The Reformer

by Stephen F. Williams

  A reporter who later talked with the jurors about the trial quoted one as saying: “Karabchevskii—we didn’t understand; Gruzenberg—we didn’t trust; Maklakov—he hit the nail on the head.”29 In fairness to Maklakov’s co-counsel, we should remember that at trial and in the media frenzy, the prosecution’s focus was on the canard of Jewish ritual murder, not poor Beilis himself, the main subject of Maklakov’s summation. If the jury verdict on ritual murder reflects a degree of anti-Semitism, that may also account in part for the jurors’ apparent distrust of Gruzenberg, who was Jewish.

  Because the fiction of Jewish ritual murder seems so nonsensical, observers have wondered what might have possessed those at the political apex of the Russian Empire to pursue a case founded on that fiction, and to pursue it at such a cost—inflicting injury on an innocent citizen and exposing the regime to mockery and contempt among its Entente allies in Europe. Maklakov was among those weighing in on the subject, publishing articles in the newspaper Russkie Vedomosti and the journal Russkaia Mysl (Russian thought) in 1913. He explained the government’s behavior as a response to political pressure from its allies on the right, sacrificing justice to politics.30

  The most interesting effort to refute Maklakov comes from the scholar Hans Rogger. He rejects the idea of political pressure, in large part on the ground that the right at that stage was not all that powerful. And the government, before it was embarrassed by the Lena Goldfields massacre in April 1912 (a shooting of several hundred workers who were peacefully protesting their living conditions), had no special need to shore up its right flank. In fact the dependence ran the other way. While the government doled out massive secret subsidies to the Union of the Russian People and others on the far right from 1905 to 1917, mainly to subsidize their presses, its officials recognized that the subsidized papers had very low circulation; the regime got very little bang for its ruble. Those favoring continued subsidies were reduced to the argument that without the government aid the papers would collapse, and that, even though small, they were an answer to the “leftwing and Jewish” press.31 Makarov, the minister of internal affairs immediately preceding Nikolai Maklakov, was planning, just before his replacement, to cut the subsidies off, but whatever chance of success that plan might have had, it came to an end with Nikolai Maklakov’s ascension.

  Given the lack of government dependence on the right, Rogger suggests that the pursuit of Beilis and ritual murder represented “a search for a principle, for a common belief that would rally and bind together the disheartened forces of unthinking monarchism,” or “a conscious effort to supply ingredients for a missing faith.”32 In reaching this conclusion, Rogger offers some thoughts on Nikolai Maklakov: He notes Nikolai’s full awareness of the hard right’s weakness as a political force, characterizes him as “unstable and shallow,” and endorses a suggestion that his activity was in significant part due to the “hypnotic sway” held over him by Shcheglovitov.33

  Rogger’s theory is enticing, but it doesn’t really answer the question why high officials would embrace as a rallying principle a completely spurious claim—that Jews indulge in ritual murder. To be sure, one could take Rogger a step further and argue that it was precisely the lunacy of the thesis that gave it value: as in submission to fraternity hazing and thousands of other social practices, the more absurd and costly the behavior (and the cost can be intellectual or social embarrassment), the more a person’s participation demonstrates his devotion to the cause or institution.

  Both Maklakov and Rogger seem to me to overlook a simpler explanation—that people living in a milieu where a strong ideological proposition holds sway (here, the presumptive evil of Jews) are likely to accept without much independent evaluation claims that sustain the basic faith. On that view, the impulses of Nicholas II seem to be just a matter of doing what comes naturally, and the activities of Shcheglovitov and Nikolai Maklakov likely a combination of the same ideological inclination (perhaps chilled in Shcheglovitov’s case by his undoubted intelligence) and an effort to please their imperial master.

