Читать книгу The Reformer - Stephen F. Williams - Страница 12

CHAPTER 1

Scapegrace and Scholar

VASILY MAKLAKOV’S CHARACTER and thinking resist easy pigeonholing and perhaps stem from his family’s social and intellectual diversity. His mother, born Elizaveta Cheredeeva, was from a fairly wealthy and aristocratic family and was devoutly religious. His father, Alexei Maklakov, a “self-made man”—in his memoirs Maklakov uses the English expression¹—was a professor of ophthalmology at Moscow University and a doctor at the Moscow Eye Clinic (and for some purposes, at least, its de facto director).

The parents’ ancestors and relatives combined distinction with a touch of eccentricity. Vasily’s maternal great-grandfather, an official with the civilian rank equivalent to a general, had three daughters, one of them Vasily’s grandmother. Vasily knew her far less well than her sisters, as she died relatively young. One of the sisters, Vasily’s great-aunt Raisa, was married to a soldier, who in the era when Maklakov knew him was a retired colonel spending all his evenings playing cards at the English Club. They had eighteen children, half of them with one patronymic, half with another—a phenomenon that Maklakov found unintelligible at the time (and evidently still did in his 80s, when describing it in his memoirs).² The other great-aunt, Mariia, never married. She lived on land that would have been very valuable if she had not given part of it to a church and if a railroad track had not prevented her from getting from her house to the rest of the property except by a roundabout route. This was no problem for her, as she never left her house. She rose at five in the afternoon and mainly enjoyed the company of other old ladies who played cards and read religious books to her. Maklakov, as her godson, had to go there for supper weekly until her death.

Some historians have suggested that Maklakov’s opinions were a product of his class origins; one, for example, says that he was one of a number of “great landowners” among the Kadets.³ That was indeed the background of many Kadet leaders, but not of Maklakov. In his memoirs he took some pains to explain that on his mother’s side (the one with money), the original wealth came from salaries. Though her forebears owned small estates in the vicinity of Moscow, that ownership entitled them to very little peasant labor in the days before the serfs’ emancipation, so emancipation itself inflicted no loss on them. Although Maklakov was technically a landowner because of land in Zvenigorod that his father had acquired for weekend and summer relaxation, the land occasioned expense and of course pleasure—but no income.⁴

Of his father’s ancestors, Maklakov knew only his grandfather, a man who pursued several careers fitfully—doctor, entrepreneur, playwright, and translator. The entrepreneurship seemed never to pan out. His development of a special breed of cocks for fighting went nowhere; so, too, did his efforts to design a perpetual motion machine. He unsuccessfully urged Maklakov’s father to join him at Monte Carlo to exploit a surefire gambling scheme. His efforts at dairy farming were effective at least in luring Vasily’s family out to visit the site, leaving Vasily with a memory of washing pigs, who squealed when they got soap in their eyes. In the end, the grandfather developed a passion for literature, writing a play that was produced at the Mali Theater in Moscow, and he learned English and translated Shakespeare. In his later years he lived permanently at the house of a hospitable neighbor, Count Olsufiev—presumably a sign of some charm on his part, unless the count was a complete pushover. He and his second wife lived apart, although they were not divorced; whenever he learned that she was at Vasily’s family’s house, he wouldn’t enter it.⁵

Vasily’s mother had been well educated and spoke three languages besides Russian; her bookshelves were full of classic works in Russian and foreign languages, which she often offered the children. The good education was coupled with a religiosity that seems extreme by modern standards. Maklakov believed it explained her indifference to the stirrings of reform in the 1860s. When her children wondered why they, though faithful, could not move mountains, she explained that it was because their faith was too weak. She managed, he thought, to live the maxim that one should hate the sin but love the sinner, never getting angry and always defending everyone.⁶

Given Alexei Maklakov’s career in science, he was naturally more inclined to empiricism than his wife. But he was skeptical rather than anti-religious. Seeing crowds of people taking off their hats and crossing themselves on Red Square at Easter, he mused, “Whatever the smart alecs say, what does this feeling come from?” It was probably typical of him to address the matter as a question. On one occasion young Vasily reported a conversation with a schoolmate who had offered an explanation of the origins of the universe: it had started, he said, with the appearance of a red-hot sphere. Vasily had asked, “Where did the sphere come from?” His father took delight and obvious pride in the response.⁷

Alexei had wanted to be a surgeon, but a shooting injury to his hand scotched that and also forced him to give up the violin. He redirected his medical interests to ophthalmology and, as Vasily saw it, pursued it with the spirit of a natural scientist, always looking for underlying explanations. The son’s perception seems confirmed by Alexei’s publishing ophthalmology articles in scientific journals in France. Life replicated Alexei’s scientific intellect rather directly in his son Alexei Alexeevich, another younger brother of Vasily, who became a professor of ophthalmology at Moscow University and director of the Moscow Eye Clinic.

As was evidently true for all who worked in the Moscow Eye Clinic, the family lived on-site. The clinic had been founded with private funds in 1826 and occupied a large building in central Moscow that not only survives to this day but is still an eye clinic. Vasily and several siblings remained there until their father’s death in 1895, so it was home to Vasily for his first twenty-six years.

The clinic gave Vasily a glimpse at the relation between accomplishment and privilege in late nineteenth-century Russia. One G. V. Grudev was chairman of the council nominally guiding the clinic. At the outset, so far as Vasily knew, he declared himself to be 84 years old, but after some years at that age he started losing years and worked down to 70. A passionate gardener, he had much of the hospital grounds set aside for his personal garden. Though his role was “purely decorative,” no one was troubled at his holding a nominally responsible position: “on the contrary, all would have found it quite improper to remove him.” Occupying the top managerial position was one G. I. Kertselli, also superannuated, who spent most of his day reading the paper. Actually running the place was a steward, Aleksei Ilych Lebedev, so much in charge that when any problem arose, one heard the phrase, “We must ask Aleksei Ilych.” Below him, managing the clinic’s lower-level personnel, was the clinic’s porter, who bossed them around as a noncommissioned officer bosses the troops.⁸

