The Reformer

by Stephen F. Williams

  Did Maklakov’s association with Tolstoy affect his own behavior as a public figure? If you look for specific impacts, you will find few. One of Maklakov’s favorite words is the untranslatable gosudarstvennost, which has some overtones of “rule of law” but tends perhaps even more to connote the simple value of having a working state, standing athwart chaos. He often observed that even a bad state was generally better than no state at all; Tolstoy, of course, engaged in no such pragmatic comparisons. While Maklakov obviously did not like war, he was no pacifist: he believed there were circumstances where the consequences of refusing to fight were worse than those of fighting. But Maklakov’s reasoning was almost invariably pragmatic and consequentialist.

  One issue escaped Maklakov’s general rejection of Tolstoy’s political positions—the death penalty. (Even here Maklakov’s position is qualified by pragmatism—he regarded it as essential in wartime.) Perhaps his most famous speech was his attack on a system of virtual kangaroo courts created by the tsar and Stolypin in the summer of 1906. The aim of this system, the so-called field courts martial, was to stamp out an ongoing wave of assassinations. Maklakov’s prime target was the procedures of the courts: their extreme speed, the absence of any right of appeal, and a virtual presumption of guilt once the defendant was charged. We’ll come to the speech in the discussion of Maklakov’s role in the Second Duma. For now, the interesting feature is that his argument against the death penalty takes a Tolstoyan form. Rather than marshaling policy arguments (the uncorrectability of errors, the questionable deterrent effects, the consequences for Russia’s reputation in Europe, etc.), he tells a story: Characterizing the procedure as “a legal rite of death,” he invites the listener to observe the scene when the death penalty is applied:

  They lead a person, captured, disarmed and tied up, and tell him that in a few hours he will be killed. They allow his relatives to bid farewell to him—near and dear to them, young and healthy—who by the will of other humans will die. They lead him to the scaffold, like cattle to the slaughter, tie him to the spot where the coffin is ready, and in the presence of the doctor, procurator and priest, who have been blasphemously called to watch the business, they quietly and solemnly kill him. The horror of this legal assassination exceeds all the excesses of revolutionary terror.30

  Of course Maklakov might have come to such a viewpoint, and to such a rhetoric, on his own. But the reliance entirely on description and the complete avoidance of policy arguments and consequences, smacks of Tolstoy.

  Yet Tolstoy’s influence on Maklakov seems most powerful at a broader level—in Maklakov’s capacity to see alternative viewpoints, his practice of fairly discussing contrary claims even while advocating whatever approach he had come to regard as best. Earlier we saw his recognition of the contradictions between Tolstoy’s theories and his life. What could give a man more readiness to see the other side of an issue than to enjoy the friendship of a man whose life was a world of contradictions; to admire—indeed to worship and even love—a man whose mental processes and convictions were virtually the opposite of his own; and to recognize this man, whose political judgments must have seemed almost crazy, as a beacon for Russia and the world?

  Of course the child who responded to his classmate’s proposition about the origin of the universe by asking where the red-hot sphere had come from was not likely to buy simplistic positions, to disregard the vulnerabilities of any contention. But Maklakov’s long relationship with Tolstoy seems likely to have fostered his sense of truth’s complexity.

  Maklakov’s extensive memoirs never discuss his romantic life. The Moscow archives of his papers contain a record of his divorce from Evgenia Pavlovna Maklakova in 1899,31 but so far as I can tell have nothing else about the marriage. The archives also contain a good deal of correspondence of an “intimate character,”32 but I’ll address just two relationships of special interest (overlapping in time): with Lucy Bresser (whose stage name was Vera Tchaikovsky), a voluminous correspondent,33 and Alexandra Kollontai, a major political figure in her own right.34 Despite the silence of his memoirs on the subject, Maklakov seems to have been not at all secretive about his loves. Rosa Vinaver, wife of his Kadet colleague Maxim Vinaver, tells of a train trip from St. Petersburg to Paris, during which she conversed with him all the way until they were approaching Berlin. Maklakov said, “Here I must get out. I’m about to meet a very interesting lady.” On the platform appeared Kollontai, “as always graceful and elegant,” says Vinaver.35 Recall that Maklakov named a happy family life as “the crown” of Tolstoy’s enjoyment of worldly blessings; yet we really have no clue why he didn’t seriously seek out that blessing for himself.

