Stolypin lost the vote on the interpellations decisively, but as a legislative matter the loss had no impact. As he had not resubmitted the bill to the Duma and State Council after the recess, it would have expired sixty days after the Duma reassembled. On May 13, 1911, one day before that deadline, he prorogued it again. When the Duma reassembled yet again, the two bodies passed the measure handily. Stolypin, however, could not enjoy the triumph. He had been shot on September 1 by Dmitri Bogrov, an anarchist revolutionary who also collected intelligence for the secret police. Four days later he died of the gunshot wounds.39
The debate over the western zemstvo bill was the third and last oratorical duel between Stolypin and Maklakov.40 On no other occasion did Maklakov’s rhetoric have so personal an edge. Had he known that Stolypin would be assassinated just four months later, or had he even been aware of the tsar’s growing readiness to dismiss Stolypin, he surely would have tempered his barbs. He later wrote a friend that, at the time of the speech, he thought Stolypin was at the apogee of his power but “now I realize he was beaten prostrate. I feel ashamed of that speech.”41
CHAPTER 9
Religious Liberty
RELIGIOUS LIBERTY did not flourish in tsarist Russia. The most well-known restrictions are the government’s array of anti-Semitic policies: limits on Jewish opportunities in education and the professions and on their place of residence—the Pale of Settlement confined them to specific areas in the western regions of the empire. But there were also restrictions on non-Orthodox Christians, principally the Old Believers, a group that had split off from Orthodoxy in the seventeenth century. As a Duma member, Maklakov advocated elimination of the Pale and a lightening of the restrictions on the Old Believers. As an advocate, he was one of the three defense attorneys instrumental in securing the acquittal of Menahem Mendel Beilis, a Jew charged with the “ritual murder” of a young boy (supposedly to secure Christian blood to use in baking matzos). He published (and voiced in the Duma) an explanation of why the regime had pursued the Beilis case despite a complete lack of evidence, a puzzle that still interests historians. For this offending publication, Maklakov was sentenced to—but never served—three months in prison.
In the Duma, Maklakov advocated religious liberty not only as desirable in itself but also as necessary to prevent government arbitrariness. His principal focus was a series of bills easing limits on Old Believers and repealing the Pale of Settlement.
The Old Believers had enjoyed a considerable degree of toleration since an April 17, 1905, decree of the tsar, which had been further implemented with an October 1906 decree under Article 87.1 The government itself introduced a bill in conformity with the 1906 law, and the Duma committee on Old Believers expanded its reach. With the committee’s amendments, the bill would allow Old Believers the right not merely to confess their faith but to proselytize, and would give Old Believer communities a right to automatic registration as such.2
Maklakov staunchly supported the committee’s amendments. He argued that they were not really amendments, but simply precautions against the destruction and perversion of the tsar’s April 17 manifesto through the arbitrariness of administrators and police. The purposes of the manifesto and the law would be “undercut by casuistry,” as Old Believers and the authorities fought over the line between confession of faith (perfectly permissible) and preaching or advocacy of faith (illegal in the absence of the committee amendments). He cited a specific case of an Old Believer who came to a factory in Kaluga and was drawn into a religious dispute and mocked by Orthodox believers. He had hotly defended his position, for which he was charged and condemned for preaching his non-Orthodox faith. Without the committee’s amendment allowing proselytizing, Maklakov argued, the bill would leave matters in the hands of the police, who would always be influenced by the Orthodox establishment’s ubiquitous representatives.3
Even with the amendment, the bill would not entirely eradicate the potential for official abuse. In supporting it, Maklakov sought to assuage Orthodox anxiety by reminding them that the laws against blasphemy would remain in place. An Old Believer who preached but failed to show respect for faith could still be punished.4 But “respect for faith” was itself a fuzzy distinction. Maklakov, if challenged on the point, could fairly have replied that a line drawn between blasphemy and preaching would engender far fewer cases than one between confession of faith and preaching, if only because blasphemy would presumably occur far less often than simple preaching. Also, the line between preaching and blasphemy might be drawn more easily than that between preaching and confession of faith.