The clinic’s head doctor, Professor Gustav Ivanov Braun, extended the pattern of disconnect between responsibility and title, limiting his actual work at the clinic to giving lectures. At least in some instances he turned responsibility over to Maklakov’s father, but it appears that most issues were resolved by consensus—one largely driven by conservatism. Maklakov: “I recall that my father complained about the impossibility of ever making improvements; his colleagues always found a reason to keep the old ways.”⁹

There may have been a gap between his parents in political inclinations. Alexei met his future bride while visiting her house, first as a doctor and then as a friend. He was evidently slow to open up about his interest in Elizaveta, for when he first did so, her mother said, “Finally, sir, at last.” Vasily knew of the story and wondered whether Alexei’s slowness was due to shyness, to concern about marrying someone of wealth, or to concern about the possible gulf in political sympathies between the families. But as he seems not to have heard his mother express political views, it seems likely that her religious perspective rendered politics unimportant. Alexei’s own views were clear: he enthusiastically supported the emancipation and the other Great Reforms of the 1860s—above all, local self-government in the countryside (the zemstvo) and judicial reform, of which the key was a start on judicial independence. And he regarded the Great Reforms as simply the beginning of a process that should go much further. In a general way, these were the views of Alexei’s friends, many of whom were active in the city council (its duma) and often talked of municipal and rural self-government. Alexei himself served at times as a member of the Moscow City Duma and of the Moscow province zemstvo. They valued their own culture and education and believed the state should make these available to others (without making them yield their place). If Vasily had a fault to find in these views, it was that they failed to grasp the less patient mood prevailing among the unprivileged.¹⁰

In 1881 Elizaveta and the children visited Red Square on the Saturday before Palm Sunday, as they had usually done. The children had such a good time that they asked her if they could skip their music lessons. In words with a curiously religious tint, she answered, “Yes, fine, perhaps I’ll forgive you.” The next morning she didn’t come down to breakfast. Doctors came and gave prescriptions, but she lost consciousness on Monday. That evening the children were taken to her to say good-bye. Maklakov and his oldest sister tried to use the ultimate resource—they went to pray at the miracle-working icon of the Savior in a church on Ostozhenka, to which their mother had often taken them. But when they came home, their mother was no better. A little later Alexei told the children that she had died. Having borne eight children, of whom seven survived, she was dead at 33. For a long time Maklakov reproached himself for the failure of his prayers and for the lack of faith that this failure must imply. He was just short of 12 years old.¹¹

The seven Maklakov children, with the youngest girl, Mariia, at extreme left, Vasily third from the right, and Nikolai fourth from the right. © State Historical Museum, Moscow.

By the time of his mother’s death Vasily was enrolled in the gymnasium. His parents had disagreed on whether he should be sent there—his mother favored tutors at home; his father preferred the gymnasium for the exposure to real life, including its “dark side.” The school, in fact, gave Vasily an early hint of some of the stultifying, oppressive, pedantic, and humorless qualities he was to encounter at the university. The students themselves did not represent an abrupt switch for him: they seemed to have been drawn from a similar social niche, being generally the children of such people as doctors and professors. One classmate was the son of a cook. With the revelation of this background and a suggestion from on high (probably the school administration) that the son of a cook didn’t belong, “he grew in our eyes like a rare bird.”

Maklakov did very well academically, never getting less than a “five,” the highest grade possible. He was especially good at foreign languages and studied Greek on his own, just out of curiosity. (But he acknowledges in his memoirs that at an audience with the pope in 1904, he was unable to converse in Latin.) Though admitting that there were some excellent teachers, he deplored the teaching methods generally. For ancient languages there was a great focus on grammar rules, at the expense of reading literature. When a teacher took up actual thoughts expressed in classical literature, it was “like contraband.” History similarly seemed to consist of pumping the students full of isolated facts. It seemed to Vasily as if the object must have been to kill any interest in history or literature. Reflecting on it later, he thought that perhaps the state’s true goal was to weaken freedom of thought and any concomitant ideas of opposing the regime.¹²

The students responded rather creatively. One, the son of a professor at an agricultural academy, taught others zoology and the basics of evolution, making the subject interesting enough for Maklakov to take it up on his own. Another was able to give instruction in chemistry. As to discipline, they reacted with a “we, they” attitude: they met the school authorities with their united strength, learning to defend their own, never betray their fellows, and never help “the enemy.”

It was on the disciplinary front that the school nearly bested Maklakov. The atmosphere is suggested by his story of a martinet, who, finding a student missing a button on his uniform, told him: “Today you’ve lost a button; tomorrow you’ll go about without trousers; and the next day you’ll be rude to supervisors. . . . Regicide! To the stocks.” Under such a regime, it’s hardly surprising that Maklakov got into endless scrapes, which ultimately put his access to a university education at risk. His bounding down a staircase elicited a reprimand from the school’s director. When he repeated (quite a few times, it appears) a sardonic reaction to Alexander III’s April 29, 1881, assertion of his commitment to “unshakeable autocracy,” his name was posted for the offense of “stupid talk.” He once used a rucksack buckle to carve a criticism of the school onto a desk; he was disciplined not for the vandalism (which, depending on the carving and the prior condition of the desk, may have been minor) but for “raising the banner of rebellion.” Maklakov’s own account of his scrapes is doubtless incomplete. A schoolmate from the class above him wrote in his diary years later, when Maklakov was quite famous and the schoolmate (M. M. Bogoslovskii) was a professor, “This demagogue, standing behind a column, cried out ‘Marseillaise, Marseillaise!’ and then sat down so as to hide himself.”¹³ The hijinks led to various marks of disfavor, such as being deprived of the special seating and public listing that normally celebrated high academic achievement. They also made him locally famous. One teacher at the school exclaimed, “Who is this Maklakov?”

