The Reformer

by Stephen F. Williams

  Thinking their visit was not an official party act, the four Kadets had not told their colleagues about it. But S. D. Abelevich, a journalist for the left-wing daily Rus, had evidently been tipped off by the minister of trade and ran a story accurately reporting the Kadets’ explanation of why they couldn’t agree to hand over their Social Democratic colleagues. But Abelevich embroidered a bit, claiming that the visit somehow portended “some new combination the details of which are not known as yet.”54

  Just as Stolypin’s colleagues had urged him not to bother with the four, their fellow Kadets—armed with the Abelevich article—at best scoffed at the failed mission, at worst regarded it as treacherous. Iosif Gessen, for example, writing years after the event, focused on the supposed terrorism of the accused Social Democratic deputies, and thought it absurd to hope that Stolypin would drop his demand to arrest them.55 The furor in the party was such that Maklakov went to Miliukov and offered to resign; Miliukov, to his credit, refused and in fact calmed the others.56 But Struve took the party outrage hard. It “struck him as symptomatic of an utterly self-destructive mentality,” and drove him largely out of active party politics.57

  It seems clear that well before the meeting the tsar had decided not only to dismiss the Duma but also to execute a coup d’état, unilaterally changing the electoral law (he did, on June 3, 1907). Stolypin and the tsar, however, were not identical, and it’s entirely possible that Stolypin remained open to some saving change of events. But we have to consider his state of mind in the run-up to June 2. He could easily have been convinced, by earlier Kadet rhetoric and votes, and by behavior such as Miliukov’s denunciation of his May 10 speech, that the Kadets (and obviously the revolutionary deputies to their left) would not compromise on agrarian reform. On that premise he agreed to implement the tsar’s wish to dismiss the Duma (and to transform future Dumas by a unilateral change in the electoral system), proceeding by means of the bogus attack on the Social Democrats. By June 2 his apparent price—Duma acceptance of the removal of the Social Democrats and of the mythical plot—was obviously too high for Kadets with honor and commitment to the Duma as the pillar of a constitutional regime. But that hardly shows that he was acting in bad faith when he parlayed with them. Yet, even if the four moderates had convinced him on the night of June 2 that an acceptable solution on agrarian reform was possible, there was probably no arrangement that would have enabled Stolypin to withstand the tsar’s commitment to radical, lawless action.

  The Act of June 3 changing the electoral law was indeed lawless. The tsar purported to adopt it under Article 87, but that article expressly excluded its use for any change in the election laws for the State Council or the Duma. And the change was drastic, ensuring a strong majority of what the regime viewed as “trustworthy” representatives. Large geographic swaths of the country, such as Turkestan, lost representation entirely; the representation of the 11 million Poles fell from 46 deputies to 14; in the fifty-one provinces of European Russia, landowners would get almost 50 percent of the “electors”—the persons who in the layered system would actually cast the votes for deputies—against 26.2 percent for the urban population and 21.7 percent for peasants. In the countryside the tiered system assured that peasants reaching the status of elector would vote under the watchful eyes of landowners.58 Of course this system produced, as intended, Dumas inclined to reach agreement with the government (at least relative to the First and Second Dumas). But the skewed franchise, and that franchise’s unlawful origins, exacted a price in government legitimacy right through to 1917, when they impaired the Fourth Duma’s ability to take over from the faltering Nicholas II.

  An unbridgeable gulf between two of a country’s institutions—as manifested in the June 3 coup—is hardly either novel in politics, or necessarily fatal to either institution. What was most ominous for Russia is surely that the dominant opinion on both sides regarded even talking with their political opponents as a worthless activity, or worse.

  How did Maklakov view the coup? He is quite explicit in his memoirs that, despite his vigorous criticism of the Second Duma, he believed that in it the left had tempered the bellicose tactics of the First Duma, and that responsibility for the failure to fulfill the chance of implanting a constitutional monarchy fell squarely on the regime.59 I’ve encountered nothing by him that might seem to excuse the government. Yet Soviet historians, ever reluctant to impute true constitutionalism to a “bourgeois” public figure, have latched onto observations by Maklakov on the floor of the Duma citing the 1762 coup removing Peter III and bringing Catherine to the throne, and the 1801 coup removing Paul and elevating Alexander I, as evidence of a belief that coups can lead to good. True enough. But his whole point in these passages was to distinguish those illegalities from a recent Duma act, which he regarded as not only unconstitutional (for infringing on Finland’s constitutional liberties) but also likely to bear corrupt fruit.60

  Maklakov had developed the same theme in an earlier article on the rule of law in Russia, noting instances when a legally invalid act is politically accepted, receives recognition, and becomes the law. He cited not only Catherine II’s seizure of power but also the overthrow of Louis XVI in 1792 and of Napoleon III in 1870. (Americans might amplify the record by pointing to their own constitutional convention: given only a mandate to propose amendments for the Articles of Confederation, it drafted an entirely new constitution.) He specifically considered the June 3, 1907, coup, focusing on its juridical defects: although Stolypin explicitly defended the act as a coup, the government pretended, by cloaking it in Senate approval, to rest on a supposed continuation of the Senate’s role of verifying legislation for failure to comply with the Fundamental Laws.61 In his Duma speech and in the article Maklakov recognized the possibility that a coup d’état can “work,” but he never suggested that the June 3 decree represented such a coup.

