The Reformer
Page 16
No such word came. Rather, the Kadet leadership treated this apparent olive branch as a stink bomb.24 But Stolypin’s meaning is to some degree independently verifiable by looking at the behavior of the field courts martial after March 13. The Social Democratic paper, Tovarishch, hardly an organ to downplay the state’s bloodletting, collected the month-by-month figures.25
The downward trend is clear. It had been under way since November, but the decline steepened sharply in February, March, and April. Without day-by-day figures, and indications of the crimes for which the field courts martial were used after March 13, we can’t precisely evaluate Stolypin’s fulfillment of his apparent promise.26 But despite those gaps and the preexisting decline, the record appears at least consistent with an effort to confine use of the field courts martial to the most egregious cases. Although the courts were sure to expire in any event (subject, of course, to the risk that the government might dissolve the Duma and radically limit the franchise, as it in fact did on June 3, 1907), this is a case where Maklakov’s eloquence in the Duma may actually have saved lives from government arbitrariness.
In a letter to his friend Boris Bakhmetev, the Provisional Government’s ambassador to the United States (unlike Maklakov, Bakhmetev at least arrived in time to take up the office), Maklakov said that the speech was the only one for which he received laurels in the press (an absurd exaggeration!), but that for him
what made it important was not articles in the press . . . nor applause in the Duma; for me the important thing was the response of adversaries. I’ll not forget how at the time of the speech I turned toward Stolypin, sitting on the ministerial bench, and saw his eyes, which he never took away from me. I continued to watch his eyes, and he didn’t turn them from me till the very end; I was later told that he had talked about me afterwards. And the speech . . . was built on respect for authority, on the need to preserve it from what was dangerous for it, to save it from any mistakes that might compromise it. This was the idea that I pursued to the end, on account of which I often found myself divided from the Kadets.27
While the field courts martial decree itself was lawless, the authorities managed to make it more lawless by violating even the decree’s own rules. In his speech assailing the decree, Maklakov exposed an especially flagrant example. Four people from the countryside surrounding Moscow met another outsider, who was a policeman. They asked him to join them, and all five spent several hours eating and drinking and in friendly conversation. After a while the policeman departed. The four then drank some more, and, perhaps drunk, wandered through the city and again met their friend. They asked him to rejoin them, but he refused, and they then began to fight with him, to drag him about by force. The policeman waved a revolver at the four. One of the four picked up a wooden snow shovel that was lying about and struck him on the head (as we’ll see, the policeman died, but only after government injustice had run its course). All four were brought to a police station, sobered up, overslept, and, the next day, heard to their horror that they had been given over to a field court martial.
The members of the court expected something more like sedition and were amazed when they saw four bearded old people before them. They were horrified by the recognition that under Article 18 of the field courts martial decree there was only one punishment—the death penalty. They realized that death was impossible for such a fight. Although unable to state a legal justification for their verdict, they invoked the absence of aggravating circumstances, and sentenced the four to hard labor for an indefinite term, thinking it a punishment that no one could criticize as too soft.
They were wrong. Moscow’s governor general, Sergei Konstantinovich Gershelman, overturned their decision. The verdict was put before him at ten in the morning, and at noon he cancelled it. In the evening he began another field court martial, condemned the four to death, and promptly had them hanged. Forget, for a minute, the savagery of Gershelman’s decision: Article 5 of the field courts martial decree itself forbade any reversal of the court martial’s judgment. But when an official found the rule inconvenient, he simply disregarded it.
As part of the October Manifesto’s promise that Duma members would get “an opportunity for actual participation in the supervision of the legality of [officials’] actions,” the Fundamental Laws entitled Duma members to question officials on the floor of the Duma. Maklakov thus pursued the attack on several occasions, asking for an explanation and responding to official efforts at justification. Among the official defenses was that the injuries inflicted on the policeman were more severe than Maklakov had originally reported—indeed, he had ultimately died of them. But the death occurred after the second trial, and thus in no way excused the government’s lawlessness. Officials also cited legal exceptions, which Maklakov showed were inapplicable. The most extreme claims were those of Ivan Shcheglovitov, the minister of justice, and Alexander Makarov, then deputy minister of internal affairs, who would ultimately become the minister and Nikolai Maklakov’s predecessor in that post. Shcheglovitov argued that there had been no unlawful reversal of a verdict; the first one had only been put aside without implementation! Makarov went further: Gershelman didn’t reverse any verdict because the one he was accused of overturning did not, legally, even “exist.”