Maklakov also invoked standard religious freedom arguments, for example, that Orthodoxy itself would benefit from having to win people’s allegiance in free debate.5
Alternative amendments were offered, such as one allowing preaching but only in the Old Believers’ own religious establishments. Just as hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue, the proffer of useless substitutes was a kind of backhanded acknowledgment of the difficulty in answering Maklakov’s case. The Duma saw through the ruse and voted the proposals down.6
Advocating an amendment that gave Old Believer congregations a clear entitlement to registration, Maklakov again stressed the risk of arbitrary enforcement. (Why should there have been registration at all? Presumably because of the regime’s deep suspicion of every association of citizens that might prove a site for seditious plotting—even when there was no reason to suspect the association’s members of such plotting.) Among other things, the amendment removed a qualification of the Old Believers’ rights, one that allowed registration only when their activities were “not dangerous for social peace.” Maklakov called these “sacred words”—sacred to the police because it allowed them infinite discretion in enforcement. The exile of the Old Believer bishop for refusing to register as a petty bourgeois, mentioned in the last chapter, also showed the great potential for police arbitrariness, given the slightest chance. Maklakov ended by again pressing the idea that the amendments were only “a logical conclusion from the manifesto [of April 17, 1905]; without them the manifesto may be destroyed. The law will be law only at the pleasure of the authorities. . . . (Prolonged applause from center and left.)”7
The Duma approved the amended bill, but the State Council declined to accept the language emerging from the Duma. A reconciliation committee was formed (with Maklakov among its members), but reached no agreement.8
Another religious issue, a chance to repeal the Pale of Settlement, drew Maklakov’s ardent advocacy. Putting aside a patchwork of exceptions, the Pale confined Jews to a large western strip of the empire. It dated from a decree of 1791, reflecting the great increase in Russia’s Jewish population as a result of the successive partitions of Poland between Russia, Austria, and Prussia, together with a mélange of anti-Semitic and protectionist arguments.9 In calling for repeal of the Pale, Maklakov laid the groundwork by pointing to the proliferating self-contradictions in Russian policy. While the state purported to protect the Russian people from Jewish “oppression,” it retreated, he said, before the most powerful of the potential oppressors—presumably an allusion to the organizers of pogroms—and instead set out to oppress the most defenseless. It faulted Jews for not working the land but excluded them from the countryside. It gathered them into one place where there was not enough demand for their skills. It forced them into the lowest work and reproached them for being in that work. It drove them into conditions of poverty so extreme that official reports declared them worse off than peasants, and then reproached them for the filth of their conditions. Its injustice drove Jews to hate Russian authorities, and the state then found in that hatred a justification for its own anti-Semitism.10
Maklakov also suggested that recent economic changes had exacerbated the policy’s inherent cruelty and made it more costly for everyone. In the twentieth century, he observed, when state authority collects everything it can from its subjects in money and services, where people seek their livelihood
under unbridled competition, using all the advances that modern civilization has to offer (railroads, mail, telephone), the government artificially locked Russian Jewry away in a defined territory.11 Further, to the extent the policy was driven by fear of Jewish competition, it had backfired: in the Pale, non-Jews were subject to exceptionally intense competition from Jews, stirring up hatred against them.12 And on the other side, its anti-competitive features injured non-Jews: “When the question comes up of uprooting the Jews, you have requests from the rest of the Russian population about leaving Jews in place, about how their industry and economic strength are so useful. The Jews and the traits that distinguish them—energy, enterprise, willingness to put up with little—are a boon in economic life, especially necessary for us, in vast but sleepy Russia. . . . In short the state has contrived to make these traits a source of unhappiness for the western part of the country and their absence a source of great deprivation for the rest.”13
