In public discussion Maklakov attacked the government on two quite specific issues relating to the Poles: first, its plans for creating zemstvos in Russia’s western provinces but with a franchise skewed to assure Russian dominance; and second, its carving a new province out of Congress Poland.
We saw in chapter 8 Stolypin’s use of Article 87 in 1911 to overcome the State Council’s resistance to the western zemstvo scheme, but the scheme had been in the works since May 1909. It started simply with a reactionary editor’s idea of adjusting the franchise in the western provinces in order to have more Russians among the members of the State Council elected from that area than would be likely under the general franchise law. But Stolypin had the idea of marrying that goal with a policy of extending the zemstvo—the institutional route for selection of State Council members in the rest of Russia—to the western provinces. The standard zemstvo franchise rules, however, tilted heavily toward landowner interests, and would not produce the desired results in a region dominated by Polish landowners and Russian, or at any rate Orthodox, peasants. Accordingly the usual provisions had to be manipulated. The government devised an extremely complex set of electoral rules—even to the point of imposing limits on the number of peasants who might be elected as a result of the bill’s weakening the usual tilt in favor of the gentry.6
But the principal target of Maklakov’s account in Russkaia Mysl was the scheme’s use of nationally based curiae, Polish and Russian, which could each vote only for its own nationality. This was, he pointed out, the antithesis of the government’s whole nationality policy, under which it forbade voluntary and professional organizations that limited admission to those of a particular national group. “The government, which forbade associations defined on a basis of nationality for fear of separatism, itself unites the Poles of a whole region, gives them authority, making them representatives of a whole people, and sets them up in opposition to the Russians. It’s hard to imagine a greater self-contradiction, a greater want of principle.” This was, he thought, a sin against the idea of the state, “which ought to unite and not separate . . . all the peoples of a single state.”7
He then turned to the scheme’s sins against the zemstvo principle. There were three. First, it betrayed the idea of the zemstvo by subordinating it to an interest other than local popular authority, namely the goal of changing the composition of the upper house. Second, since the success of the zemstvo enterprise de pended on the quality of the people chosen to exercise responsibility, constraining choice by an irrelevant consideration (the obligation of each curia to choose only “its own” nationality) would limit the group who could be chosen and thus degrade overall quality. “Russia is not so rich in cultivated local people not to fear the results of such a constraint.” Third, the zemstvo is aimed at local self-government, at giving rights to local people, to whom local interests are near and dear. The bill’s artificial support for the Russian landowner element, after the measures aimed at Russification of the area, would turn zemstvo matters not into the hands of the local people, but into the hands of bureaucrats who had obtained estates in the western provinces on easy terms and, living in St. Petersburg, were unaware of local needs. In short, the scheme made no sense in terms of Russia’s nationality problems, and at the same time jeopardized local self-government. Maklakov again upbraided the Octobrists for renouncing their promises, for ignoring the zemstvo ideal and the constitution.8
In the Duma a little later, Maklakov attacked a bill that aimed to carve a new province, Kholm (Chelm), out of two existing provinces in Congress Poland. He argued that the bill made promises to the Russian (or Ukrainian) population that would not be kept, and threatened and insulted the Poles with no offsetting benefit. It was a lose-lose proposition.
Technically, he observed, all the bill did was to create a new province out of parts of two preexisting ones; but the new province would be the domain of the minister of internal affairs, and, just as before, the region would be governed from St. Petersburg. The excuse given for the bill was that it would protect the ethnic Russians from the consequences of city and rural self-government likely to be dominated by non-Russians once self-government was established. But the need for protection seemed fanciful. There was already urban self-government, and with the system of voting by curiae it posed no threat to the Russians. As to rural self-government, there was no way of figuring out what might be needed for such protection until the details of this as-yet hypothetical self-government were known. He argued that the “protection” excuse was given only to quiet the conscience of those who would not agree to the bill if it were recognized as simply an act of hostility to Poland.9
While he clearly would have no truck with forceful Russification, Maklakov saw a legitimate Russian concern over the likely “Polonization” of the area’s Russian population. He identified three potential sources of Polonization, but doubted whether the bill would affect any of them: the Russian peasants’ economic dependence on Polish landowners; the dominance of the Catholic Church; and the existence of schools, including private ones, that taught in Polish and reflected Polish sympathies and interests. Not only did the bill not address any of these issues, but Maklakov found it hard to see any decent way of doing so. The government could, of course, close Polish schools, forbid private schools, and encroach on the right of the population to learn the mother tongue, but he plainly regarded such measures as unthinkably drastic. So too with the influence of the Poles as landowners: nationalizing their land might solve that problem, but the bill certainly didn’t propose it.10 The bill would thus wholly fail to achieve its stated aims, at the cost of increasing alienation among the Poles.