Writing of the episode later, Maklakov drew the lesson that use of the Duma’s interrogation weapon worked best when not entangled with a factual dispute, for which the Duma was illsuited. (His account in the Duma had been inaccurate as to the scope of the policeman’s wounds, but the error was irrelevant to the government’s offense.) It was best, he thought, to focus on conduct that was unlawful even on the government’s version of the facts. This particular exchange, he thought, brought an act of government illegality into the open under the scrutiny of the Duma. It made clear that the government could not defend itself with straight arguments, but rather was reduced to lies, sophistry, and demagogy—such as the theories vaporizing the first verdict. Stolypin’s defense of state necessity was plainly unavailable.28 Many of Maklakov’s later Duma speeches pursued the same basic strategy.
Before turning to the Duma’s demise and Maklakov’s efforts to avert it, a word is in order about the Second Duma’s treatment of two issues that had bedeviled the First: amnesty and terror. As to amnesty, the Kadets recognized that they had a jurisdictional problem: the Fundamental Laws (Article 23) assigned that power to the executive. But, wishing to press the issue, they placed it on the agenda but then proposed to send it to a committee to review the jurisdictional question. Maklakov spoke energetically for the referral to committee. He thought it clear that the tsar’s power was exclusive as to the verdicts of ordinary courts, but very likely the reverse as to administrative decisions under the extraordinary security laws. He argued to the Duma that the committee could use the referral to develop a law eliminating altogether the system of administrative exiles and fines under the extraordinary security laws.29
As to terror, Maklakov seems not to have been very active. The Duma as a whole floundered. Its chairman, the Kadet Fyodor Golovin, succeeded for a long time in keeping it off the agenda, reflecting the Kadet concern that a resolution condemning terror would be seen as an implicit approval of the field courts martial and a betrayal of the left, while a negative vote would enable the government to paint them as sympathetic to terror. Maklakov worked to forge a compromise resolution acceptable to both the government and the Kadets, but the effort misfired.30 There followed a swirl of draft resolutions, many aimed at trying to satisfy both sides by including a condemnation of the Black Hundreds’ terrorist acts, which in at least some cases had been assisted by elements in the government. None passed. Looking at the issue in hindsight, Maklakov argued that, whereas the First Duma’s failure to condemn terror had not been justifiable, the Second Duma’s was. By that time, he thought, the government’s own methods, including its use of agents provocateurs, were so offensive that any resolution should reach them as well. Of the rightists’ arguments, he wrote
, “They demanded condemnation of terror not in the name of the rule of law, but in support of the government.”31 Given that the authority for the field courts martial expired in April, that left-wing terror continued to predominate over right-wing or government-supported terror, and that the Kadets kept silent on left-wing terror even in their own newspapers (where they could have added balance in their own words),32 the pass he gives the Kadets seems a stretch.
Although the divisions over amnesty and terror were severe and even raucous, the Duma-government split over agrarian policy was perhaps the key reason for the government’s dismissal of the Duma and abrogation of the franchise. The government’s solution to the problems of peasant agriculture was to establish, through its decree of November 9, 1906, a means by which peasants, acting either collectively as an entire village,33 or individually against the will of the village, could convert communally owned property into individual “personal property,” a status akin to conventional Western private property.34 Fully converted land would be free from periodic redistributions to match up landholdings with family size and would be consolidated rather than scattered so that an individual peasant could cultivate it independently rather than only with the agreement of all the peasants in his commune. A peasant would no longer be, vis-à-vis the commune, in a phrase that Maklakov attributed to N. N. Lvov, “a rightless individual against a tyrannical crowd.”35 The Kadet proposals took exactly the opposite tack on private property: the first step was confiscation of gentry land at a value that was never specified but that was explicitly not fair market value. Their second step was to hold these lands as part of an ill-defined national land fund, to be allocated to peasants in some sort of equally ill-defined temporary tenancy, evidently subject thereafter to continuous bureaucratic reallocation.36 Miliukov explicitly took the view that peasants simply wanted land and were not interested in the legal regime under which they held it.37 The argument confirms Leonard Schapiro’s comment that Miliukov’s tragedy was “that he believed that he was a liberal, when he was in reality a radical.”38
The government’s concern was not that the Kadet program would become law. It could easily prevent that by having the State Council reject, or ignore, any Duma bill. The risk was that the Duma could destroy the government’s program, dependent as it was on a decree under Article 87. For such a decree, all that was needed was for the Duma to vote it down.39 With an anticipatory dismissal of the Duma therefore looming as a possibility, Maklakov was open to participating in a direct conversation with Stolypin. The background of the conversation, the conversation itself, and the reactions from left and right, tell us a good deal about the state of politics in 1907 Russia.
