Who was this man who stood in the eye of the hurricane that was Russia in 1917? Kerensky was a moderate socialist whose passionate, lifelong goal was to see a Western–style constitutional democracy in Russia. He tried valiantly, but ultimately failed, to straddle the ever–widening gulf between the relative conservatives, who felt the Revolution to be complete with the simple elimination of the monarchy, and the radical leftists pushing for much more extreme social and economic transformations.

[I]n a sense, the Revolution really was his revolution—he had seized the moment, channeled the energy of the masses, and now he was the only figure straddling the two power centers. In fact, because of the vote in the Soviet, he was arguably the only member of the provisional government with a genuine electoral mandate.

As minister of justice, Kerensky immediately instituted universal suffrage and unheard–of freedoms of speech, assembly, press and religion. He would argue later that Russia was, for a few months, the freest country in the world. But individual liberties meant little to a people suffering the privations of World War I—massive fatalities at the front, hyperinflation, transport breakdowns, empty shelves in the stores and insufficient fuel to heat their homes.

Kerensky later maintained that there was one principal force responsible for the rise of the Bolsheviks from their status as a minor splinter group—namely, a master plot by the Germans. The exiled Lenin firmly opposed the "imperialist and capitalist" war; and once in power, he would likely make a separate peace, allowing Germany to transfer all its troops to the Western Front. In early April, Lenin returned to Petersburg through enemy territory in a sealed railway car provided by the Germans. Winston Churchill noted with awe that the Germans had let loose that "most grisly of all weapons. They had transported Lenin like a plague bacillus into Russia."

However, Kerensky always felt that his government was threatened not only by Lenin but even more by right–wing forces within the military. Indeed, Kerensky maintained to the end that his government could have survived if not for a rightist plot to establish a military dictatorship. "I felt it important," he wrote later, "to ascribe the main reason for the defeat of Russian democracy to this attack from the right instead of to the foolish myth that we were 'soft' and blind to the Bolshevik danger."

Lenin's laser eye spotted this as a golden opportunity to portray the government as both weak and bourgeois. The Bolsheviks—the only true "defenders of the Revolution"—soon gained control of the Petersburg and Moscow soviets. With an All-Russian Congress of Soviets scheduled for November 7, Lenin urged his comrades to initiate an armed uprising just before its opening session.

Bolshevik units occupied key bridges and checkpoints throughout Petersburg. The naval vessel Aurora steamed up the Neva and fired a few thunderous blank rounds at the Winter Palace, where government ministers were promptly arrested around their dining–room meeting table. The convening Congress of Soviets, whose more moderate members had walked out, then duly ratified the results of this coup—Russia's 74–year Communist Party dynasty had begun.

But what about Kerensky's contention that Russia was ready for democracy in 1917—that it could have happened but for the treachery of a Kornilov and the villainy of a Lenin compounded by Allies pushing to the right and Germans pulling to the left? This is, of course, the tougher question. It seems that it would have taken a miracle for Russia to have gone from a near-absolute monarchy to a functioning democracy given the circumstances. The country faced at once a disastrous war, massive economic hardships, and a multitude of warring political factions fighting it out within two diametrically opposed power centers.

Kerensky tried to bridge this political chasm, but it was too wide. The eventual Bolshevik outcome was certainly not foreordained, depending as it did on the unique personalities of Lenin and Trotsky. It's still hard to believe, in fact, that the world's first experiment with a "worker state" occured in a country that was 98 percent agricultural. But, in the dire atmosphere of 1917, some form of extremism—either of the right or of the left--seemed a more likely outcome than Kerensky's democratic center.

Forty–eight years later at Stanford, such speculation and theorizing became the subject of the term–paper assignment for Kerensky's seminar on the Revolution. "Think about it for a moment," says Tom Cox, '66. "It was as if there had been a senior seminar on Watergate taught by Richard Nixon in which the main assignment was to write a paper on the role of Nixon in Watergate!"