  The relationship with Lucy Bresser involved at least a momentary brush with marriage. It began with Maklakov’s providing legal representation in some dispute in which Bresser seems to have been involved as a relative of a party. Her first (preserved) letter to him starts as follows:

  I am writing this not to the dear companion of a night’s journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow but rather to the unknown lawyer who sat with me in the Buffet of the Palais de Justice—whom I had the honor & intense satisfaction of thanking—of thanking for his efforts & success by a kiss.36

  The breathless style continues for about four hundred pages over nearly a decade, with punctuation rarely taking any form other than a dash. Lucy was married to a Cyril Bresser, so any marriage to Maklakov would have required a divorce. Evidently Cyril wasn’t ready to agree to one, so “apparently we shall have to find someone to swear that we were together—the difficulty is to make Cyril sue me for divorce.”37 The social stigma involved is suggested by Lucy’s mother’s reaction: “My mother calls me a prostitute & that I ought to be shot—if only someone would do it.”38 Maklakov (as quoted back to him in her letters, our only source) responded rather captiously to the need to show guilt under English law: Lucy quotes his rhetorical question: “Qu’est ce qui empêche de devenir coupable?” and in English, “What’s easier than to become guilty?”39

  More troubling, Maklakov seems to have reversed his position on marriage over the brief interval between June 8 and June 14, 1910. Bresser lays it out: “[O]n the 8th of June you reply to my question of divorce ‘Ai-je l’intention de t’épouser.’ Ah, il ne m’est plus difficile de le dire. Je le désire, je le veux de tout mon âme.” [“Do I intend to marry you. It’s no longer difficult to say. I want to, I want to with all my soul.”] Then “on the 14th your first letter of doubt arrived—what has happened between 8th & 14th?”40 If Maklakov ever offered a real answer, her letters don’t reflect it back. In a sense, the question is why he ever proclaimed his wish to marry her. He seems not to have been the marrying kind (or, more precisely, the remarrying kind), and her letters suggest a flightiness, even to the point of incoherence, that boded ill for the long term.

  The relationship, though featuring many a rendezvous that filled Lucy with delight, was persistently troubled by her dependency. Her letters are filled with requests for money. He met many such requests, but not all—or not completely. We don’t know the exact words Maklakov used to resist the claims, but she clearly read them as suggesting that she was a kept woman. She saw the financial aid differently: his desire to be able to be with her at times that fitted his schedule necessarily impeded her freedom to pursue her stage career. She regarded his financial help as no more than compensation for that impediment.

  Alexandra Kollontai, a Menshevik who evolved into a Bolshevik, could hardly have been more different. Like Maklakov, she was an impressive orator, stirring audiences with revolutionary fervor. Like Maklakov, she was named to diplomatic posts (in Norway, Mexico, and Sweden), holding the rank of ambassador after 1943; she had the advantage over Maklakov in that, unlike the Provisional Government, the government that appointed her remained in office. She was an articulate advocate of “free love,” or at least “comradely love,” and she lived in accord with her precepts. Her novel, Red Love, is a lightly concealed tract in favor of free l
ove (or perhaps more precisely, against any feelings of sexual jealousy) and against what she saw as the triumph in the early Soviet state of commercial and managerial greed over pure communist ideals. The heroine’s husband is generally seen as modeled on the lover with whom she had the most intense and extended relationship, a worker named Pavel Dybenko; Red Love’s heroine is named Vasilisa—in homage to Vasily Maklakov?

  The two seem to have gotten on very well politically. One letter reflects Kollontai’s reading of a series of Maklakov’s speeches in the Duma: “The first speech on the peasant question was very powerful, exact and successful. The later ones less satisfying.”41 Curiously, at the height of the Stalinist bloodletting in 1937, she wrote to a friend expressing a positively Maklakovian skepticism about Russia’s readiness for popular rule: “Historically, Russia, with her numberless uncultured, undisciplined masses, is not mature enough for democracy.”42

  Like Maklakov, Kollontai wasn’t fully at home in her political party, though perhaps she was more vocal in her dissent. After the October Revolution she helped found a “Workers’ Opposition,” aimed at fighting bureaucratic encroachment on worker control in industry. Her (and others’) ardor in the project helped precipitate a Communist clampdown on intra-party expressions of dis-agreement: in 1921 the party adopted resolutions condemning the Workers’ Opposition and claiming the right to expel members for “factionalism.”43 As was true of Maklakov, she had a deep skepticism about her party’s leadership. In 1922 she told Ignazio Silone, an Italian Communist who later left the party, “If you should read in the papers that Lenin has had me arrested for stealing the Kremlin’s silverware, it will mean simply that I have not been in full agreement with him on some problem of agricultural or industrial policy.”44 Despite all this, she was the rare Old Bolshevik to die of natural causes (so far as appears), a little shy of her 80th birthday and just a year before Stalin’s death.

