The universities had been the organizational centre of opposition to the tsarist regime since the 1860s. In the Russian language the words ‘student’ and ‘revolutionary’ were almost synonymous. Like everyone else, the students had been politicized by the sheer scale of human misery which the famine exposed. The lecture-rooms became hotbeds of socialist agitation and there was a new mood of rebelliousness against the university authorities, which since 1884 had been under police control. Alexander Kerensky (1881–1970) recalls the camaraderie of the dormitory at St Petersburg University: ‘The students lived as a friendly, closely united community, with its own favourite men as leaders in matters of communal concern … If something exceptional happened in the country that touched and hurt the moral feelings of youth, if some order of the educational authorities touched our corporate pride, then all the students rose as one man.’15
Kerensky’s early life had many similarities with that of Lenin, who would become his arch-rival in 1917. He was born in the same town of Simbirsk eleven years after Lenin. His father was the headmaster of Lenin’s gymnasium and an acquaintance of Lenin’s father, who was the Chief Inspector of Schools in Simbirsk. In 1889 Kerensky’s father was promoted to the same post in Tashkent, where the young Kerensky went to school. As with the adolescent Lenin, there was ‘nothing at this stage to suggest the future career of Kerensky as a minister of the revolution’, one of his teachers recalled. ‘He happily complied with the strict discipline of the school, went enthusiastically to church,fn2 and even sang in the church choir.’ At the age of fourteen, Kerensky’s heart was set on an acting career. He even signed a letter to his parents: ‘The future Artist of the Imperial Theatre. A. Kerensky’.16 His belief in his destiny — which would drive his actions in 1917 — had clearly taken root at an early age. Kerensky never made it into the theatre, although as an actor on the revolutionary stage he was to prove as self-dramatizing as any provincial thespian. In 1899 he went up to St Petersburg University to read history and philology, the subjects his father had studied there, although in the second year he switched to law. This too set the pattern for the future: changing from history to law is, obviously, the move of a careerist.
In the year Kerensky matriculated the students at St Petersburg became embroiled in a series of campus demonstrations. On 8 February it was customary for the students to mark the anniversary of the foundation of the university by holding celebrations in the city centre. But in 1899 the government was in no mood for a student street party and banned the event. When some students tried to defy the ban by marching into the city they found their way blocked by police, who beat them with whips. Greatly agitated, the students began a protest strike, which spread to other universities. Their grievances were still not political; they would have been satisfied by an official apology for the brutality of the police and the restoration of the academic and student freedoms removed from the universities in 1884. This, at least, was the finding of a commission appointed later to look into the troubles. Instead the government arrested the student leaders and threatened future demonstrators with military conscription. The students were outraged and, encouraged by socialist agitators, began to condemn the political system root and branch. Even Kerensky, who until this point had been more interested in the theatre than in politics, joined the campus protest. ‘Last year’s insult has not been forgotten, and cannot be,’ he wrote to his parents in February 1900. ‘The repressions were uncivilized, that is what disturbs us, and those who ordered them (i.e. the ministers) do not deserve respect!’17 Once again, the heavy-handed tactics of the government turned a minor protest into a full-blown opposition movement.
The following November there were fresh student demonstrations at Kiev and other universities. Bogolepov, the Minister of Education, responded in January 1901 by enlisting more than 200 student leaders into the army. One month later a student called Karpovich shot Bogolepov in the neck, fatally wounding him in the first of a new wave of terrorist actions. The public were generally unmoved by the murder (Kerensky and his student comrades even saw Karpovich as a saint); its outrage was provoked by Bogolepov’s repressions. ‘I feel, you see,’ wrote Gorky to Bryusov, ‘that to send students into the army is disgusting, it is a flagrant crime against individual freedom, an idiotic measure of powersated scoundrels.’ On 4 March, two days after Bogolepov’s death, Gorky took part in a massive demonstration in St Petersburg. The capital came to a standstill as 3,000 students converged in front of the Kazan Cathedral. Red flags were unfurled, the Marseillaise was sung, and Gorky made a speech condemning the government’s actions. In the crowd were a large number of bourgeois liberals sympathetic to the students and dozens of present and future luminaries of the revolutionary movement. Suddenly, a squadron of mounted Cossacks appeared from behind the cathedral and charged into the crowd, hitting out on all sides with their batons. Struve was one of those struck. As people scrambled for cover some of the crowd broke into the cathedral itself, where a service was in progress. Thirteen people were killed, hundreds came away with bloodied faces and, in all, some 1,500 students were imprisoned, many of them in the Peter and Paul Fortress. It was the first time that such a large number of respectable bourgeois citizens had found themselves within its famous penitentiary walls. The students’ parents and friends visited them daily with lavish food hampers. A well-known tobacco manufacturer, whose son had been jailed, sent 10,000 de-luxe cigarettes and repeated the gift at regular intervals. Thousands of books arrived, allowing the students to catch up with their long-neglected studies, although, according to one of the students, they spent most of their time in chess tournaments and concerts. The whole adventure was described by him as ‘a kind of student picnic’.18
For many of the students this was their first shocking confrontation with the coercive power of the state. It was to prove a radicalizing experience. Thousands of students joined the SR Party, whose Combat Organization took the lead in a campaign of terror which soon claimed the life of D. S. Sipiagin, the Minister of the Interior. Others joined the Social Democrats. But the real home of the democratic students was the Union of Liberation, established in 1903. It was the brainchild of Struve, one of a small but influential group of liberal defectors from the Marxist movement at the turn of the century. He argued that a violent social revolution would be disastrous for Russia. What it needed was a period of social and political evolution on European lines, during which the workers campaigned for their rights within the capitalist system and the whole democracy was united in a constitutional movement. This was the message of Struve’s journal Osvobozhdenie (Liberation), published in Germany, which had inspired the foundation of the Union. Antagonized by the campaign of police persecution organized by Plehve, Sipiagin’s successor at the Ministry of the Interior, the Union gradually moved to the left and, in 1904, embraced the programme of a constitution based on universal suffrage, self-determination for the nationalities, and far-reaching social reforms.