Alexander Fiodorovitch Kerensky has been one of the major actors during the Russian Revolution. He was the one who, from February 1917 onwards, took Russia on the road to change but he did not manage to prevent the communists from sweeping him aside and taking power in order to install a police state even more totalitarian than that of the czar.

Alexander Kerensky – ephemeral prime minister of an even more ephemeral democratic government – is , between the lines, one of the most important characters of this history of the Baranovsky family to whom we have dedicated this book. We discover him under lighting rarely used : a man not only swept by the whirlwind of events in his country, but also by the tempest of feelings he had for a young woman with whom he was passionately in love.

Swept from power by Lenin and Trotsky, Kerensky has dragged along the Baranovskys in his fall from power and like so many Russian families of the period they could only say : “Farewell to Russia, farewell to everything”, as wrote at the end of her newspaper article Olga Kerensky-Baranowsky, who was his legitimate wife and cousin of the young woman with whom he was in love.

Like the Baranovskys, the Kerenskys and so many other families who have known a similar fate, have been sacrificed mercilessly on the altar of the revolution of which we measure, one hundred years later, the immense mess it has produced.

Retracing their lives let us, no doubt, somehow fetch and understand this revolution on a daily basis, at the dimension of a human being.