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CHAPTER 4

Into Politics—and Early Signs of Deviance from Party Dogma

AN OFFICIAL INVESTIGATION into the needs of agriculture elevated Maklakov from a distinguished young lawyer to something of a public figure. Russia’s finance minister, Count Sergei Witte, in 1902 urged Tsar Nicholas II to order an inquiry into agrarian matters through a Special Conference, headed by Witte. The conference, in turn, created committees of inquiry at the province and district (uezd) levels of government. One such committee was organized for Zvenigorod, where Maklakov owned land for hunting and fishing.

Maklakov found the committee’s discussion dispiriting. Count P. S. Sheremetyev, the chairman, quite rightly tried to give preference to peasant participants, but they tended to raise very narrow, specific complaints that could not readily be reframed as ideas for remedial legislation. Even when peasants got the idea that the committee was interested in identifying general problems, they gave up easily when they were told that the committee had no authority to adopt solutions—“There’s nothing we can do.” Maklakov did not think the peasant committee members were stupid; rather he thought that they lacked experience in the sort of reasoning required to analyze and address social and political problems. As to offerings from the intelligentsia, he found that, although they often spotted concrete questions and fundamental evils, they offered no solutions.¹

Though by his account he had generally viewed agrarian problems with the “indifferent eyes of the city dweller,” Maklakov believed that his rule-of-law ideals might well offer solutions. After seeking the blessing of a mentor, L. V. Liubenkov, he prepared a brief report, which he later disparaged as “rather elementary.” But it drew from a basic premise that agriculture is a form of industry, so that its flourishing depended on social characteristics similar to those required for other industries, primarily freedom of initiative and security of rights. His eight-page memo not only offered a devastating critique of government policy in the countryside, at least as it worked in practice, but also developed the themes that preoccupied him in the Duma: the arbitrariness of government behavior; the absence of impartial, law-governed courts that might protect the peasants; and the solidarity with which officials backed up their subordinates’ abuses. He pointed specifically to the “land captains,” a special type of official created in 1889 that wielded both executive and judicial powers and whose arbitrary behavior even included interference in peasant efforts to vote in zemstvo elections. He deplored the government’s failure to encourage (indeed, its active frustration of) private initiative and the prevailing “police point of view.” All this, he thought, led not only to distrust of government but also to skepticism of the very idea of law. And he assailed the separation of peasants into a separate estate.²

The memo generated controversy. Many members of the local committee regarded it as not germane to the needs of agriculture. When Maklakov was addressing the issue of government responsibility for lawlessness, one of the land captains on the committee said, “Now seriously, V.A., what relation does this have to agriculture?” But then a peasant with a peasant coat (armiak) and a long beard, who had never taken part in the discussions, unexpectedly stood, turned to the chairman, and said, “Your honor, this [referring to Maklakov’s depiction of pervasive government arbitrariness] is the most important thing.”

Maklakov’s theses passed the committee unanimously. Sheremetyev wanted to publish a book of the reports, but the provincial governor would allow it only if Maklakov’s paper were excluded. Sheremetyev refused to submit unless Maklakov agreed to the omission. The matter was ultimately settled by publishing only Maklakov’s “theses” (which he had articulated carefully as argument headings) and the comments of others, excluding Maklakov’s development of his theses. V. M. Gessen, later a fellow Duma deputy, asked him for the report, and in a book on the work of the Special Conference he dedicated more attention to Maklakov’s theses “than they deserved,” as Maklakov wrote in his memoirs. But the report and the rather enigmatic comments on it stirred up the educated public’s curiosity and attention.³

The paper’s moderation—in contrast to the usually extreme expressions of members of the Liberation Movement—found support. In his memoirs Maklakov noted sardonically that “even” his brother Nikolai (then a tsarist official in Tambov) wrote to him expressing satisfaction with the memo. “In those days it didn’t take much to become a hero of society.”⁴

As a direct result, he was invited to join Beseda (meaning “Symposium”), a tiny “semi-conspiratorial” organization whose members were important players in the Liberation Movement and, later, in the nonrevolutionary political parties competing for power in the legislative elections made possible by the October Manifesto. Its membership was limited to people engaged in “practical work,” meaning that they held elective office in Russia’s embryonic system of local self-government—a duma in the city or a zemstvo in the countryside. The criterion was a natural one, as Beseda had been formed in response to a 1903 memorandum by Count Witte that had attacked the compatibility of zemstvo self-government with autocracy and, at least implicitly, indicated that, of the two, it was zemstvo self-government that ought to go. Beseda was created precisely to oppose that idea. Maklakov held no elective office, but Beseda made a special place for him as “secretary.”⁵