The discipline problems came to a head on the verge of transition to university. During a language exam, Maklakov checked with a neighboring student on the translation of a word. The director happened to be passing by, heard the exchange, and ordered Maklakov to gather his papers and leave the examination room. The apparent cheating doesn’t reflect well on Maklakov, but it’s hard to assess. The director, speaking of it later, mistakenly described Maklakov’s behavior as helping the other student; the fact that the director got it exactly backwards, as well as Maklakov’s general track record, suggest that whatever was going on in Maklakov’s mind, this was not an attempt to get better marks than his competence and diligence deserved. Because entrance into the university required that a student receive “full credit” for behavior, the school was in a bit of a bind. Full credit might seem a stretch under the circumstances, but it also would be hard to block the progress of so talented a student. The outcome was a deal. He was given full credit, but denied an honor that naturally would have been his—a gold medal for outstanding scholarship and conduct.¹⁴

In 1885, during Vasily’s last years at the gymnasium, his father remarried. Lydia Filippovna Koroleva was a literary figure in her own right, author of a story published in Vestnik Evropy (Herald of Europe) that had won great praise from Turgenev; more important in the Maklakov family, she had written a children’s book that Vasily and his siblings knew and loved. Her first husband had killed himself shortly after their marriage, and she had been the common-law wife of Vasily Sleptsov, a journalist, social activist, promoter of feminism, and writer of short stories and a novella who died in 1878. A distinguished Russian author, visiting Lydia in 1930 in the old-age section of the Soviet House of Scholars to talk with her about Sleptsov (she was nearly 80 years old), spotted on her desk “Faust in German, Marcel Prévost’s Les Demi-Vierges in French, and the 1861 edition of Nekrasov.”¹⁵ She thus brought into the family the atmosphere of intellectual, literary circles. Among her friends was the great Russian historian V. O. Kliuchevskii. On one occasion six members of the Maklakov family (Lydia, Alexei, and Vasily, plus two daughters and another son) wrote to him jointly, explaining that a desire to see him had sprung up among all six at the same time and extending “a collective request” that he pay them a visit.¹⁶ Among the other distinguished friends that Lydia brought into their circle were the writer Maxim Gorky and the lawyer who became the speaker of the First Duma, Sergei Muromtsev. Another close friend, who had lived abroad since his participation in one of Garibaldi’s campaigns, was the geographer Lev Ilych Mechnikov, brother of Ilya Ilych Mechnikov, the Nobel laureate in physiology and medicine, and of Ivan Ilych Mechnikov, the model for Tolstoy’s story The Death of Ivan Ilych. Maklakov found himself captivated by one of Lev Mechnikov’s articles laying out a grand theory of history. It claimed to show a natural law tending to steady human improvement as work became specialized and people, acting on their own initiative, found their niches and ways of productive cooperation.¹⁷

Despite the gain in intellectual breadth for the Maklakov children, the remarriage took its toll. Maklakov observed that it was naturally hard for his stepmother to reconcile her literary ambitions with taking charge of a household with seven children. “Both sides,” he observed, “suffered from the unusual relationship, though both, for the sake of our father, tried to hide it; he, of course, understood and suffered more than anyone.”¹⁸

Maklakov graduated from the gymnasium in 1887 and then proceeded to Moscow University, where his career looks a little like that of a perpetual student. He studied in three different faculties—natural sciences, history, and then law, ultimately taking his law degree in 1896. The two transitions—from natural sciences to history and from history to law—are fairly easily explained. He had been rather purposeless in choosing natural sciences. In view of his success in ancient languages at school, they would have been a more plausible specialty, but he rejected them, he later explained, at least in part out of a foolish spite toward the gymnasium. To the extent that he had been drawn to natural sciences by the excitement of public polemics on Darwinism, he was disappointed; the lectures were highly technical, probing, for example, details about grubs. Partly in response to this, he started going to lectures elsewhere in the university, most notably those of Kliuchevskii, whose lectures were “an aesthetic delight. . . . He was an actor, not a lecturer.” Further, because of his involvement in student disturbances (of which more later), Maklakov was rather pointedly told that the natural sciences faculty had the highest proportion of participants in disorders and that he would do well to move to history. Maklakov was surprised by this advice, which coincided with what he’d been told by Jacques Elisée Rekliu, an anarchist geographer whom he had met in Switzerland through his stepmother’s connection with Lev Mechnikov, and with whom he had long walks and talks about history and the prospects of mankind.¹⁹

A distinct episode precipitated the second switch, from history to law. Maklakov had done well in history, and Professor Paul Vinogradov, his friend, mentor, and hero (for his courage in expressing viewpoints that could easily lead to a professor’s dismissal),²⁰ proposed that he stay at the university to be groomed for a professorship. But when Vinogradov sought the agreement of the history faculty’s “tutor,” Nikolai Pavlovich Bogolepov, whose consent was essential, Bogolepov declared, apparently on the basis of the political unreliability shown by Maklakov’s involvement in student disorders, “So long as I am tutor, Maklakov will never occupy a chair.” Vinogradov urged Maklakov not to take it too seriously: “Bogolepov’s a fool; he won’t be tutor for long.” In fact, Bogolepov rose in the educational establishment, becoming minister of education in 1898. Unfortunately for Bogolepov, his activity as minister drew the attention of a Socialist Revolutionary student who walked into his office in 1901 and fatally shot him. Maklakov could not know of that denouement in advance. Even if he had, not only could Bogolepov have dampened his career prospects for another six years, but Bogolepov clones in the education establishment might have been able to do so indefinitely. Moved by Bogolepov’s edict and his own doubts about his suitability for a purely scholarly career (“I didn’t have the spirit of a true scholar, that is, a searcher after truth for its own sake”), Maklakov turned to the law.²¹

Much of Maklakov’s university education naturally took place outside of classes. Because brushes with authorities played such a key role in his academic transitions, it makes sense to start with them. The administration and police seemed to wobble between heavy-handedness, driven by near paranoia at the thought of independent, united student activity, on the one hand, and a relatively laissez-faire attitude on the other. In late November 1887, at a university orchestra concert, a student named Siniavskii slapped a high university official, A. A. Bryzgalov, in the face. The slap was not Siniavskii’s spontaneous individual act of protest against Bryzgalov’s perceived hostility to students; he had been chosen to strike the blow by the members of a kind of “primitive conspiracy.” Siniavskii was arrested, and student buzz designated the next day at noon as the time for a protest meeting in a university courtyard. An angry crowd of students gathered and then began to move onto the streets of Moscow. After a while Maklakov and other students drifted back to the vicinity of the university. The police chief, N. I. Ogarev, who unlike Bryzgalov was popular in Moscow, sought to calm things down by telling the students in the most peaceable tone that everything was over for the day and that they should disperse. Maklakov, though he claimed in his memoirs not to have been really involved in the disturbance, happened to be close by. He rather loudly answered Ogarev, “We won’t disperse till you clear out the police.” Ogarev shouted to the police, “Grab him.” All this was in the sight of the students and, according to Maklakov, created a mild sensation.²²

