The Reformer

by Stephen F. Williams

  Maklakov went on to express dismay at seeing the procurator (the Russian equivalent of a prosecutor, but also playing a role similar to an ombudsman’s), “the guardian of the law,” “publicly seek[ing] to violate it, [and] for the sake of political ends asking that a statute be applied that cannot be [properly] applied. . . .” Then he wound up:

  It is not of the fate of these people [the defendants], however close or dear they may be to me, that I’m thinking of now. For them your verdict cannot do a great deal [they had already been excluded from the Second Duma], but from it [the verdict] I await an answer to the tormenting question, with which many Russian people are watching this trial, “are defenders of our law to be found?”34

  Another distinguished lawyer of the time wrote of the speech and Maklakov:

  Maklakov made a special impression with his speech. It was purely juridical, and in that lay the special quality of this orator of talent, who burned as no one else with passion for the law. Psychological experience, scenes of everyday life—all that touched Maklakov little, slid by his temperament, and in such matters he barely rose above the level of a good orator. But it took only some kind of violation of rights to strike his sensitive ears for Maklakov to be transformed. His speech then reached surging heights of power, he captivated and mastered his listeners.

  I’ve had to appear in defense with the best orators of Russia, but if I were asked what speech made the strongest impression on me, I would answer without hesitation: the speech of Maklakov in the Vyborg trial.

  When he finished speaking, the whole room was stockstill, then in a minute burst forth in thunderous applause.35

  The court acquitted only two of the 169 defendants and sentenced the remainder to three months in prison and a ban on electoral candidacy. Russia’s highest judicial body, the Criminal Cassation Department of the Senate, affirmed the conviction, over the dissent of three out of nineteen senators.36

  Even before the trial, the existence of the charge itself had excluded most of the Kadet members of the Duma from eligibility for election. As Maklakov wrote later: “This affected my personal fate. When there were elections for the Second Duma, the majority of the well-known Kadets were ineligible, and in Moscow the party presented other candidates, of the second order, known to it from the electoral campaign for the First Duma. They were Kizevetter, Teslenko and I.”37

  CHAPTER 7

  The Second Duma

  Challenging Stolypin, Engaging Stolypin

  SOON AFTER the Second Duma met, on the very night before Stolypin was to address it for the first time as prime minister, the roof of the chamber collapsed. It was before dawn, so no one was hurt. The collapse itself was, of course, a bad omen, but some of the reactions were worse. Pavel Krushevan, the deputy from Kishinev and one of the so-called Black Hundreds (the label loosely applied to vitriolic reactionaries and anti-Semites), on seeing the devastated room reportedly said “Good,” and “his face lit up with satisfaction.”1 On the left, a Kadet veteran of the First Duma insinuated deliberate government neglect, saying that inadequacies in the ceiling had been noticed in the First Duma and money appropriated for their correction.2

  In the election campaign preceding the Duma’s convocation, the government had harassed the opposition with a blend of repression and incompetence. At a campaign event where Maklakov spoke of what “we,” the Kadet party, favored, a policeman interrupted to say that he mustn’t do so, because the party was banned (as it technically was). Maklakov switched to “they,” and that was apparently all right.3 Another government tactic also depended on the party’s unlawful status. Because of the indirect method of elections, voters chose only electors, who were typically people unknown or at least much less well known than the real candidates. Without lists linking them, voters were likely to get the electors’ names wrong, so official lists were provided. But the government invented a new rule, which had not applied in elections to the First Duma, disallowing official lists for the illegal parties. The Kadets got around this with their own unofficial lists, which evidently functioned satisfactorily. These government shenanigans, plus cruder measures such as arresting and exiling candidates under the extraordinary security laws, largely backfired, producing sympathy for the candidates opposed by the government and bringing the Kadets closer to the hard left parties.4

  As a candidate Maklakov sought allies to left and right. On two occasions he stressed the unity of the left (that is, the Kadets and those to the left of them). In one of these he invoked defeat of the Octobrists as a goal and argued that “in great struggles that define the path of history, only two armies fight.” Despite this Manichean tone, in both instances his key pitch was that all on the left should get behind the Kadets, as the strongest party.5 So he seems to have been invoking leftist unity mainly as a device for promoting his own party—the least leftist of the leftists.

