatrical gestures and even fainting fits (these were genuine but Kerensky somehow managed to time them to coincide with the climax of his speech). All this tugged on the heart-strings of his listeners. Kerensky expressed and came to stand for the sentiment of national unity, for the peoples resurrection, which the February Revolution was supposed to be. He was called the 'poet of freedom'; the 'heart of the nation'; the 'spirit of the people'; the 'saviour of the fatherland'; and the 'first love of the revolution'.42
It is perhaps not surprising that such a cult of the personality should have appeared in these first euphoric days of the revolution. People fell in love with 'the revolution', and this rubbed off on its leader', Kerensky. The institutions, the psychology, even the language of democracy had yet to be rooted in Russia's virgin political soil. Most of the people still conceived of politics in monarchical terms. This, after all, was a land of Tsars. Even before Nicholas's abdication, the Russian people had their new 'Tsar'.
iii Nicholas the Last
The Tsar's diary, 26 February 1917:
At ten o'clock I went to Mass. The reports were on time. There were many people at breakfast, including all the foreigners. Wrote to Alix and went for a walk near the chapel by the Bobrisky road. The weather was fine and frosty. After tea I read and talked with Senator Tregubov until dinner. Played dominoes in the evening.
While Petrograd sank into chaos and the monarchy teetered on the verge of collapse, Nicholas carried on with the peaceful routines of his life at Stavka. There, in the words of one of his entourage, 'one day after another passed like two drops of water'. Judging from his letters, he was much more concerned by the fact that two of his daughters had gone down with measles than by the latest reports of rioting in the capital. True, Khabalov had not informed him of the gravity of the situation. But would the truth have made a difference? It is doubtful. On the morning of the 27th a cable arrived from the President of the Duma informing the Tsar of the real situation and pleading with him to 'take immediate steps' because 'tomorrow it will be too late'. Nicholas glanced at the message and, turning to Count Fredericks, exclaimed: 'That fat fellow Rodzianko has again written to me with all kinds of nonsense, which I shan't even bother to answer.'43
Since the death of Rasputin, Nicholas had turned his back on the capital and retreated into the quiet daily routines of Stavka and his family life at Tsarskoe Selo. Now more than ever he lived in a world of his own delusions, surrounding himself with lackeys of the court who flattered his fantasies of patrimonial power. During the last weeks of his reign numerous advisers pleaded with him to appoint a new government of confidence responsible to the Duma. But none had been able to penetrate the invisible wall of indifference that Nicholas erected around himself. And yet, beneath this outward appearance of calm, he was clearly in the midst of a deep internal crisis. Kokovtsov, who had not seen the Tsar for a year, found him 'unrecognizable' at the beginning of February. He was convinced that he was 'on the verge of a mental breakdown'. Paleologue was equally shocked by the Tsar's 'grave, drawn features and furtive distant gaze, the impenetrability of his thoughts, and the thoroughly vague and enigmatic quality of his personality'. It confirmed the French Ambassador in his long-held 'notion that Nicholas II feels himself overwhelmed and dominated by events, that he has lost all faith in his mission or his work, and that he has so to speak abdicated inwardly and is now resigned to disaster'.44 It was as if his mental crisis consisted of the realization that the autocratic path he had followed
for the past twenty- two years had finally come to an end, bringing his dynasty to the brink of disaster, and that the advice which everyone now gave him, to save his throne by handing over executive power to the Duma, was something he simply could not do. His whole life had been dedicated to the maintenance of autocracy, and now that he realized it could no longer be maintained, he gave up on life altogether. Here was the root of his notorious fatalism during the days leading up to his abdication.
In the evening of the 27th news finally reached the Tsar of the mutiny in Petrograd. He ordered General Ivanov, whom he now appointed to replace Khabalov as chief of the Petrograd Military District, to lead a force of punitive troops to the capital and establish a dictatorship there. Nicholas himself set out that night by train for Tsarskoe Selo, ignoring Alexeev's objections that this would merely hinder the counter-revolution and could endanger his life. His only concern, it appears, was to be reunited with his wife and children. The imperial train did not go directly northwards because Ivanov's troops were moving on this line but made a large detour to the east, arriving at Malaya Vishera, some 125 miles south-east of the capital, in the early morning of I March. There it could proceed no further because the line ahead had been seized by revolutionaries, so it headed west to Pskov, arriving there at 7 p.m. on I March. Because of the hasty arrangements, there was no formal ceremony to welcome the Tsar to the town where he was destined to renounce his throne. General Ruszky, Commander of the Northern Front, arrived late to meet him at the station. He was wearing a pair of rubber boots.45
By this time, however, several things had happened to undermine the plans for a counter-revolution. For one thing, the last remaining loyalist forces in the capital had singularly failed to organize resistance. General Khabalov clearly lacked the nerve for a serious fight and did almost nothing, although there was still much that he might have done. From the Admiralty, where he and his entourage had bunkered themselves in, there was a straight path to the three main railway stations (the Baltic, the Warsaw and the Nikolaevsky): loyalist troops, brought in from the Front, might have succeeded in fighting their way through. But Khabalov did not even think of this. Drinking cognacs to keep his hands from shaking, he merely wrote out a proclamation in which he declared the obvious — that the city was in a state of siege. But there was no one with the courage, let alone the brushes or the glue, to post up the printed version in the streets. Instead the leaflets were thrown out of the windows of the Admiralty, and most landed in the garden below. The efforts of Khabalov's men to link up with the loyalist forces in the other parts of the city centre ended in a similar farce. One detachment fought its way across to the Winter Palace — only to be ordered back by the palace commandant, outraged by the sight of the soldiers' dirty boots on his newly polished floors. It later turned out that the Grand
Duke Mikhail, who had been in the palace at the time, had ordered the soldiers to be turned away because he had been afraid that they might damage its chinaware. And for that he lost an Empire! Demoralized and unfed for several days, most of the soldiers ran off to the people's side rather than return to the Admiralty.
There was a second development to foil the plans for a counterrevolution on I March. Ivanov's troops had arrived in Tsarskoe Selo to find that the mutiny had even spread to the Imperial Guards, who were garrisoned there. Some of Ivanov's own troops had already begun to show signs of disaffection, answering in a 'surly fashion' when
