After his ouster from power, Alexander Kerensky went into exile and filtered in through various émigré circles in the West. Kerensky remained confident both in the imminent collapse of Stalin’s dictatorship and the strength of the Russian people to throw off their bonds during the interwar period. Such sentiments were a sign that Kerensky retained some elements of his moderate SR politics; the people coupled with economic realities would lead to the end of what he considered a sham proletarian dictatorship. Kerensky would argue, such as in this 1938 interview, that “Russia is alive” and that if the West isolated and pressured Stalin through constructive engagement, Europe could end its Depression. Yet Kerensky was no Trotsky; he had few acolytes and he was more of a footnote than an alternative to Stalin. The 1938 interview presaged Kerensky’s odd political trajectory in the postwar period. He often maintained an optimistic picture that Russia could be reformed, but the Bolshevik state was inimical to any progress for global peace and prosperity. Kerensky in the postwar period intertwined both his faith in Russian nationalism and his deep suspicion of the Communist leadership in his roles as an émigré and public intellectual on Soviet affairs.

Barbarossa revealed this duality of Kerensky quite early in his various writings on Soviet affairs. Kerensky’s initial assessments of Soviet success in throwing back the German invasion were quite dim. In a 14 July 1941 article in Life, Kerensky averred that the USSR had at best, “three months” against the “modern Napoleon,” Hitler. The provisional government head laid the blame exclusively at Stalin’s feet. Kerensky contended that Stalin’s government had destroyed agriculture, industry, and the Red Army in the thirties, such that “Russia’s domestic situation in 1914 was far more favorable than it is now.” The only hope Kerensky held out for the immediate future was a radical change in Soviet government, concluding:

[Russia] must last. In order to enable it to last, the poisonous weapon of ‘liberative’ propaganda must be immediately knocked out of Hitler’s hands. The Kremlin, whose fate is now linked to that of London and Washington, must itself, accepting destiny, restore freedom to the Russian people. By doing so, it can release in Russia new creative forces for the organization of defense and for the continuation of the struggle. At the dreadful cost of the Second War, the Western Democracies have at last come to understand that they need Russia, and not a totalitarian dictatorship in Russia. [emphasis original]

Although the Soviets proved far more durable than Kerensky predicted, by the mid-war he felt somewhat vindicated by his analysis of developments in the Soviet Union. In an August 1943 article in American Mercury, “Russia is Ripe for Freedom,” he asserted that the war had unleashed the Russian people who have now been empowered both by the war effort and their rediscovery of the Russian sense of nation that the Kremlin had only reluctantly sanctioned. The Russian people, he asserted

These people had nothing to do with the twenty-two months of Kremlin collaboration with the enemy. They have everything to do with the magnificent Russian resistance against the enemy.

Contrary to Kerensky’s consistent antagonism to Stalin’s government, he did argue for the territorial absorption of the Baltics and parts of Eastern Europe. In a series of sniping in the NYT’s letters in January 1945, Kerensky took issue with the Lithuania’s Washington Minister Povilas Zadeikis characterization of the Russian émigré of being a Russian imperialist. Kerensky argued in a 13 January letter to the editor that Soviet demands for basing and security in Eastern Europe did not violate the spirit of the Atlantic Charter and its demands were analogous to American use of naval and air bases in the Philippines. More importantly for Kerensky, by going through established diplomatic channels of the alliance, the Soviets were participating in the liberal and democratic order of the West. Unlike the earlier gobbling up of these territories during the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, this revision was now within the norms of the international community and giving Stalin this territory would deny him the chance to use Soviet insecurity as an issue to justify his dictatorship.

