The Reformer
Page 13
What of the State Council? In his memo exhorting French officials not to loan money to Russia, Maklakov assailed the government’s decree of February 20, 1906, which had established rules for the relationship of the Duma and State Council, making clear that legislation required the consent of both. This, he said, “annihilated the authority of the Duma.”15 Kadet rhetoric in 1906 was generally in tune with this view. The Fundamental Laws of April 23 retained the State Council’s equal status with the Duma—the status that the February 20 decree had granted.
But in writing his history-memoir, Maklakov sees no such “annihilation.” He argues that the State Council’s blocking role was unlikely to prove powerful. Given its lesser political accountability, it was powerless, he says, without the support of the tsar, just as the Duma was powerless without the support of the country. In any serious conflict, public hostility to the State Council would ultimately fall on the tsar—at least it would do so as long as he retained the power to appoint half the council’s membership. If he exercised his retained power to reduce the share of State Council members he could appoint,16 he would, of course, cut into his public responsibility for the State Council’s actions, but at the price of reducing his influence over its selection, and thus the likelihood of its blocking legislation at his behest. And Article 112 allowed the Duma, with the approval of the tsar, to resubmit a bill to the State Council even in the same session as its rejection (and to do so in later sessions without limit). Maklakov thus argued that the State Council was a shield the tsar could use “to deflect only a single arrow.” He had made a similar argument in the Duma in 1911.17
Maklakov’s argument as to the relative vulnerability of the State Council (and therefore of the tsar’s possible use of it as a cat’s-paw to prevent enactment of popular laws) proceeds in curious disregard of his own experience in the Duma. As we’ll see, his advocacy in the Duma—above all the Third Duma (1907–12)—helped secure Duma approval for several reforms that either were then rejected by the State Council or never even came to a vote there. How then could he be so blasé about State Council, after its seeming frustration of his efforts? Perhaps his passage in State and Society assumes the possibility of Duma reforms riding on waves of popular enthusiasm more powerful than were actually enjoyed by the reforms passing the Third and Fourth Dumas.
Curiously, the Kadets seem not to have focused any attack on the tsar’s power to defeat a provision by withholding approval. Perhaps they believed that victory on another pet issue—establishment of the principle that ministries must be responsible to the Duma—might well moot this power; the tsar as a practical matter would have difficulty acting except through the government. In any event, Maklakov argues that a tsar was unlikely to wield this veto. Whereas in a country with no representative body, or a silenced one, an autocrat or dictator could fairly easily resist the country’s will, he could do so much less easily with a body like the Duma on hand. Maklakov pointed to Article 112, which allowed the Duma to reconsider a bill rejected by the tsar so long as this didn’t happen in the same session. This would enable the Duma to build a case for a vetoed bill. The resulting debates and their publication (protected by the free speech and publication provision of Article 79) would be dangerous for the tsar’s prestige. Apart from a few matters adopted by the Duma and State Council on very thin majorities, Nicholas II’s only exercise of this power was on a bill relating to the naval staff, in which the Duma doesn’t seem to have been deeply invested.18
The Fundamental Laws had special rules relating to the budget and military affairs. Two key budget provisions are Articles 114 and 116. Article 114 precluded the legislative bodies from eliminating or reducing the amounts needed for the payment of state debts or other obligations. Maklakov defended that as suitable for a state with an underdeveloped sense of the rule of law;19 the defense seems sound so long as the legislature could limit the power of the executive to incur obligations, which the Duma’s general legislative competence would seem to include. Article 116 said that if a new budget should not be adopted by the beginning of a fiscal period, the prior year’s budget would carry over. Maklakov offered two defenses. First, he pointed to the risk of demagoguery or “scatter-brained improvisation,” illustrated by the Second Duma’s near rejection of the budget, a rejection prevented only by the vote of Polish Circle deputies—because their party was primarily interested in advancing Polish interests, it acted as a kind of free agent on broader Russian issues. Second, he argued that, whereas for ordinary laws the status quo continues in the event of inaction, for the budget, inaction (in the absence of something like Article 116) would mean that “the life of the country freezes.”20 In the United States, where the government’s spending is mainly authorized by continuing resolution, one can see his point.