Viewpoints in Beseda represented a broad range of reformist but nonrevolutionary opinion. Liberal constitutionalists favored a representative legislative body. The Slavophiles, who believed Russia could be better reformed by restoring healthy Russian practices than by adopting Western ones, split into at least two camps. Liberal Slavophiles favored reforms altering the structure of government but falling considerably short of an elected legislature; conservative ones favored policy reforms, but with no changes in the structure of the autocracy. Liberal Slavophilism was represented by Dmitri N. Shipov, whose vehement reaction to the Witte memorandum had been the spark for Beseda’s founding. Though constitutionalists of a moderate or liberal flavor soon came to dominate Beseda numerically, they never sought to make it purely constitutionalist, if only because doing so would have cost the organization the liberal Slavophiles’ potential influence over the government. Maklakov identified its unifying principle as a commitment to some degree of self-government, which was the essence of the zemstvo. At the time he joined, he was already a friend of a majority of the members.⁶ Perhaps surprisingly for such an elite group, it seemed not to take itself too seriously. By tradition, Maklakov reports, the first day of its meetings was devoted to what was jokingly called “collection of gossip”—information not generally available about what was going on in the corridors of power.⁷

By the time of the October Manifesto, its members had dispersed politically, mainly to the Kadet and Octobrist parties, and Beseda ceased to meet. Maklakov later wrote a brief elegy.

“Beseda” left me the best of memories. . . . To the end it personified the youth of Russian liberal society. It was pervaded by lively and powerful illusions about the healthy and peaceful renewal of Russia, illusions that later weakened. It had not yet lost faith in the authorities and was full of faith in Russian society. . . . The historical interest of Beseda lies in its representing one of the stages of development of Russian society, when it had not yet forgotten the traditions of the ’60s [the Great Reforms], but recalled the cooperation of the authorities and society and prepared for more of just that cooperation.⁸

The Russian Revolution of 1905 began on Bloody Sunday, January 9, in the wake of Russia’s disastrous performance in its war with Japan. Father Gapon, a charismatic activist priest, led a throng of workers toward the Winter Palace to deliver a petition to the tsar. Government troops opened fire on the marchers, killing 130 and seriously wounding 299, according to official figures.⁹ One can hardly imagine behavior more sure to arouse nearly universal hostility toward the regime. It triggered strikes, violence, arson, and killing in the cities and countryside; it nearly precipitated the regime’s collapse.

There is, oddly enough, a little-known counter-story to Bloody Sunday that tangentially involves Maklakov’s friend Alexandra Kollontai. In 1961 a woman who said she had been a 19-year-old weaver in 1905 told one I. A. Isakov that she found herself in the first row of marchers, facing soldiers led by an energetic, trim, and well-dressed officer trying to prevent the crowd from continuing toward the Winter Palace. All was peaceful and quiet. Suddenly, a cleanly dressed person rushed out of the crowd up to the officer, who seemed to expect some sort of word or request from him. The man pulled out a revolver and shot the officer. The officer fell, and then the soldiers began to fire at the crowd. The weaver escaped. Later, in the 1930s, she told the story to Kollontai, with whom she was well acquainted. Kollontai cautioned, “Masha, don’t tell anyone of this story. It could do you great harm.”¹⁰ Of course the story’s value depends on the veracity of the weaver and Isakov, which can’t be verified. But Kollontai clearly recognized the physical risk to anyone offering evidence impugning a key element of Russia’s revolutionary iconography.

In any event, Russian society, including Maklakov and other Beseda members, responded to the accepted account with vehemence. The Assembly of the Moscow Nobility met just a few days after the shootings to discuss possible “addresses” to the tsar, ultimately endorsing the most conservative of the drafts, one presented by F. D. Samarin (formerly of Beseda), supporting the troops’ action. Though not directly opposing reform, Samarin urged that it be postponed until war and internal rebellion passed (there had been little internal rebellion at that stage). Maklakov says that he “never took part in nobility meetings,” explaining (perhaps in jest), “I would have had to obtain a uniform,” but in nearly the same breath he reports that, at the request of Prince S. N. Trubetskoi (a professor of philosophy and liberal constitutionalist, also of Beseda), he did take the floor to contest Samarin. He argued that Samarin’s view—first peace and quiet, then reform—was just what had gotten Russia into its current position. Without reform there would be no peace. Writing about the episode later, Maklakov said that after rereading Samarin’s speech he didn’t see it as quite the “unconditional reaction” he had seen originally.