Maklakov then catalogued some of the absurdities produced by the policy itself. The English minister of post and telephone had been unable to get a visa for Russia and so had been excluded. Even as the debate on repeal unfolded, there was a dispute pending in the Senate over evicting one-year-olds to the Pale, even though their parents had permission to live outside it. What is more strange, he asked, than for Russian soldiers who fought in the war with Japan and were taken to Moscow for an operation to be then sent out of Moscow immediately after the operation? What is more strange than that Jewish children, born of artisan parents living lawfully outside the Pale, should be sent off to the Pale when they reached their twenty-first birthday? Holidays also caused a problem. The law said that Jewish artisans could live outside the Pale only so long as they were working in their craft: so if the police came on Saturday, when they weren’t working, they would be subject to eviction. And trade definitions could be treacherous. A Jewish watchmaker who made and sold watch chains had thereby gone beyond the precise definition of his trade (watchmaker), and was subject to eviction if the police took a narrow view of the permissible trade.14
By colliding with both economic reality and elementary fairness, the Pale’s rules sparked government arbitrariness. “One might even say that the essence of the law is to increase police rewards,” that is, bribes. Jews outside the Pale under a legal dispensation had to buy from the police the right that they had by law, because they knew that otherwise the lawless authorities would evict them. If a Jew violated the law by giving the bribes, Maklakov argued, he could not justly be blamed; the blame lay with the authorities who pressured him to pay, who corrupted him, but even more with the law that created the authorities’ opportunity.15
Maklakov concluded:
The Pale has been with us more than 100 years . . . , but again and again new questions arise, and again and again the questions appear unforeseen. . . . Time after time imperial decrees have issued that gave someone who has been living illegally the right to stay. There have appeared new interpretations, new permissions making new breaches in the law. Why? Because never, not once, not in any matter, has a state combined such an extraordinarily cavalier attitude toward feelings of humanity or of lawfulness with simultaneous reluctance to make decisions [presumably ones dispensing with the Pale itself]. . . . Those same authorities that have recognized that equal rights are the ideal toward which we should move and are moving, those same authorities about which the premier [Stolypin] said that if you don’t believe in the strength of a rule-of-law state16 you must not legislate, those authorities have not believed in their own strength and have retreated before anti-Semitic prejudice. . . . As was said 100 years ago [by the Abbé Sieyès], ‘Those who don’t know how to be just cannot be free.’17 . . . The Jewish question is really the broader question of whether law and right can triumph in Russia.18
The debate ended with a 208 to 137 majority sending the matter to the committee on inviolability of the person (encompassing roughly what today we might call civil rights and civil liberties) under a one-month deadline.19 But when the time was up, the committee chair reported to the Duma that it couldn’t meet the deadline because of the volume of materials;20 zeal for the matter seems then to have petered out without a vote.
Maklakov also confronted the state’s anti-Semitism as defense counsel in the Beilis case. In a sense the prosecution was just a case of outrageous prosecutorial overreaching. But since it was driven forward by support at the highest levels (the tsar, Minister of Justice Shcheglovitov, and two ministers of internal affairs, Alexander Makarov and his successor, Vasily Maklakov’s brother Nikolai), it was also a scandal of statecraft. (Stolypin, though minister of internal affairs as well as premier at the outset, appears not to have been involved in the shady work of skewing the investigation and was assassinated soon after the affair’s start.)