The first contact with Maklakov on the subject came through a Kadet member of the First Duma, S. A. Kotliarevskii, who had signed the Vyborg Manifesto out of party discipline although he thought it inexcusable. Because of the government’s prosecution of the signers, he was therefore not in the Second Duma. He favored Kadet relations with cabinet members whose goodwill he trusted, such as Stolypin and Alexander Izvolskii (the foreign minister); he unexpectedly asked Maklakov if he’d be willing to meet with Stolypin. Maklakov saw nothing reprehensible in such a meeting and said he was willing. Kotliarevskii later called him to the phone; Stolypin was on the line, and they had a brief, rather guarded conversation. Maklakov surmised that Stolypin thought the phone was likely bugged. The next day Maklakov received a note of invitation, and met Stolypin that evening at the Winter Palace.40 Maklakov discussed the meeting only with the Kadets ideologically closest to him—Mikhail Chelnokov, Pyotr Struve, and Sergei Bulgakov. In classifying them, it’s useful to recall that Maklakov and the other three were among the eight Kadets who had attacked the field courts martial decree, something that only one Octobrist had done (Mikhail Kapustin); so the four were by no means reactionaries. (Struve and Bulgakov were later among the contributors to Vekhi, the collection of essays that assailed the Russian intelligentsia’s rigidity, utopianism, and absorption in vague abstract principles.) The four nonetheless jokingly called themselves (and were called) the Black Hundreds, or the Black Hundred Kadets.41
Each of the four had occasional meetings with Stolypin after Kotliarevskii raised the issue, though only Chelnokov saw him at all regularly—in his capacity as Duma secretary.42 At one such meeting, Stolypin made clear his anxiety about secret meetings of a Duma committee on agrarian matters, which he feared were building up to a rejection of the November 9, 1906, decree; Stolypin indicated that if rejection loomed, the government would dismiss the Duma preemptively rather than waiting for such a rejection.43 The four moderates evidently caucused. Struve understood from a meeting with Stolypin that the latter would accept a good deal of amendment of the decree as a way of avoiding dismissal of the Duma, but not its transformation into a program of massive compulsory alienation—just the sort of measure that Kadet party rhetoric, and its agrarian appeal in the First Duma, had appeared to endorse.
The four met and agreed that the best strategy would be to ensure that any bill would receive a clause-by-clause reading: immersion in detail might lead to moderation. Chelnokov saw Stolypin and returned quite relaxed, conveying the impression that such a process was acceptable to Stolypin.44 The premise appears to have been that Duma adoption of a radically amended version of the November 9, 1906, decree would constitute a rejection within the meaning of Article 87—and that seems a reasonable interpretation of the article. Thus amendments would meet Stolypin’s demands only if they were moderate enough to allow him to get the amended version approved by the State Council and tsar.
Soon afterward, on May 10, 1907, Stolypin gave an extensive speech in the Duma on agrarian policy. Among other things, it discussed his agreement to compulsory alienation to help peasants use their land: to create wells and cattle pathways to pasture, to make roads, and finally to cure the scattering of plots. If the suitable Duma committee asked government representatives to attend, they could offer more details.45 Maklakov himself thought that one might reasonably add instances of land that a peasant rented or that wasn’t in use.46 Given landowners’ widespread practice of renting out land, it seems naïve for Maklakov to have thought that this would not be a deal-breaker.