  The two also shared a distaste for party partisanship—a distaste different from, but in keeping with their dislike of intra-party discipline. In 1914 a Bolshevik member of the Duma, Roman Malinovskii, was exposed as a double agent. The Bolsheviks were deeply embarrassed, and their Menshevik rivals piled on with criticism. Kollontai, then still a Menshevik, expressed her disgust to Maklakov. “The dirt we try to throw on Malinovskii above all makes us dirty.”45

  Consistently with her views on romance, she rather playfully teases Maklakov at his suggestion that she might be jealous. “Have you forgotten that that intolerable, though perhaps interesting feeling, has completely atrophied in me?” Then she teases him further about rumors of the “intimate side” of Maklakov, rumors that there was some pretty Jewish girl that he had had to marry.46 The idea that someone moving in sophisticated Russian circles in the early twentieth century would “have” to marry someone seems a bit outlandish, but perhaps the rumor mills had generated such a story. Despite Kollontai’s amusement at the thought of her possibly being jealous, she sounds a touch possessive. She is plainly eager to see Maklakov whenever their paths might potentially cross, giving details as to how to reach her, and is openly disappointed when he goes through Paris and fails to get in touch with her at a time when he knows she is there. She says she does not want to lose him, and that she has not lost faith in him.47 The correspondence suggests there may be something simplistic in a purported total denial of jealousy: how is the line drawn between that and love’s natural eagerness to be with the loved one (and presumably not in a mob scene)? This may be why Red Love reads more like a tract than a novel.

  Kollontai’s letters, especially one of them, devote a good deal of space to an analysis of their relationship. A letter sent in July 1914, on the eve of World War I, suggests she found in him an almost mesmerizing charm coupled with a frustrating remoteness:

  When we parted yesterday, . . . it was as if a melody had been interrupted, not allowed to play to the end. And today yesterday does not disappear, thoughts about proof-correcting [she was a busy writer as well as a revolutionary] flee to yesterday, look for something, there’s not regret that the melody was interrupted, not sadness, there remains rather a smile, a small smile at us both. Isn’t it funny that we’re so similar? . . .

  Our interest in each other is surprisingly intellectual! It isn’t boring—to the contrary! All the same—nothing in the heart trembles, is on fire. And it’s funny that each of us pushes himself to move to feelings. Together—we’re easy, not bored, but somehow relate as comrades. And we rebel against that. . . . You were far from any emotion, but when we went to the hotel you suddenly felt uneasiness; isn’t that natural? . . . And we both tried to find the right mood. But the question remains a question. Are conditions responsible for the fact that this interest always remains intellectual? . . . all the same, I’ve a right to have a really good relationship with you. I give you what is due and I know your value. Today I even sketched your silhouette in my notebooks. But, you know, there is something unclear, not individual about you—your relationships with women. To characterize you—one needs to find other strings to [the structure of] your soul. You aren’t one of those who would be characterized by your love life. And that’s especially curious in you, in whose life so many kinds of women have always been intertwined. But do you really distinguish between them? . . .

  Do you ever hear the effect you have on a woman’s soul? You simply have no ear for that. In this we are not alike. I, unfortunately, hear very well what develops in my partner’s soul, and it horribly complicates relationships. But there is another mark that brings us together [she never seems to say what this is]; but you do not love that, her individuality, nor her love for you, but rather your own experience. You forget the name, face, the specialness of the woman, however fascinating she may have been, but you never forget if you yourself went through something sharp, special. You know this. But what must exasperate them, your future loved ones, is your absolute inability to reflect the image of the loved one. Especially for women who are not too gray, they much more than men love to have a mirror in the face of their partner, in which they can be loved. But you, among the very rarest varieties distinguish only “gender” and “species,” like a naturalist. Those poor women! A question interests me: how is it then that you captivate them?48

  Kollontai’s questions, of course, remain unanswered, as do our own more prosaic or bourgeois questions about his failure to find—perhaps ever to seek—what he called the “crown” of worldly blessings, a happy family life.

  II. A Radical Tide

  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