  In assessing Maklakov’s take on the core period of the Revolution of 1905, from Bloody Sunday in January 1905 to the June 3, 1907, coup, we have to distinguish between his acts during that period and his later analysis. While the validity of his analysis doesn’t depend directly on when he reached it, contemporaneous parallel assertions would surely buttress it—the reverse for contemporaneous contradictions.

  On some issues there were clear changes. His spring 1906 memo to French officials savaged the State Council’s legislative role, which in State and Society he found quite harmless. And in articles published in Russkie vedomosti shortly before and during the First Duma itself, and in speeches pursuing election to the Second Duma, he seemed to endorse parliamentary supremacy almost as insistently as his more extreme Kadet peers. He scoffed at moderates who “don’t recognize ministerial responsibility [to the Duma], who disown parliamentarianism.” He even gave favorable mention to Nabokov’s “pithy” summary of the parliamentary principle, which he later anathematized.62 His early comments show no sign of the point he made later—that as the Duma manifested responsibility and usefulness, government responsibility to it would follow in the course of nature, as it had in Britain.63 Giving a campaign boost to such a change, of course, is hardly the same as making it a precondition to substantive legislative work—the Kadets’ strategy in the First Duma.

  Indeed, his good friend and fellow moderate Kadet Ariadne Tyrkova-Williams noted in her diary on first reading State and Society: “Even Maklakov himself, as I recall, in the Duma and the Central Committee of the Kadet party, didn’t speak against its [the party’s] policies, and only after the events did these criticisms with which his memoirs are full come to mind.”64

  Her diary (plus the published records of the Kadet party) seem enough to convict Maklakov at least of failing to press his case in the party. So we have no way to be sure of his contemporaneous thoughts. But there are clues that they didn’t change all that much, especially after the promulgation of the Fundamental Laws. His attack on the field courts martial decree in the Second Duma rested on its threat to the rule of law in Russia, and e
ven his early response to the violence after Bloody Sunday proposed pitching any Beseda reaction as an attack on the regime’s own lawlessness. And his meeting with Stolypin to save the Second Duma shows a readiness—at some risk to his position within the party—to seek common ground with opponents in the regime. His public posture was generally consistent with his later analysis.

  We can learn something from a public debate between Miliukov and Maklakov that they conducted as émigrés in Paris, in a newspaper edited by Miliukov and a “thick” journal—the sort of intellectually (and physically) weighty periodical that dated from tsarist times. Maklakov had published the essence of State and Society in such a journal, and Miliukov replied both there and in an émigré daily that he edited. Throughout, Miliukov reproached him for the unrealism of his arguments (as he saw the matter), not for flipping his position.65 Moreover, in his insistence on the inadequacy of the October Manifesto and the Fundamental Laws, Miliukov never attempted a comprehensive assessment of either document in constitutional terms. He thought it enough to say that they left in place the three “locks” (the State Council, the absence of four-tailed suffrage, and the absence of ministerial responsibility to the legislature), locks which he said “blocked the lawful path to construction of a normal constitutional regime.”66 But this critique is simply a restatement of the Kadets’ constitutional goal, and an assertion (doubtless true) that the Fundamental Laws fell short of that benchmark. It tells us little about the scale of the change wrought by the two documents (on paper, to be sure) or about their capacity to generate improvement. This is odd, since only deficiencies along these lines could justify his response that “nothing has changed” and thus the Kadets’ behavior in the First Duma. We are left to guess his argument as to why the two, evaluated as constitutional documents, did not represent not only a tectonic shift in tsarist policy but also a promising platform for the development of liberal democracy.

  Beyond the supposed deficiencies in the documents, Miliukov’s argument rested largely on the lack of any sincere commitment to constitutionalism on the part of the tsar and his ministers. He often mentioned Nicholas II’s resistance to the word “constitution,” as reported to Miliukov by Witte.67 And he pointed to another clue to Nicholas’s attitude—his well-known belief, based in part on a rather wishful assumption of unity between tsar and people, that it was his duty, in the interests of the people, to pass the autocracy on to his son more or less unimpaired.68

  Of course the dispute between the tsar and society was over more than the word “constitution.” The tsar’s distaste for the word reflected his loathing for the thing itself. But while it is undoubtedly a plus when the author of a state document is sincerely committed to its undertakings, sincerity is hardly a sine qua non of effectiveness. After all, the October Manifesto was effective in producing action on the tsar’s part—promulgation of the Fundamental Laws themselves. And when Englishmen and their successors over the centuries asserted rights in the name of Magna Carta, no one asked whether King John was “sincere” at Runnymede, or whether later kings “sincerely” accepted his commitments (which were thereafter embodied in English statutes). It seems improbable that such verbal commitments can ever do more than nudge the balance toward compliant behavior. As Learned Hand once said,

  I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon law and upon courts. These are false hopes, believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no courts to save it.

