Алекса́ндр Фёдорович Ке́ренский (Alexander Kerensky)

May 4 1881 - June 11 1970 (89)

In Office: July 21 1917 - November 7 1917




Born to Fyodor Kerensky, a teacher and director of a local gymnasium, and Nadezhda née Adler, the daughter of a nobleman, in Simbirsk (now Ulyanovsk), Russia, Alexander Fydoch Kerensky grew up to be a lawyer and major political leader before the Russian Revolutions of 1917.

At the age of eight, his family moved to Tashkent, where his father was newly appointed the main inspector of public schools (superintendent).  Kerensky graduated from a Tashkent secondary school with honors in 1899, and in the same year entered St. Petersburg University. There, he studied history and philology his first year. The next year he switched over to the law department and received a degree in 1904. In the same year, he got married to the daughter of a Russian general, Olga Lvovna Baranovskaya.

In 1905, Kerensky joined the Narodnik and worked as a legal counsel to victims of Revolution 1905.  By the end of the year, he was jailed for suspicion of belonging to a militant group. After the ordeal, he gained a reputation for his work as a defense lawyer in a number of political trials of revolutionaries. By 1912 he was widely known when he visited the goldfields at the Lena River and published about the Lena Minefields incident. That same year, he was elected to the Fourth Duma as a member of the Trudoviks, a non-Marxist labour party who were associated with the Socialist-Revolutionary Party.

When the February Revolution broke out in 1917, Kerensy was one of its most prominent leaders, being that he was a member of the Provisional Committee of the State Duma and was elected vice-chairman of the Petrograd Soviet. He simultaneously became the first Minister of Justice in the newly formed Provisional Government. When a resolution prohibiting leaders from joining the government was passed by the Soviet, Kerensky delivered a stirring speech at a Soviet meeting. Despite the decision never being formalized, he was granted a de facto exemption and continued acting in both capacities.

During the Kornilov Affair, Kerensky distributed arms to the Petrograd workers, and by November most of the armed workers had gone over to the Bolsheviks. On October 25-26 1917, the Bolsheviks launched the second Russian revolution of the year. Kerensky's government in Petrograd had almost no support in the city, and only one group was willing to fight; A 137 soldier strong subdivision of 2nd company of the First Petrograd Women's Battalion a.k.a The Women's Death Battalion.  This force was overwhelmed by the numerically superior pro-Bolsheviks forces and were easily defeated and captured. It took less than 20 hours for the Bolsheviks to take over the government.

Kerensky fled to France, and during the the Russian Civil War he supported neither side.  He lived in Paris until 1940, engaged in the endless splits and quarrels of the exiled Russian politicians. He married a former Australian journalist Lydia "Nell" Tritton in 1939, and they both emigrated to the US when Germany occupied France in 1940.  His wife became terminally ill in 1945, which sent them both to Australia to live with her family. After he death on April 10, 1946, Kerensky moved  back to the US, where he spent the rest of his life.  He died at his home in New York City, and because of his being largely responsible for Russia falling to the Bolsheviks, neither The local Russian Orthodox Churches in New York nor the Serbian Orthodox Church would grant him a burial. Instead, his body was flown to London where he was buried at Putney Vale's non-denominational cemetery.