The Liberal successors of the Tsar

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32554, 13 March 1971, Page 10

The Liberal successors of the Tsar

The Provisional Government. By V. D. Nabokov. University of Queensland Press. 144 pp. Index. History, and historians, are often unkind to political losers, especially when the materials needed to explore an event are largely inaccessible. Thus, it has been all but forgotten in the last 50 years that Lenin and the Bolsheviks in Russia, in October, 1917, did not overthrow a reactionary and autocratic Tsarist Government but rather a democratic parliament which was attempting to control a vast country in the midst of a chaotic war. The Provisional Government, from which this book takes its title, ruled Russia for less than a year after the downfall of Tsar Nicholas II; over much of the country its authority was never secure; in the

end it collapsed when attacked from within by the Bolsheviks. The lesson is all too familiar in political revolutions. Moderate, humane men struggling to preserve a system which reflects their high values and ideals fall victims easily to the violence of extremists, just because of the principles which prevent them using in their own defence the brutal weapons of fanatics like Lenin. If this little book did no more than rescue the Provisional Government from oblivion and remind later generations of what it attempted it would still be important—a nostalgic glimpse of what might have been, if a Russia ruled by a democratic system not unlike that of Western Europe instead of lingering on in totalitarian darkness.

But “The Provisional Government” is much more than a useful account of almost-forgotten history. Vladimiv Dmitrievich Nabokov actually wrote this book more than 50 years ago, shortly after the fall of the government in which he had played a significant part. It thus forms a deeply moving and personal account of important events seen from a most intimate perspective. There is a poignancy, too, in the author’s tragic death, murdered by a young fascist in Paris in 1922 after the Nabokov family had gone into exile there. Today’s readers can hardly fail to be interested, also, in a book by the father of the Russian-American poet and novelist, Vladimir Nabokov, perhaps best known for his novel “Lolita.” Nabokov junior has added a biographical note on his father to the text of “The Provisional Government.” From it emerges a picture of a liberalminded lawyer, a deeply patriotic man concerned for his country and its peoples with a rare passion. Professor Richard Pipes, of Harvard University, who contributes an introduction to the main text which is edited by Andrew Field, echoes the younger Nabokov’s view of his father: “Nabokov, and men of his kind, acted out of a sense of patriotic responsibility, pure and simple. Their lack of ‘realism’ (in other words, of political opportunism) elevated their politics to a higher level of human activity. They were admirable men, the Russian liberals, combining Western individualism with the intelligentsia’s tradition of public service.” A personal memoir from such a man, brief as it is, is of more than passing interest.