Paradoxical though it may seem, the leaders of the Provisional Government thus backed an offensive to strengthen their campaign for a general settlement of the conflict. They went to war in order to make peace. That was also the rationale of the Soviet leaders in supporting the offensive. Tsereteli’s Revolutionary Defensism, the rallying of the democracy for the needs of national defence, was the main justification for their entry into the Coalition. It might of course be argued that national defence did not demand that an offensive be launched. By supporting the primacy of the needs of the army, as they did in signing the coalition’s Declaration of Principles on 5 May, the Soviet leaders were in danger of losing sight of their basic aim — the negotiation of a general peace — and thus laying themselves open to the Bolshevik charge of joining the warmongers. But they were carried away by the hope that the defence of democratic Russia might help to rally the people behind them. They compared Russia’s situation with that of France on the eve of the war against Austria in 1792: it seemed to them that a revolutionary war would give birth to a new civic patriotism, just as the defence of the patrie had given rise to the national chorus of ‘Aux armes, citoyens’. They were quite convinced that a ‘national revolution’ had taken place, not just a revolt against the old regime, and that through this upsurge of patriotism, through the popular recognition that the interests of ‘the nation’ stood higher than any class or party interests, they could restore unity and order.
Kerensky, the Minister of War in the coalition government, was cast as the hero of this new civic patriotism. As a popular and above-party figure, he became the embodiment of the coalition’s ideal of national unity. The cult of Kerensky, which had first emerged in the February Days, reached its climax with the June offensive, which indeed the cult had helped to bring about. All the nation’s hopes and expectations rested on the frail shoulders of Kerensky, ‘the first people’s minister of war’. Schoolboy poets like Leonid Kannegiser (later to assassinate the Bolshevik Uritsky) portrayed Kerensky as a Russian Bonaparte:
And if, swirling with pain,
I fall in the name of Mother Russia,
And find myself in some deserted field,
Shot through the chest on the ground,
Then at the Gates of Heaven,
In my dying and joyous dreams,
I will remember — Russia, Liberty,
Kerensky on a white horse.
Marina Tsvetaeva, who was then herself barely out of school, also felt moved to compare Kerensky with Napoleon:
And someone, falling on the map,
Does not sleep in his dreams.
There came a Bonaparte
In my country.7
Kerensky revelled in this role. He had always seen himself as the leader of the nation, above party or class interests. The adulation went to his head. He became obsessed with the idea of leading the army to glory and of covering himself in honour. He began to model himself on Napoleon. A bust of the French Emperor stood on his desk at the Ministry of War. Although he had never himself been in the army, Kerensky donned a finely tailored khaki tunic, officer’s breeches and knee-high leather boots when he became the Minister of War (a semi-military style of dress that many future leaders, including Stalin, would later take from him). The Minister of War took great care over his personal appearance — and it was a huge source of pride for him. Even at the height of the fighting in October, when he appeared before the Cossacks during the battle for Gatchina against the Red Guards, he made sure to wear his ‘finest tunic, the one to which the people and the troops had grown so accustomed’, and to ‘salute, as I always did, slightly casually and with a slight smile’. During his famous tours of the Fronts, Kerensky even wore his right arm in a sling, although there was no record that the arm had ever been hurt (some people joked that he had simply worn it out by too much hand-shaking). It was no doubt a deliberate attempt to suggest that he, like the ordinary soldiers, had been wounded too. Perhaps it was also an attempt to echo the image of Napoleon with his arm tucked into the front of his tunic.8