Maklakov agreed in a qualified sense with the argument of Count Bobrinskii, one of the bill’s proponents, that the administration in Kholm had been drawn from the dregs of Russia’s administration. In Maklakov’s view, Kholm had been run by “administrative careerists who have not understood—as they have not understood in Russia itself—that a population is a living organism, not scaffolding that is constructed around a building.” He regarded Russia, with its clumsy efforts to support the Russian population, as acting like a “rhinoceros in a china shop.”11
He then turned to an argument advanced by another supporter, Bishop Evlogi, who had said that the bill was needed to raise the spirits of the Russian population. He responded that it was trying to do it by means of show rather than substance, and in that respect the means were extremely “ne-gosudarstvennyi,” an untranslatable phrase meaning, roughly, “destructive to a healthy state.” The bill was also ne-gosudarstvennyi in that it tended to destroy the idea of Slavic unity. It would, for the sake of symbolic legislation, push the Poles toward Germany and would cost Russia our “dear and reliable friends.” In the same passage he referred to the Germans as “our immemorial enemies,” which was accurate in one sense but at the cost of neglecting other immemorial enemies such as the Poles and Lithuanians.12 His choice of language was clearly driven by the increasing tension between Germany and France, Britain, and Russia.
Maklakov characterized the proponents’ claims as demagoguery, as offering up a resounding and grand formula to raise the mood of the Russian population, but one so vague that a listener could fill it with whatever content he liked.
You tell the Russian population that they will become khoziains in their country. [Khoziain is another untranslatable word, here suggesting “boss.”] But did you tell them that they will be khoziains only in the sense that a Moscow or Tula peasant is a khoziain, someone who will be ordered around by every lower official of the Russian administration, that when famine comes Russian authority will obstruct the collection of relief funds? (Prolonged applause from the left: shouts from the right and center: “Demagogue, shameful!”) The Russian peasant, who suffers from dependence on Polish bread, will doubtless think that when he becomes a khoziain, as you have promised him, he’ll no longer feel this economic dependence.13
The allusion to bureaucratic obstructio
n of famine relief of course echoed his own experience in the famine of 1891.
With the Octobrists’ support, the Duma approved the Kholm bill and the tsar ultimately signed it. Maklakov’s Russkaia Mysl article reflects his disappointment with the Octobrists, whom rightly he calls “the center”: “And here is the center, which has followed along, which hasn’t understood, in its naiveté, or perhaps in its hypocrisy, what sort of road it is pursuing.”14
In the war, Maklakov gave several speeches directed to the government’s bungling of the war effort, but in one he particularly focused on its relations with the Poles. “Poland for a long time has been a private preserve of the functionaries of Russification. In fighting Polonization they protected the Germans in Poland.” And he examined the two-faced character of Russian statements on Poland’s future. Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich (Nicholas II’s first cousin once removed), the commander of Russian armies in the west, had issued a proclamation in August 1914 suggesting that the regime would agree to autonomy for Poland after the war. But the authorities in St. Petersburg, behind his back, told the press that autonomy must not even be discussed. They explained to Russian functionaries that any autonomy for Poland would not involve Russian (as opposed to Austrian or German) Poles.15 The tsar issued no declaration paralleling the Grand Duke’s, a gap noted by the Poles.16
Maklakov later, in a speech celebrating Russian culture, identified Russia’s role in the partition of Poland as a great sin, for which he thought Russia was still paying.17 That position seems completely in accord with his positions on the western zemstvos and the creation of Kholm province.
In the case of the Finns, the government proposed legislation that seemed to Maklakov even more egregious than the western zemstvos and the Kholm carve-out: it violated solemn obligations Russia had made to Finland, obligations that he regarded as having constitutional status.