Somehow Ogarev and Maklakov ended up outside the cordoned-off area. Maklakov asked to be allowed to go back to the university, but Ogarev told him not to hope for that—they would not let him return. He then asked Maklakov where he lived. Maklakov said it was at the corner of Tverkaia Street, and Ogarev said, “I’ll let you off at the corner.” At the corner Ogarev asked his name. When Maklakov gave it, Ogarev asked, “You’re the son of Aleksei Nikolaevich?” “Yes.” “Then go home and tell your father from me not to let you out of the house.” In fact he tried to go back to the university, but, failing in that, went home. The upshot was that he gratuitously got the reputation of a troublemaker. Or perhaps not so gratuitously: after all, he had directly challenged Ogarev with belligerent words and for a couple of days afterward was in the thick of disturbances on Strastnoi Boulevard. Mounted police broke these up, and the episode led to nearly two months without classes at Moscow University and five other Russian universities.²³

The reputation of being a troublemaker stuck. Speaking years later as a deputy in the Third Duma on the issue of government policy on disciplinary exclusions from the university, he said that the precedents for such exclusions “are well known to me, though no worse to me than to many others, as I was once excluded from the university.” Right-wing deputy Markov II shouted from the floor, “You behaved badly.”²⁴

Siniavskii was sentenced to three years in a disciplinary battalion. Maklakov recalled later that this was the first time he had seen someone sacrifice his life for something. It brought to mind his mother’s stories of saints who were tortured because they refused to deny their faith. After serving his three years, Siniavskii returned to Moscow. Maklakov: “I got to know him; historic heroes lose something with close acquaintance.”²⁵

A second episode occurred two years later, on the death of the writer Chernyshevskii, author of the famous revolutionary tract What Is to Be Done? According to Maklakov, the younger generation didn’t actually read him, but they knew his name, mainly from a student drinking song that included the words “Let’s drink to the one who wrote, ‘What is to be done?,’ to his heroes, to his ideals.” (Would the students have found this ditty very stirring without a great deal of vodka?) Students managed to organize a memorial at a church, and though they were not allowed to place announcements in the newspapers, the call to attend the event, launched by a so-called fighting organization, spread widely. After the service, the crowd poured out into Tverskoi Boulevard and made its way to the university. The police didn’t intervene, and after some struggle among the students over whether there should be speeches, the crowd dispersed.²⁶

But the episode didn’t pass without regime reaction. Acting for himself and other students, Maklakov had asked a professor to postpone a lecture scheduled for the day of the memorial service so that they could go to the service. The professor agreed. When he entered the room for his next lecture, he was accompanied by the deacon, and the deacon and the professor jointly told the students that the professor’s accommodation was regarded as a conspiracy and was the subject of a reprimand. When the professor finished his lecture, the students applauded at length.²⁷

The university tutor at the time, Count P. A. Kapnist, followed up on the episode. Happily, he was far more tolerant than his successor, Bogolepov, the official who was later to drive Maklakov out of a scholarly career in history. Having assembled a group of students, he asked them what works of Chernyshevskii they had read; the answer—none. Maklakov volunteered that the students honored him not as a student of natural sciences or as an economist: they knew him through the drinking song. Kapnist cut him off, saying: “You can’t cancel lectures because of a song.” He went on to say that he wasn’t going to give them a punishment or reprimand, but that his ability to defend them against state authorities was limited. He had selected them because they would know the ones who started the Chernyshevskii gambit; they should pass on to them what he had said. He also had special reasons for assembling this group of students. He had chosen some because they were on a stipend that could be cut off, some because they were recidivists, and specifically Maklakov, to whom he turned and said, “You, I asked specially because of your temperament. You need to think first, and then act. Learn to rule yourself before you may have to rule others.”

While the students’ memories were fresh, they wrote down Kapnist’s talk, underscoring what they saw as “funny” parts. At home, Maklakov read the account to professors who were guests of his father and was surprised that they didn’t laugh at the humor. They understood that Kapnist’s action reflected a humane approach to the students and one that disappeared with the appointment of Bogolepov. Recounting the episode in later life, Maklakov concluded that it showed how much he and his fellow students failed to understand.²⁸

Maklakov’s third and last major run-in with university authorities occurred in March 1890. Students had assembled in a university courtyard with a view to organizing some kind of protest in support of a student disorder at Petrovskii Academy. Maklakov saw this from where he was working in the chemistry lab, and, because he was then hoping to advance student enterprise and independence through more-or-less legal means, he tried to persuade them to do nothing that would set that goal back. His argument encountered resistance, but before the students agreed on a course, Cossacks entered the space and surrounded them, and a group of nearly 400 people was herded first to the Manezh (a vast building in central Moscow suitable for exhibitions) and then to the Butyrskaia Prison. At the Manezh a number of students expressed satisfaction at his joining them despite his having opposed the demonstration; they chalked it up to solidarity, though he was there only because he’d been swept up with the others.

Life at the Butyrskaia appears to have been quite different in 1890 from what later generations experienced under Stalin and his successors. The students started two in-prison newspapers: one liberal, with the slogan “Involuntary Leisure,” the other conservative, edited by Maklakov, with the slogan “Render unto Caesar the Things That Are Caesar’s—and Also unto Caesar the Things That Are God’s.” A satirical column spoke of how a wise government in its work on popular education had in just two days opened a new institution, “Butyrskaia Academy.” Reality intruded on these intellectual hijinks when two new groups of students were brought in (first a batch of seventy-seven, and then one of sixty). The earlier arrivals asked eagerly how the event was perceived outside. The answer was that the whole episode was being completely ignored. The discovery totally chilled the students’ discussions of what “demands” to make upon the government.