  Though Hand surely exaggerates, the basic idea is correct. Unless society has internalized the norm and is willing and able to exert pressure, holders of power will get away with violations. But a document can help on both counts—internalizing the norm and energizing society. The signer’s state of mind is hardly a be-all-and-end-all.

  In the end, what was the essence of the political difference between Maklakov and Miliukov? There was, surely, a difference in their weighting of the “liberalism” and the “democracy” in liberal democracy. Maklakov’s great goal was control of government arbitrariness, Miliukov’s the establishment of majoritarian democracy. This surely accounts for some of the higher value that Maklakov placed on the October Manifesto and the Fundamental Laws. But the far greater gap seems to me to lie in their ideas of the path toward liberal democracy from the centuries of Russian autocracy. Maklakov saw it as a long, hard slog, a gradual overcoming of the autocracy’s near millennium-long deformation of Russian ways of thought. Miliukov saw it as something that a wise tsar could have accomplished in a minute, either by summoning a constituent assembly elected by four-tailed suffrage or by directly proclaiming a copy of the Belgian or Bulgarian constitution. The two men seem to be latter-day personifications of Edmund Burke’s gradual reformism and Thomas Paine’s revolutionary commitment to “reason” and its teachings.69

  III. Reform in the Third and Fourth Dumas

  CHAPTER 8

  The Third and Fourth Dumas and Maklakov’s Fight against Government Arbitrariness

  THE DEMISE of the field courts martial ended one especially repellent form of government arbitrariness; others continued to flourish. They were prime targets of Maklakov’s Duma oratory. In chapters 9 through 13 we consider many of his speeches linked to specific legislative proposals. But here we address a sampling of his attacks on the government’s seemingly random acts of violence and injustice that were not pegged to any specific legislative reform, specifically its use of the criminal laws to affect the composition of the Duma; abuses of the extraordinary security laws; abuses by agents provocateurs; and the use of Article 87.

  As Maklakov once said in the Duma, Russia was ruled the way an invader might rule a conquered country; he hoped the authority of conquerors could be replaced by authority “that has trusted a country, that does not exclude but nourishes, that does not destroy but creates, that does not mock but serves.”1 Russia’s problem, he often said, was not so much the quality of its laws, as that the government paid so little attention to them. On the reform issues addressed in this section, Maklakov and his fellow Kadets generally battled together, arm-in-arm.

  But first, to see the fetters constraining Maklakov at this stage, we should look at the composition of the Third Duma, elected under the truncated franchise prescribed by the June 3, 1907 coup. The Octobrists emerged from the elections not only in the center of the Third Duma but also as the largest party, with 154 deputies, more than a third of the 441 total. (The Octobrist numbers fluctuated over the Duma’s five-year lifespan, with a general downward slope. Because of the party’s openness, it was unclear what those numbers meant; the party leader, Alexander Guchkov, said at one point that there were no more than 100 to 110 “true” Octobrists.) The remainder of the members, working loosely from right to left, were: Rightists, 51; Moderate rightists, 96; Progressives, 28; Kadets, 54 (about half their number in the Second Duma and little more than 10 percent of the new Duma); Trudoviks, 14; Social Democrats, 18; plus three groups identified with nationalities and not readily classifiable on any ideological spectrum: Polish Kolo, 11; Polish-Lithuanian-Belorussian Group, 7; and Muslim Group, 8. As a social class, landowners were dominant, representing about 40 percent of the membership. A student of the Third Duma’s social composition found it to contain a “surprisingly large representation” of the narod (“the people”), and the Octobrists, though center right, had the most diverse social representation, with one-fifth of the Duma’s worker deputies and the same share of its peasants.2

  Maklakov figured in the new Duma’s initial self-organization. There was a move to make him deputy speaker, but just as the leftist majority in the First and Second Dumas had resolutely excluded everyone to its right from leadership positions, the Octobrist plurality of the Third Duma “repaid them in their own coin,” as Maklakov later put it, and voted
his candidacy down. Some members of the new Duma majority also wanted to throw out the internal rules drafted by Maklakov as relics of the old leftist Duma, but enough members—led by the new speaker, Nikolai Khomiakov—recognized that the rules had been aimed at fairness and efficiency, and so retained them; Maklakov was elected reporter and de facto chair of the committee on rules.3

  Let us look first at Maklakov’s arguments against the government’s use of the criminal laws to eject members from the Duma. Recognizing that the rule of law depended on the “correlation of forces,” on political realities that back up courts’ ability to enforce constitutional rules,4 Maklakov naturally fought to preserve the legislature’s independence. Above all, he mounted a critique of the government’s interpretation of statutes under which legislators who had run afoul of a broad range of criminal statutes were automatically excluded from the Duma—interpretations that helped the government use its prosecutorial powers to affect the Duma’s composition.