Samarin’s address prevailed, getting 219 votes, while a more reformist address received 147 votes. The moderates decided to issue a separate statement explaining their opposition to Samarin’s position and tasked an all-Beseda committee of Trubetskoi, N. A. Khomiakov (a liberal Slavophile), and Maklakov to draft the statement. A line supplied by Trubetskoi attacking the bureaucracy and accusing it of both paralyzing Russian society and dividing it from the monarch drew great applause, even from the rightists. As a way forward, the minority statement called on the tsar to summon freely elected representatives, whose presence could reconcile the tsar and the people. By contrast, the action of the assembly’s majority stood out against a background of overwhelming public sympathy for the victims and condemnation of the regime. In retrospect, Maklakov thought that, although the liberals didn’t prevail, their efforts at least qualified the image of the Moscow nobility as supporters of aggressive reaction.¹¹

The Beseda records (under Maklakov’s custodianship as secretary) suggest that Maklakov’s attitude at the time was more hostile to the monarchy than one might suppose from a study of his later writings. As a historian he pointed with horror to another politician’s seeming indifference to the burning of manor houses.¹² Yet his January 1905 remarks at Beseda seemed to express a good deal of schadenfreude at the woes of the autocracy and gentry. He argued that the agrarian disorders “make autocracy a much more dangerous profession.” Though seeing the disorders as possibly making ordinary people more reactionary, he had an answer. The task before Beseda, he said, was to convince the public that the disorders are “the consequence of government lawlessness” and thus turn them into “weighty evidence of the crisis of the regime.”¹³ At least at this stage—before the October Manifesto of that year and the Fundamental Laws of 1906—Maklakov’s language, though aimed at nudging the regime to curb its arbitrariness, seems fairly indifferent to the risks of revolution.

Indeed, Maklakov had earlier been instrumental in promoting cooperation between Moscow adherents of the Union of Liberation (the center-left precursor of the Kadets) and local Social Democrats and Socialist Revolutionaries. The group failed to form any real bloc because of the Social Democrats’ refusal to collaborate with “bourgeois elements,” but the Moscow Socialist Revolutionaries and members of the Union of Liberation did cooperate for a while.¹⁴ So at least before the October Manifesto, Maklakov saw benefits to acting in concert with the revolutionary left.

As part of the accelerating political action of late 1905, the Kadets held their founding congress at the Moscow home of Prince Paul Dolgorukov, between October 12 and 18. Maklakov spoke up twice. The first occasion was in response to a policeman who had entered uninvited. Nikolai Teslenko, who was presiding, tried to persuade the intruder to go. Maklakov asked for the floor and started to speak of the sanctions, including imprisonment, that a policeman risked by entering a house unlawfully. The policeman decided it was best to leave; Teslenko and Maklakov shared plaudits for this happy outcome. Maklakov credited his selection for the Kadets’ central committee in part to this effective action and in part to agitation on his behalf by his colleague in political trials, N. K. Muravyov.¹⁵ From then on he was continuously reelected to the committee until long after the Bolshevik revolution.

Maklakov’s second intervention was substantive. In a discussion of the party’s possible platform, he suggested that they bear in mind that one day the Kadets might become the government. An ideal polity, he thought, should obviously identify and protect its citizens’ rights, but a polity whose government lacked the capacity to enforce the law could hardly do so—it could not provide the order of “ordered liberty.” Thus Kadet ideals, he argued, called for the party to support allowing the government reasonable authority. This remark, he later reported, produced a storm of righteous indignation; one colleague told him that that the party must never think as the government, but always as a champion of the rights of man. The criticism was renewed years later, after most or all of the surviving participants had emigrated. It seemed to him that this position showed how ill-prepared the party was for the practical work of governing in a constitutional structure.¹⁶

Maklakov’s two brief interventions capture his relation to the party. His legal and rhetorical skills made him useful, and his memoirs make clear that he found a deep satisfaction in political work on the party’s behalf. At the same time, he seems never to have been really content with the party’s overall direction. Paul Miliukov, in one of his works in exile, described Maklakov as always having been a Kadet “with special opinions,” a judgment Maklakov reports without dissent.¹⁷ Later, as a Kadet deputy in the Second, Third, and Fourth Dumas, Maklakov relished the independence that its Duma delegation gradually acquired vis-à-vis the party leaders; he seems never to have been content with the party’s general drift. Maklakov’s aversion to tight party allegiance seems to have been a bond with his friend Fyodor Plevako. The latter, elected to the Duma as an Octobrist, showed no devotion to (or really much interest in) the abstractions of the party program. At political meetings in the elections to the Third Duma, Plevako and Maklakov appeared as champions of their parties, but Plevako’s “tolerance and respect for opposing views disarmed opponents and angered friends and associates.”¹⁸ So, too, as we’ll see, for Maklakov.

On October 17, in the midst of the Kadets’ congress and rising unrest, Nicholas II confronted a choice between repression and retreat. He chose the latter, issuing the October Manifesto.

We impose upon the Government the obligation to carry out Our inflexible will:

(1) To grant the population the unshakable foundations of civic freedom based on the principles of real personal inviolability, freedom of conscience, speech, assembly, and union.