In the end, students were called into the office in groups and told their punishments: for one group, nothing; for another, a trifle. Maklakov fell into a third group, which was punished with suspension for the rest of the term, but with the right to return to the university. This had a short-run consequence—it prevented him from going as a student delegate to an international student conference in Montpelier.²⁹

But the suspension wasn’t the end of the story. While he was pondering his possible shift to history, a friend of his father, N. A. Zverev, then an assistant to the university rector, brought word that the university had received papers from the public education and internal affairs ministries saying that because of his political unreliability, Maklakov was to be excluded from the university without right of return, a classification called a “wolf’s passport.” The family speculated on the possible cause—suspicious books he had been reading? people he had met on a trip to Paris in 1889?

His father consulted Kapnist, who told him to go to the root of the problem—St. Petersburg—and gave him letters to I. D. Delianov, the minister of public education, and to Pyotr N. Durnovo, then director of the police department and formerly a colleague of Kapnist in the procurator’s office. Right after his father left for St. Petersburg, Vasily was called to the police station and told that as a political unreliable he would henceforth be under police observation.

In St. Petersburg, Delianov asked Vasily’s father what Maklakov’s offense might have been. His father replied that he was hoping to get the answer from him. But Delianov also said that if Kapnist would accept responsibility for Vasily, there would be no problem with the ministry of education. The minister then urged him to see Durnovo. The latter took the same position as Delianov on the effect of getting the tutor to assume responsibility. Kapnist agreed to do so, though telling Vasily he mustn’t join illegal organizations. Technically, this included organizations forbidden under generally unenforced rules, such as those barring the zemliachestvos, largely apolitical student associations that were built on the desire of homesick students to see others from their parts of the country.

Years later Count Sergei Witte (finance minister from 1892 to 1903, and till April 1906, prime minister, and the empire’s most influential minister throughout the period)³⁰ introduced Durnovo to Maklakov while all three were vacationing in Vichy. By then Durnovo had served as minister of internal affairs. The conversation drifted to this episode, and Durnovo told him that such things were done for small faults, simply to show that the authorities were watching and not to fool around, and that the orders were often revoked. In short, a trivial matter could terrify a student, even if the orders were revoked, and blight the student’s higher education and likely his career if they were not.³¹ For Maklakov, the immediate cause of his escape from this fate was his father’s excellent connections—a point later harped on by Professor Bogoslovskii, the one so upset by Maklakov’s shouting “Marseillaise! Marseillaise!” from behind a pillar.³²

These close calls with government arbitrariness, and his escape through the accident of paternal connections, must have added zest to Maklakov’s lifetime of efforts to expose and thwart exactly that arbitrariness. He saw them as a good summing up of the old regime and an explanation of why it had so few defenders later.³³

It would be nice to be able to say that when we end discussion of these episodes we put paid to Maklakov’s difficulties with the authorities, but it would not be true. Spontaneous civic association is the bedrock of civil society, and on this issue Maklakov’s mind and nature put him at odds with the regime. Maklakov not only admired Tocqueville, civic associations’ greatest proponent (he later participated in a project for translating many of Tocqueville’s works into Russian),³⁴ but he also seemed by disposition to have relished joining and creating and enlivening such associations. The regime, by contrast, was instinctively hostile to just about any independent association of citizens. Once two or more people were gathered together for any purpose, no matter how innocent superficially, their thoughts just might turn to politics. Maklakov’s behavior left him, at best, in subdued conflict with existing authority.

In his first two university years, the years of rather fruitless study of natural sciences, he appears to have joined two of the existing zemliachestvos, one for the Nizhny Novgorod region and one for Siberia, and he later participated in the formation of one for Moscow. The 1884 rules governing universities specifically named zemliachestvos as among the organizations students were forbidden to join.³⁵ He also joined other students in taking an existing organizational model, an institute formed by students in the medical faculty, seeking to spread it among all faculties. He believed that such organizations, reaching beyond the purely social goals of the zemliachestvos, were likely to be more effective. Indeed, the organizing students felt themselves to be acting on the militant-sounding maxim “He who wields the stick is the corporal,” and, partly as a joke, they called the center a “fighting organization.” That this did not lead to disaster seems to have been the result of Bryzgalov’s successors’ pragmatic decision to lighten the yoke a bit.³⁶

Maklakov also had a hand in turning the student orchestra and chorus, formerly governed by the university administration, into a self-governing student organization. He and others formed a kind of “Management Board,” half of the members of which were from the orchestra and chorus and the other half nonmembers, using broad student involvement to help justify student control. They secured student approval of the change by asking that the annual meeting be held in an auditorium, which they then packed with supporters; the effect was evidently strong enough to abort any official effort at rejection. Maklakov was elected president of the first board. To keep the elective principle fresh, the initial board members didn’t run for a second term.³⁷

Maklakov’s involvement in the orchestra and chorus—specifically in advocating dedication of concert proceeds to relief of the famine of 1891—launched his reputation as a speaker. In the end, the choice of famine relief came at no cost to indigent students. Enthusiasm for the project (partly cultivated by getting popular professors to talk it up) led to not only a more than usually lucrative concert but also a successful subscription that raised double the usual amount for needy students.³⁸

But the actual provision of famine relief gave rise to a typical imperial Russian minidispute. University authorities wanted the money distributed through a specific official organization created for the famine. The student board saw this as an invasion of students’ rights. But it worked out a compromise behind the scenes, with the university publicly asking only that the money be given through some official entity. The board agreed, taking the risk that the full student membership wouldn’t approve the official organization ultimately proposed (which proved to be the one originally named). The student membership voted its agreement, thus nipping a potential crisis in the bud.³⁹

Though most events in Maklakov’s as yet brief life underscored the hyperactive character of the Russian state, his university years also provided him with a dramatic example of the state’s potential benefits. His older sister had often spoken of Mikhail Alexandrovich Novoselov, one of her gymnasium instructors, as a wonderful teacher and person. Maklakov, attending a lecture in the natural sciences faculty, found himself chatting with his neighbor, who proved to be Novoselov and who expounded his rather Tolstoyan ideas—that the state’s reliance on force made it in effect dishonorable and that revolutionaries were no better, as they just wanted to secure the power of the state for themselves. He also believed that if people saw how a community that was not founded on force worked, they would be drawn to it and would want to join, just as people who see someone actually cross a dangerous river are inspired to take the risk themselves. Novoselov proposed to found a colony based on this principle, and did so in Tver province.