As to the provisions making the tsar commander in chief and giving him broad authority over military matters (Articles 14, 96, and 97), Maklakov made a case that these powers were inherently suitable for a single figure. But he recognized that this would be less true if the government were “politically mature and the atmosphere normal.” In any event, by leaving appropriations for the military in the Duma’s hands, the Fundamental Laws gave it control over everything that needed money.21 With an aggressive legislature, that seems likely to include virtually everything.
Maklakov seems never to have bothered with perhaps the most bizarre provisions of the February 20 decree, which purported to bar the Duma from having a committee work up a bill until the government had declined to do so itself.22 Taken at face value, this would have delayed the Duma’s work for little or no offsetting public advantage. In fact, the Duma seems to have paid these provisions no attention.23
Maklakov’s defense of the Fundamental Laws as a step toward a rule-of-law regime, explained in State and Society, frames his attack on the Kadets’ conduct in the First Duma.24 Although he found their tone of unbridled hostility inapt and inept, his prime target was their insistence on giving priority to constitutional change at the expense of efforts to advance substantive legislation. Absolute priority for constitutional change would make sense if the October Manifesto and the Fundamental Laws left the Duma unable to mobilize public opinion for concrete reforms. But those documents gave the Duma ample means to stir up the public.
Although Maklakov’s 1936 analysis varies in some ways from his positions in 1906, the key question is whether his ultimate assessment of the Fundamental Laws was sound. His belief that they provided basic language for the development of the rule of law and liberal democracy seems right to me. But parchment protections alone are weak. As Maklakov argued incessantly in the Duma, the October Manifesto could work only if the government and others acted with good faith—by which he appeared to mean respect for the law and willingness to seek compromise within the law. He constantly found that good faith missing on the government side. Looking at the history from the reformers’ side, the real question is whether greater realism and moderation on that side might have coaxed the government toward good (or at least better) faith. Maklakov does not assert a firm answer to the question.
The tsar joined his promulgation of the Fundamental Laws with a critical personnel change. On October 19, 1905, right after issuing the October Manifesto, he had created a “council” of ministers that was to be substantially under the control of its chairman (only substantially because several ministers could still report directly to the tsar). He appointed as its first chairman Count Witte, who had advocated the creation of a council and chairmanship along these lines. The structural change and the appointment opened up a vista for the coherent formulation of policy. On April 22, 1906, just before issuing the Fundamental Laws, Nicholas relieved Witte of his post. He replaced him with Ivan Goremykin, an aging onetime minister of the interior hauled out of retirement. Goremykin seems to have been almost universally regarded as a cypher. On the eve of Goremykin’s appointment Count Kokovtsov, whom Nicholas was about to name minister of finance, met with the tsar and observed that h
e feared that Goremykin’s “personality, his great indifference toward everything, his utter inability to compromise, and his outspoken unwillingness to meet the new elements of our state life would not only fail to help us get acquainted with them but would serve to increase the opposition.” The tsar acknowledged that Kokovtsov might be right, but said it could no longer be helped, as “he had offered Goremykin the office and could not withdraw his offer.”25
The Kadets treated Witte’s replacement as a cause for “elation.”26 They somehow imagined that his fall showed the Kadets’ might and the regime’s anxiety in the face of the liberal-radical opposition. In fact, although Witte’s stands in the process of drafting the Fundamental Laws were sometimes conservative, sometimes liberal, and sometimes just confusing, his ultimate intervention may have been vital. After the drafting, the tsar held off signing for several days. Witte then made a pitch for going forward, and the tsar’s decision followed almost immediately.27 Maklakov may give Witte more credit than he deserves, but he seems right in his view that the choice was not between the Fundamental Laws as issued and some more liberal alternative, but between the Fundamental Laws as issued and retention of the old unlimited autocracy, in complete breach of the October Manifesto.28
But the foibles of Witte are not that important. The key is that the Fundamental Laws created a platform that reformers could use to advocate reforms in a national forum, to magnify their voices, and thus, at least occasionally, to win reforms.