The government proposed its Finnish legislation to address the anomaly between Finland’s status as part of the Russian empire and longstanding provisions that guaranteed Finland and its Diet authority over its internal affairs. Article 2 of the Fundamental Laws, for example, provided that Finland should be governed “in its internal affairs by special provisions on the basis of special legislation.” A similar line was drawn in the 1869 legislation reorganizing the Finnish Diet and saying that the provision was Finland’s fundamental law and could be changed only by the joint decision of the Diet and the monarch (that is, the tsar in his capacity as Grand Duke of Finland). That in turn drew on Alexander I’s declaration to the Finnish people and the Diet assembled at Porvoo (or Borgo) on March 27, 1809 (after Alexander’s conquest of Finland from Sweden), recognizing Finland as a separate political unit, “retaining its fundamental rights and the constitution it had hitherto possessed, to be maintained in force, intact and unchanged.”18
The reservation of “internal affairs” to Finland implicitly left some matters outside that reservation, matters that the Russians came to call issues of “imperial concern.”19 Yet the line between these categories had never been clearly drawn. In a proposal precipitated by interpellations in the Duma by Octobrists and rightists questioning the status of Finland, Stolypin created a special committee of five Finns and six Russians (including the chair, Russian State Comptroller P. A. Kharitonov) to identify issues of “imperial concern” and the procedure by which legislation addressing such issues should be passed. On a predictable 6–5 vote, the committee proposed not only a virtually all-encompassing definition of matters of imperial concern, including, for example, education, but also a simple if rather brutal means of implementation: ordinary Russian legislative provisions would suffice, though the Diet would be invited to send a number of deputies to the Duma and State Council and would be asked for its (nonbinding) opinion on bills. The government introduced legislation embodying these ideas.20
Maklakov accepted a key premise of the legislation, namely that the existing situation was anomalous. He even went so far as to suggest that in extremis it might justify action in violation of the various constitutional commitments that he had identified. His theory here seems to be a variation on his basic view of coups d’état: they are bad, but sometimes the alternative is so much worse as to justify a coup. But here, he argued, Russia and Finland were by no means at such a point—there was considerable goodwill among the Finns despite highhanded Russian behavior, and the matter could be resolved in negotiations with the Diet.21
Although winning a significant number of Octobrist votes was probably hopeless, Maklakov aimed his speech especially at them. If they failed to insist that the state observe the constitution vis-à-vis Finland, how could they expect to demand that the state do so for Russia itself? Whereas members of the government might hate the October Manifesto and its ideal of constitutionalism, the Duma’s Octobrist “center” had no reason to endorse such a breach.22
Rightists and Octobrists for the most part ignored Maklakov’s constitutional arguments. They said that the Finns had been ingrates for various financial benefits supplied by Russia, including defense expenses (though they omitted any discussion of exactly what threat the Finns might have faced independently of Russia). More on point, but hardly compelling, were arguments by rightist N. E. Markov (Markov II), saying that, although Nicholas I spoke of the need to observe promises, he must have meant something different since he himself had deprived Congress Poland of the constitution promised by Alexander I. Markov also claimed that Alexander II’s emancipation of the serfs violated promises to preserve serfdom, allegedly made to the serf-owners (technically, the dvorianstvo) by several tsars (Catherine II, Peter III, and Paul I).23 These claims seem to belong in the basement of the argumentative arsenal, along with “so’s your old man” and “two wrongs make a right.”
Maklakov’s efforts were to no avail. The bill whisked through all three readings in the Duma in less than a week; it was adopted by a Duma vote of 164 to 23, then by the State Council, and became law on June 17, 1910.24
A last and curious episode involving national minorities suggests Maklakov’s rare spot on the palette of viewpoints in late imperial Russia. At the Kadets’ June 7, 1915, party congress, one Nikolai Vasilenko, a delegate from Kiev, said that Maklakov had claimed in a press interview that the Ukrainian national movement was based on German money. Delegates cited similar statements, seemingly hostile to Ukrainian interests, by his fellow Kadet Pyotr Struve. (Maklakov himself in correspondence after the revolution called Struve a “Ukrainophobe.”) Another delegate from Ukraine, M. K. Imshenetskii from Chernigov, reported that dissatisfaction with the Kadets was growing among the democratic intelligentsia in Ukraine, mainly because of the speeches by Struve and Maklakov. He wanted the party to clearly disavow their positions. Miliukov proposed a resolution explicitly saying that the opinion of the party was not the opinion expressed by those two. Whereupon another member, V. V. Lashkevich, asked for a word of personal privilege. He used it to say that Maklakov had authorized him to say that he (Maklakov) had given no interview at all on the subject of Ukraine and had never uttered the words ascribed to him. So far as the party congress’s reproving Maklakov was concerned, this pricked the bubble.25
As we’ll see in chapter 14, Maklakov took a rather nationalistic stance in the international maneuvering that culminated in the outbreak of World War I. In that project he was closely associated with Struve, who was with him at the intellectual core of the short-lived newspaper Russkaia Molva [Russia speaks]. Many public figures holding such viewpoints were also nationalistic vis-à-vis Russia’s subject peoples: take the Octobrists generally and Struve himself. But Maklakov and Struve were hardly ideological twins. The delegates’ readiness to believe that Maklakov had made the statement attributed to him seems likely to have stemmed in part from a notion that since he and Struve thought alike on many issues, including their nationalism abroad, they would share similar viewpoints on Ukraine. But things that often go together do not always go together. As we’ve seen, Maklakov didn’t
let his nationalistic views spill over into scorn for Russia’s national minorities or a will to dominate them.
Maklakov’s position on Russia’s subject nationalities seems based on a full recognition of the political realities. It had a crucial gap, however. While recognizing the interests of both the Poles and Russians (or other Orthodox) intermingled in western Russia, and properly blasting the ineptitude of the government’s solutions, he didn’t affirmatively offer a solution of his own. In fairness, of course, no good solution was readily available. It’s not clear even now whether any solution was available. The intermingling has now largely ended, but only through the massive ethnic cleansings that preceded, accompanied, and followed World War II. It’s hard to dub those a “solution,” much less a good one.
Despite this shortcoming, a little attention by the regime to Maklakov’s position might have secured it a degree of loyalty and trust when the stresses of war and Russia’s faltering military position inspired its national minorities to think of escape.
CHAPTER 11
The Reformer Page 21