(2) Without halting the scheduled elections to the State Duma, to admit to participation in the Duma, as far as is possible in the short time remaining before its call, those classes of the population which at present are altogether deprived of the franchise, leaving the further development of the principle of universal suffrage to the new legislative order, and

(3) To establish it as an unbreakable rule that no law can become effective without the approval of the State Duma and that the elected representatives of the people should be guaranteed an opportunity for actual participation in the supervision of the legality of the actions of authorities appointed by Us.¹⁹

From the perspective of what became standard Kadet doctrine, the manifesto had serious weaknesses. First, the tsar expressed his “will . . . [t]o grant” the civil liberties named, but that was not the same as granting them. Second, the principle of “universal suffrage” didn’t live up to the egalitarian “four-tailed” suffrage (universal, direct, equal, and secret) that the Kadets demanded. (As the electoral law of December 11, 1905, would show, it was easy to combine nearly universal male suffrage [giving the vote to males over 24 years old, excepting students and military in active service] with a strong tilt toward the propertied classes. As a result of the mathematics of the indirect structure, in which curiae of landowners, peasants, town dwellers, and workers chose electors who then directly or indirectly chose Duma members, the vote of one landowner was worth the same as those of two town dwellers, of fifteen peasants, or of forty-five workers.)²⁰ Third, the manifesto obviously did not call for a constituent assembly and thus kept the tsar very much in the picture for the ultimate crafting of any possible constitution.

But the manifesto stated a commitment to core principles of the rule of law. In the hands of a reasonable and independent interpreter, paragraph 1 had the potential of developing into a full-fledged bill of rights. Paragraph 2 meant that even if the votes of many citizens might be diluted, all or nearly all men would participate in the governmental process, thereby acquiring a say in legislation and experience in thinking about government and politics. Most important, paragraph 3 barred the tsar from changing any law without the consent of the (as yet uncreated) Duma, a wholly independent institution, and promised the “people’s representatives” a role in ensuring the legality of the laws’ administration. The manifesto thus would bar the executive, the tsar, from acting on the basis of his will alone, either by ignoring the law or by changing it unilaterally. At least as a promise, then, it brought the government under the law—the most vital but the most elusive component of the rule of law.

The Kadets who had gathered at the founding congress generally recognized the manifesto’s historic significance. As described by Alexander Kizevetter, a Kadet leader and historian, a man named Petrovskii rushed in from the editorial offices of Russkie Vedomosti (Russian news) and made his way to the podium. The presiding Kadet, Maxim Vinaver, interrupted the speaker and read out the manifesto. Writes Kizevetter, “The autocracy was over. Russia had become a constitutional monarchy. Citizen freedoms were proclaimed. Mitrofan Pavlovich Shchepkin, gray with age, trembling with emotion, said, ‘Now at last we are free.’” Kizevetter reported in his memoirs that no one could stay at home, but instead poured into the streets of Moscow, congratulating each other as if it were Easter.²¹

Maklakov seems to have shared the general delight among liberals. Certainly in his speeches in the Duma over the years from 1907 to 1917, he invoked the manifesto constantly, not merely as a legal standard by which to measure the government’s acts, but as an inspiration, as the founding of a new order, as a sacred text.

Miliukov, the party leader, shared none of this. He publicly responded, “Nothing has changed. The war continues.”²² When the Kadet party’s founding congress ended the next day, the party issued a statement (postanovlenie) that conveyed the same spirit without using Miliukov’s exact metaphor. Looking at the October Manifesto, the statement almost completely ignored the doughnut and focused relentlessly on the hole. Imagine if King John had preemptively issued rather than negotiated the Magna Carta, and the barons had responded by pointing out the gaps between it and a detailed constitution meeting all of their political dreams. The Kadet statement started by saying that the manifesto and Witte’s accompanying report gave “far from full recognition” to the basic principles of political freedom and the equal and universal electoral rights demanded by the Liberation Movement. The October Manifesto, in fact, did recognize basic principles of political freedom, even if they were not exactly the ones demanded by the Liberation Movement, and even if full elaboration was left to the future (as under the American Bill of Rights). After making the important point that the manifesto didn’t repeal the extraordinary security laws (which allowed officials of the ministry of internal affairs to exile people for up to five years without any recourse to judicial process), the statement went on to argue that for various reasons the Duma soon to be elected could not be recognized as a genuine popular representative assembly, so that (non sequitur alert!) the Kadet party’s goal must remain as before—a constituent assembly elected on the basis of four-tailed suffrage.²³ In short, the statement reflected Miliukov’s insistence that society and the authorities remained at war. In a zemstvo congress about a month later, Miliukov offered a resolution recognizing the October Manifesto as a “precious achievement” of the Russian people. But his zemstvo congress audience represented a far more moderate body than the Kadet party; Miliukov was sugar-coating his views to enlist its support for the Kadet program.²⁴

Soon afterward, Witte launched a set of negotiations aimed at forming a cabinet relatively acceptable to the nation. First he asked Dmitri Shipov, the leader of liberal Slavism, to call on him, and asked him to join the cabinet as state controller. Shipov declined the job offer, but proffered some advice. As Witte had clearly invited Shipov in order to learn a zemstvo viewpoint, Shipov advised him to turn to the zemstvo leadership, in the form of the Bureau of Zemstvo Congresses, and ask it to send him a delegation. Shipov expected that at the Bureau’s scheduled meeting on October 22 he would have a say in naming the delegates. But the process moved too swiftly. Witte sent the invitation to the Bureau by telegram, which (in Maklakov’s words) “whipped up” the Bureau’s self-confidence. Seeing the request as a sign of the government’s weakness and a capitulation, the Bureau began to act with great self-confidence.²⁵