  Whatever the merits of Maklakov’s analysis, he did not express it without cost. He and the editors of the paper and journal with his article were accused of distribution in print of “deceitful and shameful” information about officials. At about the same time, the government brought a similar charge against Vasily Shulgin, editor of a Kiev newspaper, the Kievlianin (Kiev citizen), for publishing an article exonerating Beilis. Shulgin’s article had been especially startling, as he was persistently and openly anti-Semitic. But in this instance, at least, he looked at the facts. Maklakov testified in the Shulgin trial, but Shulgin was convicted and sentenced to three months’ imprisonment. His term didn’t start immediately, however, and when World War I began he was allowed instead to join the military service; after he was wounded, the government was ashamed to put him in prison and pardoned him. The trial of Maklakov and the editors was delayed, but in due course he and the editors were found guilty. They appealed, but the appeal was for some reason never heard. Maklakov encountered the sentencing judge during the February Revolution, when their power relationship was reversed (Maklakov now on top, the other powerless), but Maklakov refrained from reacting at all.34

  Given the bloodshed of the civil war and the Bolshevik regime, many of the figures in this book necessarily came to untimely, dramatic ends. Among these were Shcheglovitov and Nikolai Maklakov, both executed by the Bolsheviks on December 5, 1918, the first day of the Red Terror, without, of course, the government’s incurring the inconvenience of a trial. Menahem Mendel Beilis’s life after the trial was financially harsh, as he was dependent at the end on selling his account of the trial from door to door in New York. But throughout he preserved his honor (rejecting offers to exploit his fame), and he died peacefully in 1934.35 One is tempted to see a little poetic justice in this. But one should resist the temptation: however reprehensible the actions of Shcheglovitov and Nikolai Maklakov, their deaths in a massive Bolshevik bloodletting cannot be thought of as justice of any kind.

  In light of Maklakov’s advocacy against the Pale and for Beilis, it seems odd to find suggestions that Maklakov was anti-Semitic. There is a more nuanced and compelling suggestion that he was not philo-Semitic.36 In any event, he himself observed in correspondence with Shulgin that he had a kind of “zoological” anti-Semitism—he claimed he had never seen a Jewish face that he found attractive. But he went on in the same paragraph to say that many people having this aesthetic impulse let it corrupt their thinking. Such a person “stubbornly stands on his convictions, insists on any rubbish, and an argument with such a person is obviously useless.”37 However Maklakov may have arrived at his negative aesthetic judgment, it seems not to have spilled over into his life as an advocate or, indeed, as a citizen and political figure.

  An item of evidence that has been used against Maklakov is a January 27, 1916, entry in the diary of his good friend and fellow Kadet moderate, Ariadne Tyrkova-Williams: “Maklakov, always playful and joking, said, ‘It’s a big secret. I’m a good Kadet. Only I don’t favor compulsory alienation of land, equal rights for Jews, and universal suffrage.’”38 In a sense it’s clear that Maklakov was joking, for his rejection of the party line on the first and third items, which were regular Kadet themes and which he did in fact reject, surely rendered him a dubious Kadet rather than a “good” one. But why would he have added the reference to “equal rights for Jews”? A conceivable explanation is that Tyrkova-Williams misunderstood his position on the bill expanding peasant rights, which he guided through the Duma in June 1916. In that context (as we’ll see in chapter 12) he did reject an attempted expansion of the pending bill to embrace equal rights for Jews—the proposed change would have doomed the bill, injuring peasants and not helping Jews in the slightest. (His draft, by clarifying a provision that had been mistakenly read to the disadvantage of Jews, rendered the provision harmless.) But the Duma activity on peasant rights took place in June 1916, and he became reporter for the co
mmittee producing the bill only in March 1916, not in time for Tyrkova’s January 1916 diary entry. Conceivably he foresaw the peasant rights issue as the next occasion for Duma action on equal rights, and his thoughts may have jumped ahead to that context. Whether it was a silly joke or an anticipation of the peasant-rights controversy, the remark (if correctly recorded) seems not to have reflected any genuine impulse to deny Jews equal rights.