Maklakov, along with some friends, went to share this experience and emerged with conflicting thoughts. He deeply admired the simplicity of the participants’ way of life; he mentions that that was the summer he gave up smoking. But he was equally clear that this was not for him. On his return to Moscow, he wrote Novoselov an enthusiastic letter, saying how the people there had found their true path, and that this was written in their faces. He soon realized that he’d overstated his position; Novoselov responded in terms clearly expecting Maklakov to return and join the colony.

In any event, the colony soon came to a tragic end. Neighboring peasants, learning that the colony believed one should never return evil for evil, tested it by stealing a couple of horses for no other reason than that they felt the need of them. The colony contemplated enlisting the aid of the local authorities, but decided against it, presumably on Tolstoyan grounds. The next day the whole neighboring village came, and the colony welcomed them, thinking they were acting out of conscience. But the peasants came to haul off everything they could—and did so. After that, no one wanted to remain in the colony. Novoselov himself became a priest.⁴⁰

In the summer of 1889, when Maklakov was 20 years old and the French Revolution was 100, his father went to Paris for the World’s Fair and brought him along. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven!” Recounting the trip in his memoirs sixty-five years later, Maklakov didn’t quote Wordsworth’s revolution-inspired exclamation, but he conveyed some of the feeling. “Later, any time a group of friends discussed the happiest minute in their lives, I always answered that the minute was the month I spent then in Paris.”⁴¹ It was the start of his lif-elong love affair with France, which he often visited and to which he returned as ambassador-designate in 1917, remaining until his death in 1957.

The trip started, characteristically, with a falsehood. For an underage child to go abroad required a doctor’s certificate of illness and an endorsement by provincial authorities. Those authorities gave the endorsement without reading the papers. Why should they take the trouble? The whole exercise was a charade.

Maklakov was no simplistic fan of the French Revolution, but he was dazzled by the freedom enjoyed by the French. Political hawkers would press flyers into his hands—the presidential campaign of General Boulanger was then under way—and Maklakov at first, out of Russian caution, was afraid to hold on to them. He was struck by the common ground shared by antagonistic political actors. He fondly recalled the scene after a group of Boulangists invaded an anti-Boulangist meeting, leading to a rather violent debate, with antagonistic mobs swirling out of the meeting hall and into the street. Suddenly the strains of the “Marseillaise” were heard from the hall, and minutes later the two chief adversaries were walking off arm in arm, enveloped in the music. “The whole crowd in the street suddenly followed them, caps flew into the air, all sang and applauded and embraced. The Marseillaise, the republic—for a minute reconciled everyone.”

And the French voters impressed him. Pro-republic, they were discerning enough to reject not only outright foes of the republic but also demagogues who would compromise it (Boulanger, for example). Maklakov felt that France’s freedom had taught him a lesson in a kind of conservatism—a popular readiness to preserve a relation to the historical past. Russia, he thought, had nurtured no such readiness.⁴²

His French revolutionary hero was Mirabeau, whom he admired, he said, not for his genius, but for his commitment to Berryer’s view that “the only way to avert a revolution is to make one.” As the French Revolution’s most eloquent proponent of averting revolution through reform, Mirabeau was obviously the perfect model for Maklakov. Later, in Russia, Maklakov was given an eight-volume work that included a biography of Mirabeau and excerpts from his speeches, many of which he memorized and retained for life. Ariadne Tyrkova-Williams—Maklakov’s longtime friend and colleague in the Kadet party and the only woman member of its central committee—reported that Maklakov would recite long excerpts from Mirabeau’s oratory. His memoirs enthusiastically quote Mirabeau’s self-description as “a man who does not believe that wisdom lies in extremes or that the courage to destroy should never give way to the courage to create.”⁴³

The Paris trip implanted in Maklakov a belief in the affirmative value of a free state, one that recognized the independence of individuals and of society and protected them from lawlessness. He linked this to the experience of the Novoselov colony, which obviously needed government to defend its legal rights from the crowd. He even wrote to Novoselov—one hopes not gloatingly—to argue that the state was necessary for the success of undertakings such as the Tolstoyans’.⁴⁴

Gregarious as ever, Maklakov naturally sought out French students and, after brief frustration because he mistakenly looked first in the cheapest cafés, found the Association générale des étudiants de Paris, whose students welcomed him enthusiastically. He declared this event the decisive moment of his trip abroad. His links gave him access to the nitty-gritty of political campaigns in which the students were active—so different from politics and student life in Russia. His father was scheduled to go home before the elections, but Maklakov persuaded him to let him stay on.

On his return the Russian state hit Maklakov with an immediate reminder of its character. He had brought along books and cartoons relating to French politics and the revolution; border guards confiscated the cartoons. Wanting to share part of his experience, he wrote an article recounting the lively, innocent, and unburdened activity of the Paris students’ association. Submitting it to Russkie Vedomosti (Russian news), the first of many pieces he ultimately published there, he was pleased at its acceptance, but dismayed that the editor had shortened it in the published version. He went to see the editor, who assumed Maklakov was coming to thank him. At the end, the editor said, “This will be a lesson to me not to have anything to do with young people who know nothing.” Maklakov replied, “And it will be a lesson for me not to have to do with old people who’re afraid of everything.” In retrospect, he saw that the shortening had done no harm, preserving the article’s message about the benefit of allowing Russian student organizations to associate with international ones.⁴⁵