Before Shipov could meet with the Bureau, it formed a small committee that included, either as a member or at least an attendee, someone who wasn’t involved in zemstvo matters at all, Miliukov himself.²⁶ Miliukov managed to arrange the selection of F. F. Kokoshkin as leader of the delegation, a choice that Miliukov himself recognized as signaling to Witte that the zemstvo bureau was not ready to compromise.²⁷ The committee charged the delegation to tell Witte that the only solution to the present situation was to call a constituent assembly, to be chosen by a “four-tailed” franchise; and that a constitution “granted” by the tsar would be completely unsatisfactory. (This insistence on immediate democracy at the outset, including a democratic method of generating a constitution, seems based on Miliukov’s belief that a developed and organized democratic society “can be created only by an active political life,”²⁸ that is, that the onset of democracy would itself be enough to generate the skills needed to make democracy functional, to enable it to survive amid countervailing forces such as reaction, populist demagoguery, and interest-group machinations.) Obviously Witte could not accept such terms.²⁹ Witte soon thereafter invited Miliukov himself in for consultation, and, curiously, Miliukov’s direct advice to Witte was quite different from the standard Kadet notion that the only way forward was through a constituent assembly. Writing of it later, he explained that with Witte he conceived of himself as acting in a non-party capacity:

I came [Miliukov reported] not as representative of anyone but in my capacity as a private person, whose advice was sought by the highest representative of the authorities of the moment, when it was being decided what direction Russian history should take. And on the question then put to me by Witte, what should be done, I decided to answer according to my conscience and personal conviction, not binding myself to the generally approved political formulae of my intellectual fellow travelers. I wanted to take the discussion down from academic heights to the sphere of real life.³⁰

Miliukov’s explanation of his answer does not really bridge the gap between his public position and his advice to Witte. If important decisions “for Russian history” were at stake (as they were), it would be startling to think that Witte would want anything other than Miliukov’s real views, or that he would prefer notions from the “academic heights” rather than ones from the real world. It seems a sad commentary on the politics of the Kadet party that there was such a gulf between its leader’s “conscience and personal conviction” and the “generally approved political formulae” that he and his “intellectual fellow travelers” had enthusiastically adopted.

The substance of Miliukov’s advice was no less otherworldly. He told Witte that, although he still thought that a constituent assembly was the ideal way to get to a constitution, it was unsuitable in the circumstances and that the tsar should just grant one. Yes, he acknowledged, society would complain (in part because Miliukov himself had been constantly insisting that only a constituent assembly would do), but in the end it would work.

Specifically, he proposed that Witte arrange translation of either the Belgian or the Bulgarian constitution (presumably chosen as reasonably liberal written constitutions, and, in the Bulgarian case, one that had survived since 1879 in a country with scant liberal tradition), get the tsar to sign it the next day (whichever constitution it happened to be), and publish it the following day. Miliukov’s constitutionalism seemed to be wrapped in a passion for labels, for form regardless of substance: when Witte refused to use the word “constitution” and explained that the tsar was against it, Miliukov, by his own account, broke off the discussion, telling Witte, “It is useless for us to continue our conversation.”³¹

Maklakov says, with some justice, that Witte must have taken the constitutional proposals as a joke. At stake was a new order for a huge country of different ethnicities, different “estates” (a historical legacy that Maklakov was determined to eradicate),³² and different levels of education. Its political relations were encrusted with complications that had accumulated over centuries. And Miliukov was saying that for this transition, it was enough to adopt the constitution of one of two very small countries, with apparent indifference as to which it should be.³³ All told, he took a “flick-a-switch” view of how to transition to liberal democracy.

Maklakov’s critique of the Belgian/Bulgarian solution operates on two practical levels. The first is the matter of political power. The tsar had not been defeated. To be sure, his issuance of the October Manifesto had not delivered the hoped-for calm. Indeed, a major insurrection had arisen in Moscow right after its promulgation. But as suppression of the uprising in December was to show, the regime could protect itself. It was naïve and even arrogant to think that under those circumstances the tsar would accept the role of a figurehead in a purely parliamentary regime.

The other element of absurdity in the Belgian/Bulgarian option lay simply in the broader issues of social and political evolution. If a new regime in Russia was to live as a rule-of-law state, it could not instantly transform all the actors’ accustomed roles by fiat. Change to an alternative system of arbitrary rule would be simple enough. But in Maklakov’s view transformation to the rule of law was a different story: people’s old practices, expectations, and habits of mind inevitably shape their behavior to some degree, and Russia’s historic ones would not match the kind of full-blown democracy that Miliukov contemplated.

