Alexander Kerensky

Alexander Fyodorovich Kerensky was a lawyer and revolutionary who joined Russia's Provisional Government after the February Revolution of 1917, rising from Minister of Justice to Minister of War to prime minister by July. Leading the social-democratic Trudovik faction and serving as vice-chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, he held real power in a country tearing itself apart. His government's fatal choice was continuing World War I despite mass opposition, then cracking down on the anti-war sentiment that might have kept him afloat. The October Revolution ended his tenure in early November; the Bolsheviks and Left Socialist-Revolutionaries replaced him, and he fled into exile. He spent the rest of his long life in Paris, New York, and at Stanford's Hoover Institution. When he died in New York in 1970 at 89, both the Russian and Serbian Orthodox churches refused his body - for his Freemasonry and for what they saw as his role in the Bolshevik rise - so he was flown to London and buried in a non-sectarian cemetery in Putney Vale.