The French students had told Maklakov of an international students’ meeting in Montpelier and said that only Russia was sending no delegate; they urged him to come. As the time of the conference approached, Maklakov found himself barred by his involvement in the disorders that had led to his time in Butyrskaia. Somehow a substitute was found, one Dobronravov. He participated and as a result was also excluded from the university for political unreliability. To assist Dobronravov’s struggle for rehabilitation, the Paris students’ association mobilized the French ambassador in St. Petersburg to vouch for his irreproachable behavior. Strange to think that such heavy diplomatic artillery was needed to address the Russian state’s paranoia! Besides this, what may have been the standard remedy was applied: vouching by Kapnist as tutor (resting, in part, on somewhat unreliable assurances from Maklakov). But by the time Dobronravov’s exclusion was canceled, he had unfortunately died of a blood infection.⁴⁶

Before leaving Maklakov’s time in the natural sciences faculty, we should have a look at his initial acquaintance with Tolstoy. An indirect acquaintance began very early, as he had been given—and very much liked—a copy of Tolstoy’s account of his childhood. Later, in the second grade at the gymnasium, Maklakov had been sent with his brothers, because of diphtheria in the family, to the house of a friend of his father, V. S. Perfilev, the prototype of Stiva Oblonsky (of Anna Karenina). A man came in wearing a blouse and high boots, and Maklakov discovered that it was Tolstoy. Having already read the account of Tolstoy’s childhood, Maklakov had hoped he would show him a little attention, but he became much more interested in the dog that Tolstoy had brought with him. He remembered Tolstoy’s broad thick beard, not yet gray, just as in the photographs. The wife of Maklakov’s host explained that in his clothing Tolstoy was imitating the simple people, and that this was all right for a brilliant writer, but that children were not to copy him.⁴⁷

Later, as a student, he had another sighting of Tolstoy, seeing him walking along Nikitskaia Street, looking exactly the way he looked in a photo at the beginning of a volume of collected works. Maklakov followed him, and even ran ahead so as to have a chance to meet him, deeply envying the person Tolstoy was talking with. But he didn’t dare approach and was content to contemplate him from afar.

After he’d gotten to know Tolstoy, Maklakov had an experience showing him how the writer’s mere presence inspired a similar awe in others. Maklakov and a fellow student named Singer were at the Tolstoys’ on the evening before Singer’s father, a professor of mathematics, was to deliver a lecture on Darwinism at the university. Singer told Tolstoy that his father would use the occasion to attack Darwinism, of which Tolstoy was no fan. Maklakov and his fellow student had the bright idea of taking Tolstoy to the talk, naively thinking that he could come without anyone’s noticing. Tolstoy agreed to come. Singer and Maklakov awaited him at the entrance and spirited him up a special staircase. Only a handful of people accidently spotted him as he entered. He sat in the hall behind a column, where no one could see him, but somehow word of his presence spread through the hall. People asked where he was and wouldn’t accept Singer’s and Maklakov’s assurances that he wasn’t there. The crowd’s whispering, and some members’ departures, made it impossible for the lecturer to proceed. Representatives of the event’s organizers persuaded Tolstoy to come up onto the platform, in the hopes that this would quiet people. But no: members of the audience jumped from their seats, waved handkerchiefs, applauded, and shouted. Professor Singer brought his lecture to a close, and Tolstoy disappeared. Maklakov caught up with him on the street; Tolstoy, “normally so delicate and disinclined to show dissatisfaction, said with irritation, ‘It’s you and Singer who arranged all this.’”⁴⁸

The famine of 1891 appears to have occasioned Maklakov’s first actual meeting with the great writer.⁴⁹ Even before that, the famine triggered a kind of anonymous encounter. At the end of the 1880s Tolstoy had published an article criticizing the custom of student carousing on Tatiana Day. On the eve of the day in 1891, Russkie Vedomosti published a letter, signed only “Student,” saying that if in the past one might not have heeded Tolstoy on this, it was indecent to ignore his point now. Evidently, the restaurants were empty the night of Tatiana Day; the “Student” was Maklakov.⁵⁰

After efforts to ban discussion of the famine, the government retreated and allowed the public freedom to help the hungry. Tolstoy normally scorned charitable activity by the rich, seeing it as a way for them to justify themselves: “If a rider sees that his horse is being tortured,” he said, “he should not try to buoy it up but should just get off.” Seeing the popularity of attempts to provide food, he prepared an article criticizing the efforts. But his friend I. I. Raevski invited him to see the peasants and the volunteers’ special cafeterias. Tolstoy came for two days and ended up staying two years, working tirelessly and becoming head of the social aid scheme.

Many came to help, often losing their positions and health to do so. Of course, all the so-called Tolstoyans came. In one of his appeals, Tolstoy endorsed a proposal that landowners offer to take in peasants’ horses to feed them through the winter. He especially liked this kind of help, as it would connect a peasant with a particular helper. Maklakov responded to the appeal, and through his acquaintances and luck he arranged more than 300 such adoptions. After Tolstoy returned to Moscow, the Tolstoyans came to report to him what they had done and brought Maklakov along. This was the first time Maklakov saw him close-up and talked with him.⁵¹

In the course of famine work, Tolstoy often told an Indian story that nicely reflected his self-effacement and sense of irony. Some sort of rich person, wanting to serve God, found a poor, sick hungry person under a fence. Obedient to God, he brought the poor man to his home, washed him, fed him, was kind to him, and showed him respect, and then rejoiced that he was able to do God’s will. After a few days, the poor man, feeling that all this had been done not for him but for the other’s soul, told the rich man, “Let me go back under my fence; it’ll be easier for me there.”⁵²

In a later chapter we’ll return to Maklakov’s relations with Tolstoy, his analysis of Tolstoy’s thought and life, and the ways they may have influenced him. For now, we need see only a snippet of their relationship in Maklakov’s student years. Maklakov observed that Tolstoy, who jokingly called him an “old young person,” didn’t try to reeducate him. At some point in Maklakov’s Moscow university life, Tolstoy asked him to join him for a walk, and in time that turned into a habit. While they walked, Tolstoy asked him about student life. It was flattering to chat with him, though Maklakov never understood why his stories might interest the writer. Later a conversation with Tolstoy about bicycling offered him a possible answer. Maklakov knew that Tolstoy bicycled a good deal around his country estate, Yasnaya Polyana; he asked Tolstoy why he didn’t make these tours on horseback. Tolstoy explained that he needed an occasional complete rest for his mind. If he walked or rode, it didn’t prevent him from thinking, so his mind got no rest. If he went by bicycle, he needed to keep an eye on the road and watch for stones, ruts, and holes, and then he wouldn’t think. “I understood why my stories were necessary for him during our walks. He could avoid listening, but they prevented him from thinking and gave his mind a rest.”⁵³