After the failure of negotiations between the Kadets and Witte, revolutionaries launched a general political strike in Moscow with the hope—which proved well-founded—that it would develop into an armed uprising.³⁴ (Some school students were accused of having started the uprising. Maklakov defended them, and a fellow lawyer and observer wrote later that “never did Maklakov’s talent sparkle so brightly” as in the defense, laying bare the weak spots of the prosecution and leading to acquittal.³⁵) In Maklakov’s view, any constitutional regime would have felt obliged to suppress it. Witte’s choices were whether to do so in alliance with liberal society or with the right. Even in an autocracy, a prime minister needs allies. Finding himself unequivocally rejected on the liberal side, Witte predictably turned to the right, unleashing Minister of the Interior Durnovo to repress the revolution.

Maklakov makes no bones about the savagery of this repression. He describes the use of artillery against neighborhoods, selective shootings of individuals on lists provided by the Okhrana (secret police), and the slaughter of students for no offense other than being a student at large on the streets of Moscow. He recounts one poignant case, in which a father kept his student son at home all day, but then ventured out into the streets with him at night, with the son wearing a coat that covered his student clothing. Police wrenched the son from the company of his father and hustled him off; the father saw him again only in a morgue.³⁶

It is of course speculation that repression by a government at least loosely allied with the liberals would have been less savage. But Witte in his diary entries repeatedly laments his isolation at this period.³⁷ It seems plausible that, if he could have pointed to some liberal support, he might have adopted, or persuaded the tsar to adopt, less ruthless methods of repression.

Instead the Kadets stood aloof, if anything signaling sympathy with the revolutionaries by organizing medical aid, never uttering a public word of criticism of the revolutionaries, and never expressing any recognition that government—any government—has some duty to prevent popular violence. In the central committee of the Kadet party Maklakov and N. N. Lvov favored Kadet condemnation of the uprising but didn’t prevail.³⁸

The Kadet response to the October Manifesto and its aftermath was in Maklakov’s view a failure on many fronts. The most immediate effect of their refusal to work with Witte was the de facto rightist control over suppression of the Moscow uprising. More broadly, it strengthened the right and undermined moderates in the bureaucracy. It also meant, in Maklakov’s view, the abandonment of a key opportunity for the sort of activity required for constitutionalism. A leitmotiv of his writings is the idea that a workable rule-of-law state requires that citizens follow certain behavior patterns, developed and nurtured by experience. Foremost of these is the habit of compromise, of recognition of the rights and interests of others. He quotes Bismarck as saying that the essence of constitutionalism is compromise. Bismarck’s view has been seconded by a quite different political figure, Bill Clinton: “If you read the Constitution, it ought to be subtitled: ‘Let’s make a deal.’”³⁹ Russian autocracy, of course, provided few chances for that experience—the zemstvo being the most notable exception. The October Manifesto offered such an opportunity, and, at least as a party, the Kadets turned their backs on it.

The next major step in the regime’s halting embrace of constitutionalism was its April 23, 1906, repromulgation of Russia’s Fundamental Laws, revised to reflect the commitments made in the October Manifesto. In the next chapter I’ll tackle the question of whether those laws moved Russia seriously toward the ideal of the rule of law. Before that, we should consider Maklakov’s involvement in an effort in Paris, just before the promulgation of the revised Fundamental Laws, to thwart the government’s effort to float a massive loan (2.25 billion francs) with the aid of the French and, to a lesser extent, the British, governments. Apart from its intrinsic interest, the episode is probably the strongest ground for an argument that Maklakov was just Monday-morning quarterbacking in his later writings accusing the Kadet leadership of radicalism and folly in 1905–1907.

Indeed, at first blush, his behavior sounds rather extreme: working abroad to defeat a key foreign policy initiative of one’s country. Perhaps, in fact, it was extreme. Under our Logan Act, adopted in 1799, it would be a crime for an American to carry on correspondence or conversations with a foreign government with the intent to “defeat measures of the United States.”⁴⁰ Because Russia (so far as I know) had no equivalent of the Logan Act, the key issue was political and not legal: activities of this sort might tar the liberation movement as at least non-patriotic, perhaps worse. I will lay out the facts, primarily as presented by Maklakov himself in his 1936 memoir-history, Vlast i obshchestvennost (State and society). That account squares well with the published scholarly accounts; where they diverge substantively, the scholars offer no evidence supporting their contradiction of Maklakov.⁴¹

Maklakov had participated actively in the election for the First Duma, both campaigning for party candidates himself and, as head of the Kadet speakers’ bureau, guiding others. By April 1906 he felt entitled to some time off and, following his long-established predilection for vacations in France, headed to Paris. On the train he had the company of Paul Dolgorukov, who went on directly to the Riviera from Warsaw (and who, as we’ll see, turns up later in Paris and engages in anti-loan lobbying). One of the scholars of the subject speaks of Maklakov’s having got “the idea to go to Paris and join the protest against the loan,” but it seems safe to reject the insinuation that he went to Paris to participate in the protest, given the absence of any supporting evidence and Maklakov’s longtime practice of taking French vacations.⁴²