  Three Kadet leaders (left to right): Prince Paul Dolgorukov, Alexander Kizevetter, Vasily Maklakov, and N.V. Talenko. © State Historical Museum, Moscow.

  Maklakov made similar efforts to cultivate potential allies to his right. In the summer of 1906 he and some other Kadets met with representatives of the Octobrists, and an Octobrist splinter, the Party of Peaceful Renewal, to see if they could coordinate in the electoral campaign. The effort failed. Dmitri Shipov, one of the founders of the Octobrist party and then of its splinter, reacted to the government’s field courts martial decree—of which more shortly—by saying that the Party of Peaceful Renewal could under no circumstances work with the Octobrists, who were acquiescing in or even supportive of the decree.6 Maklakov’s outreach activities seem to have been driven by one primary goal—enhancing the Kadet position wherever allies could be found.

  The electoral results confounded the government’s intentions in dismissing the First Duma. The most obvious effect was a hollowing out of the center. The Kadets and their adherents shrank from 185 to 99, or to about 19 percent of the membership. Slightly making up the loss to the middle was an increase for the Octobrists from 13 to 44. The Social Democrats, Socialist Revolutionaries, and Popular Socialists collectively rose from 17 to 118 (23 percent), while the Trudoviks edged up from 94 to 104 (20 percent). Those to the right of the Octobrists rose from zero in the First Duma to 64 in the Second (of whom only 10 seem to qualify as extreme rightist). Despite the shift to extremes, a centrist coalition on particular issues was conceivable. Excluding 2 percent classified as “extreme rightists,” and running leftward so far as to encompass the Trudoviks, one could nonetheless imagine—perhaps with a good deal of optimism—a centrist majority of 58 percent of Duma members. If we add in 9 percent for the Polish Circle, who often showed a moderate bent,7 this imagined coalition could prevail even in the face of losing most Trudoviks. Of course to assume that the Kadets themselves were centrist is, as we’ll see, a stretch.

  The new Duma represented not merely a shift to the left. J. W. Riddle, the U.S. ambassador, cabled to Washington: “The present Duma has the reputation of being a less educated but more practical body than the one of last year. The leaders of the first Duma were doctrinaire professors of great learning and many theories, but with no experience of public administration or of business. In the present Duma this type is not at all prominent.”8 Maklakov agreed.

  When Nicholas II dissolved the First Duma, he also appointed Stolypin, already minister of internal affairs, to be premier as well. As minister of internal affairs Stolypin had stood out in the Duma as articulate, self-confident, and relatively candid—going so far, for example, as to acknowledge the illegality of a police action, a concession that stunned the deputies by its novelty.9 Stolypin used the time between the dissolution of the First Duma and the convening of the Second to issue a set of decrees under Article 87, implementing a mixed program of reform and repression. Two reforms stand out. First, a decree of October 5, 1906, eliminated many of the disabilities of peasants vis-à-vis the other estates. This was broadly welcome, and Maklakov was later, in the Fourth Duma, to
take a lead role in trying to extend it. A second decree, issued November 9, 1906, adopted the government’s preferred solution to Russia’s agricultural woes: it enabled individual peasants to obtain rights in land that would be more like ordinary property than what they then held: they received the opportunity (either as individual families or as a village), to opt out of the process of endless redistribution aimed at matching landholding with family size. In large part because Stolypin presented it as a substitute for the left’s solutions to Russia’s agrarian problems (confiscation of gentry land, with some compensation, and redistribution to peasants), it was anathema to the left (including the Kadets); conflict between the competing visions for agriculture fueled political warfare throughout the Second Duma.

