Alexander Kerensky and Vladimir Lenin came from the same small Volga town of Simbirsk, where Kerensky's father was Lenin's schoolteacher. A progressive lawyer who used politicized courtroom cases to put the czarist state on trial, Kerensky rose to lead Russia's provisional government during the pivotal months of 1917.

Holding dual roles in the government and the Petrograd Soviet, he tried to bridge a fracturing empire but kept Russia in World War I to preserve foreign loans, alienating the army and public. His fatal policy of no enemies to the left let the Bolsheviks arm themselves, and Lenin's October Revolution swept him into a 50-year exile.

• His 1912 investigation of the Lena River goldfields massacre propelled him into the Duma.
• He ordered Rasputin's corpse exhumed and secretly incinerated in a university boiler room. ...