CHAPTER 6
The First Duma
Take-Off and Crash Landing
IN ELECTIONS to the First Duma the Kadets captured a strong plurality—185 out of 478 seats. Three parties to the right won a total of 70 seats (the extreme right—zero). The remaining 223 seats went to leftists, many elected as “non-party,” including a substantial group of peasants and intellectuals who later assumed the label Trudovik (from trud, for work). (The leftist victory would likely have been greater if the Social Democrats and the Socialist Revolutionaries had not boycotted the vote; of course they would have taken votes from “non-party” leftists.) The Kadets were exuberant, or, as Maklakov said later, borrowing a phrase of Stalin’s, “dizzy with success.” Said Alexander Kizevetter, who a year later would join Maklakov as a member of the Second Duma, “[If] the Duma is dissolved, that will be the government’s last act, after which it will cease to exist.”1 This proved to be pure hubris.
On issues of substantive reform, there were major gaps between the Kadets and the regime. But the gaps did not add up to the sort of chasm that the brief story of the First Duma makes them appear. The regime—belatedly—announced policy goals of reforming peasant rights with a view to ending peasant isolation, equalizing their rights with those of other estates, and removing restrictions on their rights in the lands allotted to them in the emancipation.2 (Thwarted in the First Duma, the government in fact adopted many of these reforms under Article 87 in the “inter-Duma” period between the First and Second Dumas.)
In the election campaign Maklakov had not been a candidate, but he had been in charge of a “school” for Kadet orators and had spent a lot of time out on the hustings. He read the voters as seeing in the Kadets an embodiment of Kizevetter’s slogan “political freedom and social justice”—which Maklakov understood as an ability to improve life without revolution. He didn’t see their support for the Kadets as based on love for, or even interest in, the structural changes championed by the Kadets: four-tailed suffrage (universal, direct, equal, and secret), deletion of the State Council’s power to withhold consent from legislation, and Duma power to remove the cabinet. Paul Miliukov regularly called these issues the “three locks,” which he saw as obstructions to a true constitutionalism. As for the general mood, Maklakov perceived the ordinary citizen as strongly disfavoring revolution, mainly because the citizen rightly sensed that he would be the victim of its violence.3 This, of course, was the antithesis of the assumptions about popular feeling that seemed to underlie Kizevetter’s idea that a Duma dissolution would trigger the regime’s collapse.
What went wrong? Both sides plainly suffered from lack of experience: the government from never having had to deal with an elected legislative body, the Kadets from never having had to operate in a legislative body, much less to dominate one. Neither side had ever seen a Russian legislature at work. The educated on both sides were of course familiar with the French Revolution and the roles of the estates general and national assembly, but that vicarious experience didn’t provide much of a model for revolutionary ferment with a happy ending.
Also important (again on both sides) was a “moralization gap,” the ubiquitous human tendency to view the rights and wrongs of any clash in a way favorable to one’s own side.4 These two factors, inexperience and the moralization gap, surely helped generate, on each side, rhetorical sloppiness and a tendency to turn manageable disputes into hopeless gaps.
