Aleksandr Kerenski

When Ilya Repin sketched him, Alexander Kerensky was the most powerful man in Russia. It was 1917, the Tsar had abdicated, and Kerensky headed the Provisional Government that briefly ran the country between the empire and whatever would follow. Repin posed him in the library of Nicholas II, inside the Winter Palace, seated in the deposed emperor's own chair. The message was plain: the new man now sits where the old one sat. Then events outran the paint. By the time Repin finished the picture, in 1918, the Bolsheviks had swept Kerensky aside, and he had fled the country he led for a matter of months. Repin, who was no admirer of the man, said his sitter 'had the glory of almost an emperor, but in reality was a nonentity.'