Kerensky escapes

On 14 November 1917 (1 November by the Julian calendar) Alexander Kerensky, Prime Minister of the Provisional Government overthrown a week earlier, escaped from the palace at Gatchina. Disguised as a sailor, he slipped past the guard posted at the only exit and vanished, at the very moment when the Cossacks who had brought him to Petrograd were negotiating with the Bolsheviks to hand him over. The British chronology of the war states under 15 November that Kerensky “fled from Petrograd”. In fact he had left the capital on 7 November, and on 14 November he escaped from Gatchina, where he had been awaiting the outcome of his expedition.

That expedition had ended two days earlier, when Red Guards and sailors beat back the Cossacks of General Pyotr Krasnov at Pulkovo. Reinforcements from the front did not come, and the Cossacks, withdrawn to Gatchina, were unwilling to fight any longer for a Prime Minister whom most of them disliked. The officers had not forgiven him for imprisoning Kornilov in September. After the retreat the political and military leaders of the expedition decided to offer the enemy a truce and a demarcation line. But it was already too late. Sailors had mingled with the Cossacks, and discipline was disintegrating just as it had earlier throughout the army. More and more often it was said that the best thing would be to give Kerensky up to the Bolsheviks.

According to Chamberlin, at dawn on 14 November Pavel Dybenko, a strapping sailor from the Baltic Fleet and one of the three members of the board for military and naval affairs in the new government, arrived in Gatchina together with the Cossack envoys who had been sent to the Reds. He quickly came to terms with the Cossack committee. The Cossacks were to return freely to the Don and hand over Kerensky, and in return Dybenko promised that Lenin and Trotsky would not be in the new government. He had no intention of keeping that promise; he only wanted to make the Prime Minister’s arrest easier. According to Russian accounts he joked to the Cossacks that they could “swap Kerensky for Lenin”.

Krasnov warned Kerensky, and in his memoirs wrote that he himself had suggested the idea of escape. Kerensky, who is said to have already been thinking of suicide as preferable to captivity, with the help of the Socialist Revolutionary Semyonov and a sailor well disposed to him, changed into a sailor’s uniform and left the palace. Accounts differ. Leon Trotsky wrote that Kerensky fled “having deceived Krasnov, who evidently intended to deceive him”. According to Dybenko’s memoirs, a certain sailor saw the disguised Prime Minister in the courtyard but did not try to stop him, as he considered the escape his political death. Kerensky’s aides and the front commissar accompanying him, Vladimir Voitinsky, stayed in Gatchina and were taken prisoner together with Krasnov’s staff. Bolshevik troops soon entered Gatchina. Krasnov was taken under guard to the Smolny, but was soon released on his word of honour not to fight against Soviet power. The general made his way to the Don and in the spring of 1918 placed himself at the head of the anti-Bolshevik Cossack movement.

Kerensky’s escape closed the attempts to restore the Provisional Government. The Bolsheviks’ opponents no longer tried to rebuild it, but looked for new solutions. For the following months Kerensky hid in the area of Petrograd and Novgorod. Elected to the Constituent Assembly, in January 1918 he came secretly to Petrograd, but the Socialist Revolutionary leadership would not let him speak. In June 1918, with the papers of a Serbian officer and the help of British agents, he left via Murmansk for London. He never returned to Russia. He died in exile in New York in 1970.