  On the repression side of the ledger was the government’s August 19, 1906, establishment of the field courts martial. The decree creating them came on the heels of an attempt to assassinate Stolypin at his residence on Aptekarskii Island, but the initiative and insistence on the decree came from the tsar, with Stolypin himself and Minister of Justice Shcheglovitov expressing skepticism.10 The law enabled military officers with no legal training to act as prosecutor, judge, and jury, taking the accused from charge to execution in three days, with no possibility of appeal. As Maklakov pointed out, the law directed an official to send an accused to such a “court” when the crime was so obvious that there was no further need for investigation, terms that seemed to call for an automatic guilty verdict.

  Just as the government manifested a real program in the run-up to the Duma opening, a stark contrast to the launch of the First Duma, so the mood on the left was more moderate. Miliukov himself sounded a less militant tone—“not assault, but an orderly siege.”11 The Kadet slogan was “Save the Duma,” that is, avoid provocations of the sort that had precipitated dismissal of the First Duma. Maklakov endorsed this approach, arguing that at particular times it made sense to save the Duma, at others to strike the government with heavy blows.12

  Another difference was a change in the Duma’s rules, introduced by a committee under Maklakov’s chairmanship. Maklakov and others believed that one reason for the futility of the First Duma was the waste of time in debate on bills that had not been through committee. To obtain the necessary clarity and specificity, Maklakov drafted, and the Duma in due course adopted, a Nakaz (rules or standing orders) that sharply limited debate over such inchoate measures.

  The Second Duma’s legislative life began with Stolypin’s March 6 speech—the one that had been postponed because of the ceiling’s collapse. The speech is remarkable for the scope and depth of reforms it proposed. As Stolypin’s biographer Abraham Ascher writes, “If a liberal had delivered the . . . speech, a large number of deputies would have applauded most of it.”13 Of course Stolypin’s agrarian reform proposal was offensive to the left, but that occupied little of the speech. Besides that, Stolypin proposed laws enshrining the civil liberties referred to in the October Manifesto; reform of local government on a plane of equal relations between all estates; reform of the local court system to bring the local courts under control of the rural electorate; a general policy of getting the government out of the way of labor-management relations; organization of medical aid for workers; religious toleration; subjection of officials to both criminal and civil liability for excesses; and, perhaps most startlingly, abolition of officials’ power to impose administrative exile except in time of war or popular rebellion.14 Imagine how Russia might have developed if the liberal Second Duma had put aside its conflict with Stolypin over agrarian policy and set out to enact such a program.

  In fact, the Duma’s leftist majority had resolved in advance to sit in stony silence regardless of what Stolypin might say. But one deputy, a Social Democrat, was bursting with such fervor that he assumed the tribune and delivered a scorching attack. The attack is familiar to history entirely because of Stolypin’s response. His few words included these: “What the revolutionaries say boils down to two words directed to the authorities, ‘Hands up!’ And to these two words, the government with complete calm and confidence in its right can answer with two words, ‘Not afraid’ [‘ne zapugaete,’ literally, ‘You don’t scare us’].”15 In his history of the Second Duma, Maklakov wrote, “For many of us only party discipline prevented us from applauding. The impression on the country was tremendous. . . . March 6 was the apogee of Stolypin’s popularity.”16 Maklakov went on to place the whole speech in context: “What was new and valuable was that he spoke as a true ‘constitutional minister,’ as the representative of a ‘constitutional ideology,’ understanding the rule of law and the need for an opposition to the authorities’ policies.”17

  As we saw earlier, the government’s efforts to quiet the revolution encompassed both reform and repression, the latter most clearly taking the form of the decree on field courts martial. The crude summary justice that the decree unleashed, almost invariably ending in a hanging, led to the epithet “Stolypin’s neckties,” a tag that ironically originated with a rather moderate Kadet, Fyodor Rodichev. That the government needed to take some action against terrorist violence seems clear: In the one-year period starting in October 1905 the killing and wounding of government officials ran at a rate of about 300 a month. Thereafter the rate slowed a bit, but when private individual victims are taken into account, the total over the years 1905 through 1907 reaches more than 9,000.18 That, of course, is not enough to justify the lawlessness of the field courts martial.