The postwar period saw many of these hopes of Kerensky prove to be ephemeral or non-existent. While Kerensky still retained elements of his deep faith in the Russian people, he became a stalwart Cold Warrior in the first two decades of the Cold War. A 23 November 1947 letter to the NYT blamed the emergence of the Cold War on the Kremlin and supported the recent speeches by George Marshall decrying Soviet expansionism. Kerensky lauded the US Secretary of State’s differentiation between Soviet expansionism and the ideologically-driven enlargement. By avoiding the “convenient” and “too simple” thesis that the Stalin was following a traditional tsarist expansionist stratagem, the letter celebrated Marshall’s perceptive estimation of Soviet intentions. In a later NYT letter clarifying his position on 3 December 1947, Kerensky noted that Eastern European expansion meant that Moscow now had to prop up various Communist leaders, making it vulnerable to sustained pressure. The danger, per Kerensky, was:

the very survival of the Soviet oligarchy, indeed is in the largest measure dependent on the triumph of communism in Europe and Asia…. It is not “Russian expansionism” that is the central issue of our time, but world revolution aiming at world domination.”

Kerensky’s activities in the early postwar years were not just limited to writing letters to the NYT. Wartime dislocation the great unmixing of ethnicities that came with the territorial revisions of Eastern Europe created a massive number of DPs within Central Europe. Kerensky assumed the mantle of leadership for these Soviet DPs, some of whom did not want to return to the USSR still under Stalin’s leadership. By 1949. Kerensky had formed the émigré League of Struggle for the People's Freedom, which had connections with the various CIA-funded outfits for the cultural Cold War in Europe. According to a 14 March 1949 Chicago Daily Tribune article on the League, the organization was not an irredentist group, but rather an organization that aimed to drive “a propaganda wedge between the Communist government and the Russian people.” The League would produce its own journals and encourage the Soviet people to revolt against Stalin’s tyranny. Kerensky would likewise snipe at Trotskyite assertions that Stalin had betrayed the Revolution. In a 11 September 1950 letter to Time, Kerensky supported the magazine’s assertion in an earlier article that Stalin was the true heir of Lenin. Pace Trotskyites and other socialists, Kerensky noted:

Some practical deductions from this false interpretation of Stalin's personality, doctrines and aims are pregnant with tragic misunderstandings between Americans and the Russian people—the best potential ally in the struggle for freedom. The Russian people were the first victims of the totalitarian yoke. They dream not of expansionism but only of the restoration of human freedom ... As to Stalin, he “spits,” as Lenin once said, on Russian interests, because Russia must merely be “used as a base for world revolution.”

Such sentiments were emblematic of the overall Russo-centric approach that Kerensky injected into the League.

This celebration of Great Russianness made Kerensky’s involvement in the League itself was a very mixed blessing. Although he was the most prominent Russian émigré and had widespread connections with Western anticommunist circles, Kerensky was still a Russian patriot. Many of the most prominent Soviet DPs were not Great Russians, but Ukrainian or from the Baltics. As Kerensky’s row with Zadeikis indicated, Kerensky prioritized the needs of Great Russians and saw them as the natural leaders of Russia. Kerensky only begrudgingly allowed non-Russian language broadcasts, but he drew the line at the League’s association with ethnic separatists. This meant that an already anemic political group found its efforts further squandered by internal squabbles. Additionally, the aged Kerensky did not cut a particularly dashing figure in the European press. The Economist sneered that the Americans had lifted the elderly leader “from the dustbin of history.”

Nonetheless, Kerensky still argued in this period that the Soviets were an existential threat to peace and the world. One of his November 1949 broadcasts for the League accused the Kremlin of playing with fire, and “should this fire flare up, Russia would burn up, if not the whole civilized world.” During a July 1952 conference at Colgate University on American foreign policy engaged in a shouting match with his fellow panelists, the director of the Yugoslav Information Center Ljubo Drndic, that there “was absolutely no difference” between Tito and Stalin. Kerensky and his émigré fellow-travelers attacked Secretary of State Dean Acheson’s assertion that the Kremlin was following a traditional Russian expansionist policy. In a circular sent to the NYT in 8 July 1951, avowed that “the ruling Communist party cannot be regarded as the national government of Russia. The party has its own objectives and is international in essence.” In a July 1953 speech in Munich, Kerensky warned of the Kremlin’s goal of world revolution and that, “the tactics have been changed in a move of cynical opportunism, but the strategy remains the same.” Despite this firebrand Cold Warrior rhetoric, the infighting within the League, coupled with its meager results and his attacks on the negotiations what would become the Austrian State Treaty led to Washington withdrawing its subsidies for the group in late 1953.