  A Soviet historian has hinted that one argument by Maklakov in the debate on the Pale reflects anti-Semitism. Maklakov drew a distinction between individual anti-Semitism, both in business and even in culture (referring as an example to people who refuse to listen to pianist Arthur Rubinstein). He suggested that private anti-Semitism was each person’s right, whereas state discrimination was inconsistent with the state’s duty to its subjects. Then he went on to link the two as a way of supporting repeal of the Pale: “I would say to the anti-Semites that they ought first to insist on recognition of equal treatment of Jews by the state so as to have a better moral right to their personal anti-Semitism.”39 His purpose, plainly, was to turn what was likely a personal attitude of many Duma members, perhaps a majority, into an affirmative reason for ending the Pale. By opposing a grievous, large-scale wrong inflicted by Russia on its Jewish subjects, they would acknowledge a line that even their anti-Semitism would not cross. Whatever the abstract merits of a state ban on private discrimination might be, the argument made complete sense in context and may well have pulled some deputies into the repeal column.

  In view of the Tyrkova-Williams diary entry, it seems worthwhile to recount briefly some of Maklakov’s other advocacy for the fair treatment of Jews. During the war the government had the gall—at a time when it was engaged in an ethnic cleansing of Jews from a broad zone near the front—to issue circulars accusing Jews of, first, being part of a German-inspired plot to burn crops, exacerbate the food crisis, and generally foment revolution; and, second, of hoarding goods and money, and thereby promoting dissatisfaction and insurrection. Maklakov joined with Miliukov and other Kadet and non-Kadet leaders in seeking an interpellation in the Duma. The move was defeated, with Kadet agreement, out of fear that it would be voted down under Octobrist pressure.40

  In the course of a Duma speech generally indicting the government’s conduct of the war, Maklakov singled out the way in which a government circular had scapegoated the Jews for inflation (fictive explanations of inflation, disregarding increases in the money supply, are legion around the world!). He had some fun with the passage, saying that it went so far as to explain inflation as a Jewish scheme to end the Pale of Settlement. He noted instead the more obvious (and economically coherent) attribution of inflation to the government’s issuance of paper money.41

  In a Kadet party congress during the war, Maklakov opposed a resolution relating to government treatment of the Jews in Galicia, but only because he doubted it would have the slightest effect. He observed that anti-Semitism was “colossal” in the army there. Although no one thought that all Jews were spies, they generally thought all spies were Jews. Given the way Jews were being treated, they would have been morally justified in becoming spies, he thought, but he had no reason to think that many of them were. In any event, no facts about Jewish espionage would justify the way they were treated. What the party had to fight was the mistaken set of notions about the supposed link between Jews and espionage. “And there is only one means of doing so—with facts.”42

  A couple of other points in this vein: First, as we’ll see in the next chapter’s discussion of Maklakov’s hostility to the tsarist regime’s stumble-footed Russification programs, he drew a careful distinction between a healthy nationalism and a bullying nationalism. The principle accords with his work opposing restrictions on Jews. Second, during the Russian civil war, he exercised what influence he had, as the defunct Provisional Government’s chosen representative to France, to lean on the White forces to behave better toward Jews in areas under their control. Strategic considerations, to be sure, called for such a policy to attract support from Russia’s former allies, but his work there also tracks his record in the pre-Revolutionary years.

  In short, Maklakov’s eloquent efforts from 1905 to 1917 to curb the regime’s religious discrimination show no sign of being infected by his aesthetic views, however puzzling we may find them. If the regime had followed his advice, the Jews and Old Believers at the receiving end of discrimination would have had far less reason to abandon it in 1917. So in all likelihood would other Russians who valued a state that respected its people.

  CHAPTER 10

  National Minorities

  IN RUSSIA’S MULTI-ETHNIC EMPIRE, two ethnic groups, the Poles and the Finns, had prior histories as nations. These survived into the pre-revolutionary era as the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Finland, both subject to Russian sovereignty. There was tension (to put it very mildly) between Russia’s interests in being a nation itself, or at least a polity meaningfully unified under the monarchy, and the subject populations’ interests in control over their own national life. Maklakov generally saw Russia’s national interest as lying in respect for the interests and historic cultures of the Poles and Finns.