  When the Second Duma opened on February 20, 1907, the government knew that as a practical matter the measure could survive for two more months at the most. Recall that Article 87 gave the government only two options for a law enacted under that article. It could introduce a bill with the same provisions in the Duma; but in that case, the law would die whenever the Duma or the State Council voted it down; given the Second Duma’s composition, it was sure to exercise this authority and kill the decree. Alternatively, the government could offer no such bill, in which case the decree would expire automatically two months after the Duma resumed its sessions. Knowing the decree’s fate if it were introduced as a bill, the government offered none. The clock started running.

  The Kadets nonetheless offered a bill affirmatively repealing the decree. The bill had no realistic prospect of having any effect, as that would require approval of the State Council and tsar, which, if possible at all, clearly would not occur until after the decree’s legal expiration on April 20. But the Kadet deputies wanted to take action, and the field courts martial issue seemed the politically most promising area of activity. Maklakov joined the repeal effort enthusiastically, though he later regretted the strategy. In hindsight he believed that joining with the left in this way made the Kadets appear to be its allies in support of revolution.19 Nonetheless, the repeal effort was the occasion of one of his most famous speeches in the Duma, and indeed the one of which he seems to have been most proud. We have already seen part of the speech in discussing his relationship with Tolstoy—Maklakov’s assault on the death penalty.

  His speech rested primarily on rule-of-law ideals. Stolypin had argued that, in the interests of protecting the state from the revolution, it was sometimes necessary to sacrifice private interests. Maklakov turned this around, depicting the field courts martial as destructive not merely of private interests but also of the state itself. Anticipating the words later put into the mouth of Sir Thomas More by the playwright Robert Bolt in A Man for All Seasons, he said:

  Striking at the revolution, you have not struck private interests but have struck all that protects us, the courts and lawfulness. . . . If you defeat the revolution this way, you will at the same time defeat the state, and in the collapse of revolution you will not find a rule-of-law state but only solitary individuals, a chaos of state breakdown.20

  He closed by saying that, if the government really meant to bolster the state system, as Stolypin had claimed, it should join those in the Duma attacking the field courts martial, and, not waiti
ng for the decree to expire automatically, should itself declare that “the shame of killings by field courts martial in Russia will cease.”21

  In response, Stolypin acknowledged the legal merits of his Kadet critics’ attacks, mentioning Maklakov by name, and going so far as to say that if he pursued that avenue he likely would not disagree with Maklakov.22 But he offered the defense of necessity. He pointed to declarations by the revolutionary parties calling for uprisings, which of course were occurring, albeit in a scattered way. And, as we’ve seen, assassinations were running at a pace no government could tolerate. His speech ended by proposing some sort of accommodation with his critics:

  [T]he government has come to the conclusion that the country awaits from it not evidence of weakness but evidence of confidence. We want to believe that we will hear from you, gentlemen, a word of pacification, that you will cut short the bloody madness. We are confident that you will say those words that will have us all begin—not the destruction of the historic edifice of Russia—but its recreation, its restructuring, and its enhancement.

  In expectation of that word, the government will take measures to limit this severe law solely to the most extreme cases of the most audacious crimes, so that when the Duma directs Russia to peaceful work, this law will fall, simply by not being introduced for confirmation [under Article 87].23

  The meaning of this offer may not have been altogether clear, but on its face it looked like a commitment to extinguish the activities of the field courts martial before their legally predetermined end (at least for all but extreme cases), in reliance on Stolypin’s hope or expectation of some word from Duma members, at least from the Kadets, condemning revolutionary violence.