In Rech, the newspaper edited by Miliukov and generally seen as the voice of the Kadet party, Miliukov responded to the Stolypin speech in his customary vein, saying that the proposal didn’t deserve the name of compulsory alienation (curious that that should have transmogrified itself into an end rather than a means!) and was just a lie. The only object was to raise the price at which landowners could sell their land.47
Maklakov and his confederates now believed that the key was to ensure that the Duma as a whole didn’t issue directions to the agrarian affairs committee that would be seen by Stolypin as likely to completely frustrate his goals. On May 26 this was achieved: the Duma voted 239 to 191 for a referral to committee without instructions (that is, without any specific mandate that the government might have read as foreshadowing rejection of its agrarian reform decree). Whether the Kadets and their allies to the left could have restrained themselves enough not to kill Stolypin’s agrarian program under Article 87 seems at best questionable; even Maklakov’s moderate Kadet ally Ariadne Tyrkova-Williams thought that in envisaging possible compromise he preferred “the wish to the reality.” But as the four saw it, the only drawback was that the debate had included reminders of prior votes for compulsory alienation.48 Overall, they saw the Duma’s debate and action as meeting Stolypin’s concerns well enough to save the Duma from dismissal.
Then on June 1 Stolypin asked for a closed session of the Duma and used the occasion to assert a claim that some Social Democratic deputies had been involved in terrorist activities. He asked the Duma to agree to the arrest of those involved and the removal of all the other Social Democrats from the Duma. The Duma set up an investigative committee that included Maklakov. Although the committee asked for more time to examine the allegations, it essentially fou
nd the government’s claim baseless.49 Meanwhile, back-channel contacts led to a meeting of the four moderates with Stolypin at 11:30 on the night of June 2. Stolypin met them immediately on their arrival, even though he was in the middle of a Council of Ministers meeting. After some general discussion of whether the Duma was working responsibly, Stolypin said there was one issue on which agreement was impossible—the agrarian one. The four were shocked; they thought they had worked out a possible path to agreement. As recounted by Maklakov, it appeared that Stolypin either mistakenly believed that the committee had adopted a resolution favoring mass compulsory alienation, or misunderstood the consequences of what had occurred, and thus was unaware that a procedure had been adopted that the moderates believed could yield an acceptable outcome. But Stolypin asked many questions, appeared to respond favorably to the answers, and gave the impression that their arguments had now removed this ground for dismissing the Duma—the main one, as it had appeared.50
Stolypin then turned the conversation in a wholly new direction, asking the four Kadets why they couldn’t agree to remove the Social Democrats. “Free the Duma from them, and you will see how well we’ll get along.” Maklakov replied for the group, saying that Stolypin’s demand was so extreme that “it would be shameful for us to look at each other if we accepted it.” Stolypin asked, “So the Duma will refuse us?” Maklakov answered, “Probably. I am the most right-wing Kadet and I will vote against you.” Stolypin: “Then there is nothing to be done. Only remember what I say—you have just dismissed the Duma.”51
What can one make of this? Maklakov appears convinced of the sincerity of Stolypin’s hopes for a compromise on the agrarian question, but we know with reasonable confidence that the tsar was by then emphatically eager to get rid of the Duma. A high government functionary, Pyotr Shvanebakh, reports being present with Stolypin late in the night of June 2 and hearing of a call from the four Kadets that they were interested in meeting him. All present “urged Stolypin not to lose time with the Kadet emissaries,” but he rejected their advice and talked with the Kadets, by Shvanebakh’s account, till 2:00 in the morning. After they departed, the group continued to wait. Soon a messenger from the tsar’s Peterhof residence arrived, delivering documents signed by the tsar to change the electoral law, accompanied by a letter saying that he had waited all day for news of the dismissal of the “accursed Duma.” He had sensed that something had gone wrong, and declared: “This is impermissible. The Duma must be dismissed tomorrow, Sunday morning. Decisiveness and firmness.”52 According to the American ambassador, the tsar had two weeks earlier told Sir Donald Mackenzie Wallace (a British observer who had been at times a journalist, at times a government official) that he intended to dissolve the Duma.53