The first major misstep was the government’s. At the outset, it appeared before the First Duma with trivial and absurd facsimiles of legislative projects, implying that it found the Duma itself a triviality. This failing was a side effect of the tsar’s abrupt decisions to dismiss Witte on the eve of the First Duma and to have no holdovers in the new cabinet. Witte had in fact prepared a slew of proposals,5 but Goremykin, the new prime minister, had so little sense of the moment that he failed either to seek them out, or to create substitutes, or to explain the deficiency. Witte had seen the prospect of reform work in the Duma as a sign of health. He had argued at the Council of Ministers’ meeting of March 5 that “it is essential to immediately direct the activity of the State Duma to definite and broad but sober and businesslike work and thus make sure its work is productive.”6 And according to the memoirs of Count Kokovtsov, who had just concluded the successful negotiations for the French loan and had a long conversation with the tsar on the eve of becoming minister of finance, Nicholas II had obliquely echoed Witte’s thought, saying (as paraphrased by Kokovtsov) that “the Duma, occupied with the responsibility of legislative work, might prove less revolutionary than I [Kokovtsov] feared,” and that zemstvo circles “would not wish to take the lead in a new struggle between the government and the representatives of the people.”7
Not to be outdone by the government’s blunder, the Duma focused not on policy initiatives but on pursuit of constitutional change. The changes it proposed, stated in a formal address to the tsar, were not only improbable as a matter of politics (the bureaucracy had only barely extracted the tsar’s consent to go as far as he did) but also were framed in terms that violated the Fundamental Laws’ ban on Duma initiative for such changes (Article 107). The proposed changes were all the regular Kadet staples—extinction of the State Council’s vote as a necessity for legislation, the four-tailed franchise, and ministerial responsibility to the Duma.8
The oddity is that the Kadets and their Trudovik allies passed up the opportunity to frame these changes in non-constitutional terms. The toughest needle to thread was the status of the State Council, which was fixed in the Fundamental Laws (see, e.g., Article 86, making the Council’s approval necessary for the adoption of a new law). But, as the Kadets said in their address to the tsar, what concerned them about the Council was the way its members were chosen—half by the tsar, half by a franchise even narrower than that for the Duma. For changing both composition and franchise, the Fundamental Laws were no problem. Their only rule on those subjects was that the number of appointed members could not exceed the number of elected ones (Article 100). In other words, the Duma could change anything about the State Council’s composition so long as it didn’t reduce the relative weight of the representative interest, which of course was the last thing it wanted to do. As for suffrage, it was not defined in the Fundamental Laws but in the electoral laws of December 11, 1905; again Article 107 was no obstacle. Thus the Duma could readily vote for four-tailed suffrage and complete democratization of the State Council. Of course these changes, despite the legitimacy of Duma in
itiation, would have to secure approval of the State Council and tsar, clearly an impossibility. But a vote could have put the Duma on record, and perhaps over time developed support for its ideas, without an in-your-face defiance of the Fundamental Laws—defiance that came back to haunt the Duma (at least rhetorically) when the government invoked it to justify its decision to dissolve the Duma.
As for a requirement that the government be responsible to the Duma, nothing in the Fundamental Laws barred such a relationship. Maklakov argued that the practice would have been automatically “introduced to the degree that the Duma’s prestige grew in the eyes of both the country and the tsar”; with a highly prestigious Duma in place, the tsar would find it politically impossible to appoint or retain a government that the Duma rejected.9 All told, despite Kadet laments that the Fundamental Laws’ formal limit on the Duma’s ability to initiate an amendment was an outrageous violation of the rights of the people,10 it was in fact a minor barrier to their ideas for transforming the government’s structure.
Besides their gratuitous attempted breach of the Fundamental Laws, the Kadets formulated at least some of their constitutional goals—notably elimination of the State Council as an obstacle to legislation—as predicates to “fruitful activity in the Duma.”11 It must have been obvious that, for the time being at least, the Fundamental Laws went as far as the tsar was willing to go. To tell him that complete transformation of what he had just wrought was a prerequisite to substantive action was to demand surrender—yet again—from a figure who clearly felt no need to surrender. And at least on Maklakov’s reading, the Kadets’ electoral victory reflected no great popular zest for the sort of constitutional issues that obsessed the Kadet leadership.