Kerensky was formerly a model family man, I heard, but something went wrong, and last summer Mme. Kerenskaia and her two small sons, nine and seven, lived alone in the modest home. Kerensky lived in a suite in the Winter Palace and drove in the Czar’s motor cars and was waited on by a whole retinue of faithful retainers. No disparagement to him is intended in the statement. The Winter Palace was his headquarters, and as for the motor cars he had a right to drive in them, and every right in the world to be waited on and cared for. The parents of this fated child of revolution were well educated and fairly well circumstanced. The elder Kerensky was a school inspector and was able to give his son a university education. Rumor persistently states that Kerensky’s mother was a Jewess, but I do not know whether this is true or not. CHAPTER XXII THE RIGHTS OF SMALL NATIONS One of the main contentions of the extremists of the Russian revolution concerns the self-governing rights of the states, large and small, which make up the empire. I met no one in Russia who did not agree that each one of the states had a right to local autonomy, but I met many who feared greatly lest the empire should be dismembered and should fall apart into a number of small, weak states. Especially disastrous would this be, both to Russia and to the Allies, if it happened during the war. That Germany is doing everything in her power to bring about this end is proof enough that it would be disastrous to the Allies. Germany’s army and navy and German diplomacy are working overtime to separate the Russian states. The enemy forces are working now to isolate the Baltic states and Finland, and German agents are busy all over the empire spreading the propaganda of secession. “The right of small peoples to govern themselves” is one of the easiest gospels in the world to preach. As a principle it is not even debatable. In practice, however, it very often is far from expedient or practicable. But the recently liberated Russians, each separate language and racial group smarting from remembered wrongs inflicted by the old government, took fire with the idea of self-government, and in every corner of Russia are found provinces, governments, even cities, repudiating the central government and setting up republics of their own. Provisional governments were created last summer in provinces of Siberia, in the rich province of Ukrania, in the town of Kronstadt, in the Siberian towns of Tomsk and Tsaritsine, and in a number of other localities. Finland very early started an agitation for a separate government, and only the closing of the Diet and the prevention by armed force of the convening of a new Diet stood in the way of a socialist manifesto of separation. The Socialists are the majority party in the Diet, and they counted on the support of enough people in the three “bourgeois” parties--the Swedish, old Finnish and young Finnish parties--to carry their measure through.