We have seen how Maklakov ultimately abandoned history for law, and a word is in order on his history studies. Vinogradov took him under his wing and, responding to a failed effort by Maklakov to develop a students’ circle for digging more deeply into Vinogradov’s work, started a special seminar. Maklakov’s seminar paper was based on a recently found fragment of parchment by Aristotle and tried to explain when and why ancient Athenians chose leaders by lot. To this day the question excites scholarly debate, but how Maklakov’s answer stacks up against current learning need not detain us. For our purposes, his answer is most interesting in prefiguring his later advocacy of reconciliation and a spirit of compromise between the Russian government and its adversaries, or, more broadly, among the social forces at war in early twentieth-century Russia. He advanced the theory that in an Athens in which four clans of about equal weight contended for power, the strategy of having government chosen by lot did not manifest any particular political theory but simply provided a way out of what might otherwise have been a hopeless logjam.⁵⁴

Maklakov’s 92-page essay was published in “Scholarly Notes of Moscow University,” with a preface by Vinogradov. As Maklakov later observed, “Of course no one read the Scholarly Notes.” But he acquired over 100 copies and, at Vinogradov’s suggestion, sent them to professors and other scholars. This didn’t pass unnoticed in the scholarly world—a Professor Buzeskul, of Kharbovskii University, cited it several times in his two-volume history of Greece.⁵⁵ In his memoirs, Maklakov goes on about this at some length and excuses it on the grounds that it is a pleasant memory of the good past. He closes the account by describing an exchange that occurred while he was a member of the Third Duma. One of his sisters met a professor who had written a favorable review of Maklakov’s essay. Knowing she was the sister of the deputy Maklakov, the professor inquired if she happened to know what had happened to the young scholar of the same name who had published work on ancient Greece and then had disappeared over the scholarly horizon. Learning that the scholar and the deputy were one and the same, he appeared for a long time not to believe it and then said with a sigh, “But we expected so much of him.”⁵⁶

Maklakov’s university years included a tragedy that haunted him the rest of his life. He had met one Nicholas Cherniaev through the Novoselov colony, where Cherniaev’s sister had lived. For a long time Cherniaev was his closest friend, and they saw each other daily. Cherniaev had been drawn to Tolstoy by his understanding of Christ’s teachings and could never reconcile those teachings with the world. To him, activities of the state and of revolutionaries seemed the denial of those teachings. He solved it by concentrating entirely on science. Maklakov thought that Cherniaev was stuck in a dilemma from which there was no exit, and they silently agreed not to talk of these matters.

When Maklakov was working at home on a paper, Cherniaev’s younger brother, a medical student, came and asked him to come home with him. Cherniaev, he said, had been burning his papers, and the brother feared some misfortune. Maklakov’s paper was due the next day, and he didn’t go. In memoirs written in his mid-80s, he wrote that he could not forgive himself for that. The next morning the brother came to his apartment and told him that Cherniaev had killed himself in the park, leaving a letter saying only that he’d used potassium cyanide and that no one was to blame for his death.

He had written letters for various friends, including several for Maklakov. One said that Maklakov had great talent, but nothing else, and went on in that vein. “I don’t believe in your heart, nor in your strength. You always exaggerate; you show more than you are.” He ended the letter with these words, full of passion: “I thought despite all that you loved me, but I was mistaken; you haven’t taken notice of my life, and you don’t notice anyone’s life, anyone’s grief. You are no Christian, and without that there is little value in all your talents. Farewell.” He added a postscript: “I wrote this a while ago, and now with a few hours left alive I have lost my pride and approach you asking for a favor: don’t forsake my Lisa [his younger sister]. Visit her, if only occasionally, bring her a book, and help preserve God in her.” Maklakov observes that she herself preserved God in herself and became a scientist, like her brother.⁵⁷

At the end of Maklakov’s time in the history faculty, he accepted the invitation of a relative—the brother-in-law of his stepmother, an artillery general—to do his military service in Rostov. The venture was preceded by yet another Maklakovian scrape, this time for acting as the party responsible for a student party that he didn’t attend but that got out of hand. He was banned from Moscow for three years after his military service—a ban that was soon dissolved. The military service was of a special type reserved for educated persons and known by the extraordinary term volnoopre-deliaiushchiisia. The service proved extremely easy, as his relative was the principal person in town, and he had loads of free time and could live in an apartment rather than in the barracks.⁵⁸

But on May 4, 1895, his father died of endocarditis, a then incurable disease leading to inflammation of the brain and aphasia, at the young age of 57. Maklakov said it was the end of his “spoiled life.” He had basically lived his whole life in a state apartment, and now he and the remaining members of his family had to clear out. His military unit was moved to Moscow, the ban on his living there was accordingly dissolved, and the military required no more of him. He resolved to do something with himself—to change his life and turn to the bar.⁵⁹

He and a brother and sister took an apartment together, and he arranged to prepare for the law faculty exams in a year. Because of the coronation ceremonies for Nicholas II, the exam date was moved up to March 1896, and the year that he could normally have counted on shrank to nine months. Though helped by such law as he had learned in historical studies, he was still compressing into nine months what would normally have taken four years to complete. He spoke of it later as “the great sporting achievement of his life.” Although he occasionally took time off for skating at Patriarch’s Ponds, he put a sign over the door to his room—“Guests should please stay no longer than two minutes.” He was greatly helped, he reported, by a professor who secured for him a copy of the lectures of another professor, V. M. Khvostov, who had explicitly refused to be of any help to him at all. In the end he added a second degree to his earlier degree in history, both “excellent.”⁶⁰