Once in Paris, Maklakov met one or more of the friends whom he regularly saw there,⁴³ learned that his old friend S. E. Kalmanovich was in town, and was brought by friends to an event in honor of Kalmanovich’s daughter’s wedding. People at the party were somewhat astonished to learn that liberals in Russia had not fully shared the Paris emigrant community’s concern that the imminent loan would strengthen the autocracy vis-à-vis the liberals. Maklakov’s friends brought him to meet Pierre Quillard, a French poet, an ardent Dreyfusard, a champion of oppressed nationalities, and a leading member of the Société des amis du peuple russe et des peuples annexés. Frenchmen of a liberal or socialist bent, with the Société in the lead, had already conducted a vigorous—but quite unsuccessful—public campaign against the possible loan. Quillard proposed that Maklakov prepare a memorandum against the loan for submission to French government officials. Good connections between members of the French government and Société figures such as Quillard and Anatole France ensured delivery of such a memo.⁴⁴

Maklakov agreed, and a copy of the resulting memo, evidently later obtained from French foreign office files, was published in 1961.⁴⁵ In a chapter of his 1936 memoirs-history, State and Society, addressing the loan, Maklakov acknowledges that he submitted such a memo but never quotes from it, presumably because he had neither a copy nor access to the foreign office files. His account of the memo is (naturally) shorter than the memo itself, but quite accurately reports its basic thesis, which was entirely political, not legal. It made no legal claim—such as the left had been circulating in France—that the loan would be unlawful without Duma approval. In State and Society he said that he then believed that until promulgation of the Fundamental Laws the tsar’s powers continued;⁴⁶ the memo is in full accord. The memo argues instead that the loan would represent an intervention on the side of autocracy, relaxing its need to accommodate the burgeoning liberal democracy. Although one of the scholars writing about the anti-loan campaign says that “no reference to this memorandum has been found in Maklakov’s major works,” in fact State and Society refers to the memo and gives its gist.⁴⁷

But in two respects Maklakov’s account of the memo might be said to shade the truth. First, without actually saying so, the memo rather subtly gives the impression that Maklakov speaks for the Kadet party. In a few places he uses the first person plural (nous or notre), saying, for example, that he’s going to discuss the reasons “why our party, in harmony with the great majority of the nation, consider the foreign loan proposed by our government as disastrous [funeste] for the interests of Russia and dangerous for those of France.”⁴⁸ His later account doesn’t acknowledge that he had seemed to act as a representative of the party.

Second, though Maklakov’s memoirs-history made clear the basic claim that the loan would help the survival of an absolutist regime, it gave little clue of the memo’s scathing portrait of the autocracy:

The dilemma is clearly posed: the absolutist party must either yield to the national will, and abandon its dream of restoring autocracy, or it must immediately make a supreme effort to provoke a conflict and suppress the Duma. . . .

If it is the former, the current practices of the government will continue, that is, the dilapidation of the Treasury, the weakening of industry and of commerce for want of the necessary liberties, the massacre of Jews and of ethnic minorities, of liberals and intellectuals, the destruction of what remains of the universities and schools, the suppression of the few liberties conceded to the press, the total ruin of agriculture, the final exhaustion of the country’s last vibrant forces, the daily increasing disorganization of the army and the fleet, and finally permanent recourse to more and more onerous loans ending in the inevitable bankruptcy.⁴⁹

Besides savaging the autocracy and drawing on French sympathies for representative government, liberty, and ethnic fairness, the memo targets concrete French interests: France’s desire for military advantage; firming up its entente with Russia; and its hopes of ever being repaid.

The memo also claims that a decree had “annihilated” the authority of the Duma by creating a higher legislative body, the State Council, in which half the seats were to be held by appointees of the government,⁵⁰ and whose agreement would be necessary for most legislative action.

Although the memo might seem to track the most intransigent voices among the Kadets, it does acknowledge that the ministry had contained at least two liberals, M. M. Kutler and Vasily Timiriazev. But it nullifies whatever sympathy that might have won for the regime with the observation that they had been removed, which the memo ascribes to the influence of “a court camarilla” of grand dukes and others.⁵¹

The memo never had the slightest chance of affecting the loan. Although it was formally executed on April 22 (n.s.), the loan contract had been signed April 16,⁵² and the memo bears a legend at the top saying that it had been conveyed to the French foreign ministry on April 18. When Maklakov and two other Russians (Kalmanovich and Count Anatolii Nesselrode) met with Georges Clemenceau (then minister of the interior, but soon to start his first period as prime minister, from late 1906 to mid-1909), the minister made clear that the loan had been a done deal for some time.