In March 1911, a group of children found the body of 13-year-old Andrei Yushchinskii in a cave in Kiev. Almost from the outset there was evidence suggesting that a criminal gang, led by one Vera Cheberiak, had killed him because of suspicion that Andrei, a friend of Cheberiak’s son Zhenia, knew too much about the gang’s operations. But the local investigators initially fastened on the mistaken idea that Andrei’s mother and stepfather were the culprits. Recognition that this was questionable created a kind of vacuum, into which right-wing anti-Semites plunged. They concocted the idea that the case was one of ritual murder, and specifically suggested Beilis as the murderer. His closest link seems to have been that he been a clerk at a brick factory near where Andrei’s body was found; the factory was owned by a Jew, Jacob Zaitsev, who had used his brick factory profits to found a hospital open free of charge to indigent patients of all faiths.21
It seems to have been an accepted notion of such a murder (presumably propagated by those who invented the idea) that the blood should be drawn while the victim was still alive; but an autopsy found nothing to show that that had been true for Andrei.22 Soon after Andrei’s death, two of Vera Cheberiak’s children died: first, Andrei’s friend Zhenia Cheberiak, and a few days later a sister. Given that the two were quite likely to have had evidence about the real murderer of Andrei, there were suspicions that Vera might have killed them to forestall their possible testimony. In fact a pathologist’s report showed that they died of dysentery, and the Beilis defense, though generally eager to point to Vera and her gang, explicitly declined to pin the deaths on her.23
Under the influence and pressure of local anti-Semites, of the nationwide Union of the Russian People, and of a high St. Petersburg police official, Alexander Liadov, who was sent to Kiev by Shcheglovitov, the Kiev prosecutor cast aside the primary initial investigator, Nikolai Krasovskii, and worked to develop the ritual murder theory. Beilis was arrested and imprisoned in July 1911 and indicted in January 1912 (he remained in prison till his acquittal in the fall of 1913). Both imprisonment and indictment preceded the day in December 1912 on which Nikolai Maklakov took charge of the ministry of internal affairs, so he cannot be blamed for those two milestones. But he was obviously aware of a privately organized and widely credited report published in May 1912 exonerating Beilis, and he acknowledged in private before the trial that a conviction of Beilis was out of the question. By the time he became minister, the government’s focus had turned almost entirely to proving the general idea that Jews engaged in ritual murder, with the trial of Beilis serving mainly as a vehicle for that demonstration. Apart from helping to run the prosecution of a man whose innocence he pretty much accepted, Nikolai ordered surveillance of the jury through government agents in the guise of court officers. The results cannot have been heartening for the prosecution: one report said the jurors were wondering, “How can we convict Beilis if nothing is said about him at trial.”24
Vasily Maklakov was one of the three primary defense counsel, the others also being nationally famous defense lawyers—Nikolai Karabchevskii and Oscar Gruzenberg. Involved on the government’s side, though nominally appearing on behalf of the victim’s family as “civil plaint
iffs,” was Georgii Zamyslovskii, one of Vasily Maklakov’s fellow deputies in the Duma and a rabid anti-Semite. Zamyslovskii was being surreptitiously paid a generous 2,500-ruble stipend by the government, but his speeches suggest that he found ample compensation in the sheer joy of ranting against Jews. (After the trial, Zamyslovskii suggested that the government pay him 25,000 rubles for publishing an account of the trial, a payment that Minister of Internal Affairs Maklakov arranged out of secret funds under the tsar’s control.)25
Vasily Maklakov’s main role was in summation. He addressed the jurors in a conversational tone, speaking throughout in simple words and starting: “They say, gentlemen of the jury, that the whole world is watching this trial, but I would like to forget about that, and would like it if no one was watching, and to talk only with you, gentlemen of the jury.” He then proceeded to review the evidence, or its absence, in the same matter-of-fact manner, with an eloquent closing that urged the jurors to focus on Beilis and not on the irrelevant and dubious attacks on Jews.26
The jury found Beilis not guilty. The vote was not recorded, but tsarist rules treated a verdict as an acquittal if there was either a majority for acquittal or a six-six split. It’s widely stated that the vote was six-six, an idea that appears to have originated with the right-wing paper Novoe Vremia (New times); its editors perhaps chose the six-six split because that was a vote consistent with the outcome but having the least tendency to show jury rejection of the state’s case.27 After more than two years in prison, Beilis at last won his release.
But in an unusual procedure, the court submitted another question to the jury. Though not specifically asking about ritual or religious purposes, the question was laden with religious/racial detail roughly tracking the evidence: had Andrei, in the brick factory associated with the Jewish hospital, had wounds inflicted on him “resulting in the almost complete loss of blood and in his death”? A yes answer would suggest a killing with intent to extract blood and thus probably a ritual murder. The jurors answered with a yes.28
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