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 al
ways 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.”
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