No doubt he had not heard the joke circulating round the country during the final weeks of his regime: ‘Q: What is the difference between Russia today and at the end of last year? A: Then we had Alexandra Fedorovna [the Empress], but now we have Alexander Fedorovich [Kerensky].’ The isolation of the Prime Minister was almost complete. The people’s hero of the spring had become their anti-hero by the autumn. There were widespread rumours of his ‘moral corruption’ (just as there had been of the Romanovs): of his fine living in the Winter Palace; of his love affair with Elena Biriukova, his wife’s cousin, who lived with the Kerenskys in the palace; of his constant drunkenness; and of his addiction to morphine and cocaine. Friends and acquaintances would ring Kerensky’s wife to express their deepest sympathy. ‘I could not understand why they were being so solicitous,’ she later recalled, ‘but then it turned out that there was some story in the leftwing press that Kerensky had left his wife and had run off with some actress.’ It was falsely rumoured that Kerensky was a Jew, which in the climate of anti-Semitism that ran throughout the revolutionary era was highly damaging to his popular image. Kerensky himself recalled that when he fled the Winter Palace, just before the Bolshevik seizure of power, he saw the following ironic graffiti written on a wall: ‘Down with the Jew Kerensky, Long Live Trotsky!’ It was also rumoured that Kerensky liked to dress in women’s clothes. There was much that was rather feminine in Kerensky’s physique and gestures (Gippius called him her ‘girlish revolutionary’), and this made him appear weak to many of the workers, in particular, who contrasted him unfavourably with the muscular masculinity of the Bolsheviks. Later it was even rumoured that when Kerensky had fled the Winter Palace he had been dressed in the outfit of a nurse.6
It was not just on the streets that Kerensky lost his credibility. The Western Allies, who had always been his strongest supporters, also turned against him after the Kornilov crisis. The British Foreign Ministry was clearly taken in by the rumours about his private life. It was under the absurd impression that his secretary, David Soskice, was a German agent and a Bolshevik, and that Kerensky himself was about to conclude a separate peace with Germany. Nabokov, the Provisional Government’s representative in London, thought that the British had decided to wash their hands of Kerensky, believing him to be ‘on his way out’, once Kornilov’s reforms had been jettisoned.7
Even among the democratic intelligentsia, where he had once been hailed as a popular hero, Kerensky was now reviled. His oldest patron, the poetess and salon hostess Zinaida Gippius, wrote in her diary on 24 October: ‘Nobody wants the Bolsheviks, but nobody is prepared to fight for Kerensky either.’ This just about sums it up. Brusilov, who since his dismissal as Commander-in-Chief had become an advocate of the need to raise a civilian militia in order to fight the Bolsheviks, found that he could muster neither volunteers nor money to buy mercenaries. Everybody cursed the Bolsheviks but nobody was prepared to do anything about them. The bourgeoisie and the Rightist groups would have nothing more to do with the Provisional Government, and even welcomed its demise. Nobody wanted to defend it, least of all the monarchists. They preferred to let the Bolsheviks seize power, in the belief that they would not last long and would bring the country to such utter ruin that all the socialists would be discredited, whereupon the Rightists would impose their own dictatorship.8
Kerensky remained oblivious to his declining fortunes. He continued to trust in the support of ‘the people’ — was he not their hostage? — and refused to take any preventive measures against the Bolshevik threat. No attempt was made to seize control of the Smolny, or to arrest the Bolshevik leaders, or to reinforce the defence of the city, during the first half of October, when such measures stood at least some chance of success. He seemed to believe that any Bolshevik rising would be a repeat of the July Days fiasco. He even began to pray that the Bolsheviks would make a move, in the naive belief that this would give him the chance to deal with them once and for all. ‘I would be prepared to offer prayers to produce this uprising,’ he told Nabokov on 20 October. ‘I have greater forces than necessary. They will be utterly crushed.’fn29
