The Reformer
Page 10
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 re
concile 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 Vedomost
i (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