Foreign News: Enter Kerensky

At the invitation of an Assistant U. S. Attorney, one Kenneth Simpson, there arrived in Manhattan from Paris last week Alexander Feodorvich Kerensky, to stop with Mr. and Mrs. Simpson at their Park Avenue residence. New York newspapers welcomed M. Kerensky in editorials of praise, of friendship. The Herald Tribune, usually synchronous with the Administration, stated that "Kerensky will have the help and support of all good Americans," Overnight this wiry, medium-sized man, with slightly bowed legs, a cropped head, and habitually narrow, squinting eyes, seemed to have become almost a national hero to the press.

Peroration. Through an interpreter M. Kerensky, who speaks no English, said: "I do not think the agents of Soviet Russia are fomenting trouble in Mexico or elsewhere in foreign countries. They lack the power to do so. ... I, myself, never think of a return to power. My episode is over. But I am continuing and will continue until the last the struggle for human freedom. . . .* Russians must settle their own internal affairs. . . ."

Comet. This was the man and these were the words which came as unheralded as though a comet had struck Manhattan and dissipated far and wide its gaseous tail. Where does the four-month Kerensky regime fit into the 'ten years elapsed since Nicholas II signed his abdication on March 15, 1917? Significant years:

1881. At Simbirsk the wife of a school principal gave birth to Alexander Feodorovich Kerensky, a pale, sickly, bright-eyed child.

1912. After graduating from the University of St. Petersburg and becoming a lawyer famed for his moving and impassioned defense of numerous Socialists, M. Kerensky was elected to the Fourth Duma as a Social Democrat. He belonged to the "Lesser Group" or "Mensheviki" of his party, in contradistinction of the "Larger Group" or "Bolsheviki."†

1917. Menshevik Kerensky was present in Petrograd** when there began a curiously leaderless and random series of riots and disorders among the people and local soldiery. Between March 8 and March 12 these leaderless disorders reached such a pitch that the Duma found the Tsarist authority had vanished and set up a Temporary Governing Committee which two days later became the Cabinet of Prince Lvov in which M. Kerensky was Minister of Justice. Next day representatives of the Duma obtained the abdication of the Tsar. Russians were all but stupefied that the Tsarist regime was so rotten at the core as to topple after four days of disorder in Petrograd. Troops ordered to shoot down the mobs flung away their guns and embraced the rioters. Never was a revolution less bloody.

Soon M. Kerensky became War Minister, and in May he began an extraordinary oratorical campaign which so far restored the morale of the army that it launched a last desperate offensive against Germany in June. When this failed and the army collapsed the power of the Mensheviki became shadowy; but Minister Kerensky as the outstanding Menshevik leader assumed the Premiership which he held for four months.