Alexandr Fyodorovich Kerensky and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin may have known each other from early childhood

Alexandr Fyodorovich Kerensky and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin may have known each other from early childhood. Their fathers were friends and kept up a close relationship. Kerensky's father was the director of the Simbirsk Classical Gymnasium for Boys, from which Lenin graduated. When Ilya Nikolayevich Ulyanov died, Fyodor Mikhailovich Kerensky helped his widow. When Vladimir Ilyich was applying to university, Fyodor Mikhailovich gave him an excellent character reference.

Both Kerensky and Lenin were born in Simbirsk. But Lenin was 11 years older. And despite the close acquaintance of their families, neither Lenin nor Alexandr Kerensky remembered any meetings with one another in their younger years.

Nor did they meet abroad. Kerensky mentioned this in an interview with Canadian television: "You see, if Lenin spent a great deal of time in emigration (France, Britain, Switzerland), I had never been abroad before my exile in 1918… We belonged to two different generations. Lenin's school and university years fall in the eighties, the era of reaction, when Russian youth began to be carried away by the doctrine of Western materialism, Marxism.
I began my political life at the start of the twentieth century, when young people in Russia were more interested in spiritual quests and were becoming disenchanted with the classical doctrines of Kant and Marx. That is the main difference between our two generations."