  A useful starting point is a report that he prepared on the third session of the Third Duma (1909–1910), which he initially delivered as a speech to his constituents and then published as an article in the journal Russkaia Mysl in 1911.1 To put this in perspective, imagine a member of the House or Senate publishing a report to his constituents in Foreign Affairs or perhaps The New York Review of Books; the American legislator of the last half-century whom one can most easily imagine doing so is Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Maklakov distinguished between several varieties of nationalism. On the one hand, he recognized a kind of innocent or benign nationalism: “a burst of national feeling . . . an expression of joy and pleasure that ordinarily coincides with revolution. Take the Great Revolution: who could be more nationalist than the Girondists and Danton?” More broadly, this good nationalism arose in eras when the state began to “correspond more closely with popular trust and expectations.” Nationalism—of the right type—is “firm toward the powerful, magnanimous to the weak. French nationalists dared to fight all Europe, but they voluntarily gave equal rights to the Jews.”2

  But the nationalism that Maklakov saw prevailing in Russia was utterly different. It was only “so-called nationalism,” “a forgery and imposture”—and among the forgeries and impostures that distort the meaning of words, he said he knew of none more shameful than the forgery committed with nationalism. “Our nationalism is born of reaction, not revolution. It marks a moment of breakdown, not rise, in the public mood.” It was born when “reaction prevailed and the frightened enemies of revolution came on the scene. . . . Reaction called all revolutionaries foreigners, and vented all its fear and weakness on them.” From this sort of nationalism—the government’s—he expected no good. Contrasting it with yet a third nationalism, that of the oppressed, he said, “What is forgivable in the weak can be repellent in the strong.”3 He pointed to the example of French teachers who shunned Germans after the Franco-Prussian war; as the reactions of the citizens of a defeated power toward those of the conqueror, their actions seemed at least excusable. Comparable actions by Russia toward its subject peoples were not.

  Having set up this typology of nationalism, he used it to chide the Octobrists. If the government’s policy, this forgery of nationalism, was the work of reaction, of hostility to aligning the state with the expectations of the people, then why on earth were the Octobrists, conceived in the name of the October Manifesto, giving it their support?

  Maklakov’s liberal positions on the nations within Russia may seem at odds with his rather nationalistic stance on the international scene (see chapter 14). But at least in one respect the two sets of ideas mesh, as Maklakov explained from time to time. For Russia to withstand international geopolitical competition, it required internal cohesion, which in turn required some degree
of loyalty from its subject nationalities. Beating up on them was not the best way to win their loyalty.

  In later life, Maklakov wrote a rather touching account of two fellow soldiers in the struggle for reform, Fyodor Rodichev and Alexander Lednitskii, a Pole, whom we’ve already met as Maklakov’s chosen—but in fact unused—legal mentor (see chapter 2). The piece includes an episode that obviously made a strong impression on him, and may partly account for his sympathies for Russia’s subject peoples. Maklakov was a member of a 1905 all-Russian congress to form a Lawyer’s Union, gathering in response to the tsar’s February 1905 decree calling on people to offer proposals for reform. The Polish lawyers announced in advance that they would participate only if the congress recognized the Poles’ right to autonomy—evidently both as a general principle and within the lawyers’ conference (that is, an understanding that the conference as a whole could adopt a position only if both Polish and Russian memberships approved). The Russians were unprepared, and disliked the pressure of such an ultimatum. Rodichev saved the day with a speech, the first of his that Maklakov had ever heard, that raised the matter to such a level “that any opposition would seem shameful,” and the Poles’ claims were promptly approved by all.4

  At a slightly later zemstvo congress, Polish autonomy was again debated. Maklakov was not a participant but followed the proceedings closely, and was persuaded that the debate exposed the “deceit” in the principle of mere “equal rights,” that is, simply extending the type of democracy advocated in the Kadet platform throughout the empire—a polity of strikingly varied histories and cultures—but without the kind of allowance for variation implicit in a federal structure. That principle ignored the facts and the distinctiveness of Polish culture, the Polish past, the not-yet-forgotten former Polish state, and even currently separate Polish legislation (a residue of its having formerly had an independent legislature). To ignore all this in the name of equality, to consider Russia a unitary state despite the obviousness of these problems was, he wrote, as doctrinaire as the demands for a constituent assembly and for universal and equal suffrage. The idea of Polish autonomy—popularized at meetings organized by Lednitskii—was, he said, as statesmanlike an idea as Russian society was ready to grasp at the time.5