Aleksandr Fydorovich Kerensky, the focal point of the tidal wave of revolution that consumed Russia during 1917, was a man without nation even in death as well as lifetime. The irony of the permanent rest denied to the Russian Orthodox Church of New York City at the behest of the grounds that the dead man was a Freemason and was believed to be the author of the Bolshevik rise to power remains an apt reminder of the refractoriness of the past and the shadows of exile.
The refusal by the New York Russian Orthodox Church to permit funeral rites for Kerensky, allegedly, was based on the deep-seated feeling that his leadership as head of the Provisional Government had open the way, indirectly, for Lenin’s Bolsheviks and their eventual usurpation of the authority over Russia by the Orthodox Church. To make matters worse, the connection to Freemasonry, an organization frequently-at-odds with Orthodox Christianity, placed him even farther away from the Church’s advantage from the sacraments.
This denial put the Kerensky family to the question of where to lay permanent rest to the corpse of the man so condemned by many for having been a party to any previous revolution that had placed the Soviet regime in power. The answer was from the far west of the Atlantic; the corpse was flown out to London where the corpse was buried in the non-denominational Putney Vale Cemetery. The life of Kerensky, as revealed by the reports, was one that was filled with the contradictions of revolution and reform, exile and promotion. His work as an advocate representing on behalf of revolutionaries to subsequently sitting over the Russian Provisional Government provided the scene of working for democracy during revolution. His subsequent exile by the October Revolution when the Bolsheviks assumed power made the rest of the days of Kerensky as an academician and professor, specifically under the Hoover Institution of Stanford University and living in New York City.
His death from pneumonia later in 1970, when 89, was the coda to the life so intertwined with the seismic convolutions of Russian chronology. Although so intrinsic to the text of what came before the Bolshevik Revolution, the name of Kerensky had faded from the pages of the past so that by the time death claimed him, he was something of an unknown, as is the tang of obituary brought by the New York Times.
Amazingly enough, the funeral epic doesn’t end with Kerensky by himself. It’s one combined destiny story, as beside the grave of Kerensky is placed his first wife Olga and their progenies. The drama of their emigration from Russia and their later residence in England is a silent but eloquent commentary on the final page of the life of Kerensky.
