The Reformer

by Stephen F. Williams

  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 cafeteria
s. 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 prepa
re 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

  CHAPTER 2

  Trial Lawyer

  MAKLAKOV’S DECADE as a trial lawyer developed his analytical and rhetorical skills, exposed him to facets of Russian life rarely brought home to a Russian intellectual, and gave him the opportunity to hone his powers of persuasion on countless juries of ordinary Russians. The simplest way to describe this period and highlight the features of Maklakov’s character that it reveals is through a series of vignettes and anecdotes. I postpone to later chapters discussion of his two most famous trials, which occurred after he had turned almost entirely to politics. One was the Vyborg Manifesto trial, where Kadet Duma members were charged with distribution of offensive material in a call for civil resistance to the tsar’s proroguing of the First Duma in July 1906 (see chapter 6). The other was the defense of Menahem Beilis, whose prosecution arose entirely out of Beilis’s being Jewish (see chapter 9).