In State and Society Maklakov gives quite a full account of the interview with Clemenceau.⁵³ The meeting was rather secret, conducted in a little office apart from Clemenceau’s main office, evidently because his holding the meeting poached on the territory of the minister of foreign affairs, Léon Bourgeois, behind whose back they were meeting. Clemenceau explained right off the bat that the loan had been agreed on, so there was really no occasion to discuss its merits.⁵⁴ The conversation instead turned to the Russian liberals’ general strategy. Clemenceau was astonished at their quest for universal suffrage: “Didn’t we understand,” he asked Maklakov, “that any people needs a long time to be weaned away from their prejudices and crudeness, before they can be allowed to take charge?” As an example of such crudeness, he recalled how the French, much more experienced in these matters than the Russians, had reacted like “lunatics” to a mere proposal to inventory the contents of churches (after the Separation of 1905). “You don’t know what the strength of the authorities will be under an inexperienced population.” Though Clemenceau was famous for saying that the Revolution must be accepted “en bloc,” he was aware of its weaknesses and recommended caution and moderation: “Anything can happen except what you expect.”

Maklakov raised the issue of resisting the oath to the autocracy, which was to be demanded of incoming deputies (and which his memorandum had complained about). Clemenceau “grabbed me by the arm: ‘Don’t do it. What does a vain word cost you? For the devil’s sake, don’t fight over a word. Leave them their words and titles, and take the substance yourself.’”

In a brief exchange on the loan itself, Maklakov explained how the loan would be a powerful weapon for the old regime in its struggle with the liberals. Clemenceau: “Ah, I understand you. You’d like to seize the government by the throat. You ought to have thought of it sooner.”

Maklakov closed his account of the conversation by explaining why he had made it so complete: It was “so characteristic—in it spoke the real Clemenceau.”

After the Clemenceau interview, word reached Maklakov that Raymond Poincaré, then finance minister, would like to meet the Russians.⁵⁵ Nesselrode refused to go, and Kalmanovich had left town. Maklakov met with others in a café, where their conversation was overheard by an official in the Russian embassy. (While Maklakov noticed this sign of Russian intelligence operations, doubtless there were many he didn’t detect.) He was not eager to go, but Dolgorukov had arrived in Paris from the Riviera, and Maklakov proposed that they go together, which they did. Poincaré spoke of a condition that the French were proposing—that no money could be expended without consent of the Duma. Maklakov said it was completely useless, because a French condition could not amend the Russian constitution. (Presumably the French could not, after the execution of the loan, add a new, binding condition to the delivery of the loan’s tranches.)

Just before Maklakov and Dolgorukov returned to Russia, the French foes of the loan asked them whether they would join a public campaign against it, and specifically whether they would do so as representatives of their party. This proposal obviously called for consultation with the party’s central committee; in view of their imminent return they did so by telegram, which they sent “in clear.” The central committee didn’t answer, thus implicitly rejecting the idea. Maklakov chides himself for the carelessness and irresponsibility of sending an open telegram, thus giving “arms against ourselves.” The self-reproof is surely right, though one wonders if the telegram added much to the secret police’s dossier on the Kadets’ activities in Paris.⁵⁶

Concluding his account, Maklakov addresses an issue he had raised at the beginning—the principle that Russia should be united in relation to foreigners.⁵⁷ In justification of his conduct, he says that if he had acted in accordance with that principle, he would have brought on himself “the indignation of the whole of Russian society.” Such an idea was no part of the liberation movement as it then existed. As an example of prevailing standards, he cites Miliukov’s refusal, on the occasion of the parliamentary delegation’s visit to London, to take part in a possible collective Russian response to an article, apparently attributed to Ramsay MacDonald, that ranted not only against the Russian government but against the tsar himself. Because of Miliukov’s resistance to any rebuke by the delegation as a whole, the only Russian answer was from its chairman, Khomiakov. The refusal to defend the country, he says, wasn’t personal to Miliukov. “In 1906 I sinned not individually, but from our general sin.”

Even if we assume that the MacDonald episode was parallel, the exculpation seems dubious—at least by the standards that Maklakov developed later. First, his post-1917 account of Russian politics is replete with broad criticisms of “society” and its militancy; so how could the assumptions and predilections of society justify his conduct? Second, he could have just kept quiet in Paris, or at any rate not ventured beyond conversations with his Russian and French friends.

Though Maklakov’s writings and Duma speeches are filled with criticism of the regime, none appears as vehement as that of the anti-loan memo. In State and Society, as we’ll see, Maklakov gives a reasoned defense of the new Fundamental Laws—which had not been issued at the time of his memo. To be sure, I’ve found no Maklakov defense of the Fundamental Laws contemporaneous with their issuance. Despite that gap, it seems quite possible that the newly revised Fundamental Laws may have led him to appraise the regime more generously than he did at the time of his memo to the French and to believe that the powers granted the Duma gave it a decent chance at fulfilling the promise of the October Manifesto.