The property rights issue was, of course, critical in the Second Duma (see chapter 7), where the split between Stolypin and the Kadets explains the Duma’s dissolution and the June 3 coup d’état. Those two events enabled the government to implement the Stolypin reform without Duma interference. Maklakov, not sharing the Kadet party’s policy, made very few public statements on the subject. The statements he did make reflect much of his usual acuity, but can’t be said to offer either a nuanced critique of the Stolypin program or a full assessment of the Kadet proposal—his assessment, if it were candid, would have been scathing. (As he wrote later while an émigré, he thought the Kadet idea would reinforce the principle of dividing the population into estates, a principle the Kadets normally and rightly opposed; only gentry would have property confiscated and only peasants would receive any rights. And it would violate property rights, one of the basic rights requiring protection in a rule-of-law state, to which the Kadets claimed to be committed.)2 We’ll look at the public statements that he made on the subject before the Bolshevik Revolution, but they are disappointingly few and brief, considering the issue’s importance and the passions it aroused.
On the broader issue of peasants in local government and provision of local public services, however, Maklakov played quite a serious role. In the period between the dissolution of the First Duma and the assembly of the Second (a legally productive period, thanks to Article 87 and Stolypin’s energy), the government issued not only its property-rights reform but also an October 5, 1906, decree eliminating or ameliorating some of the special rules that made the peasants a separate caste. In 1916 the government proposed a bill to turn the October 1906 decree into a regular statute. As a member of the Duma committee on judicial reform, Maklakov was assigned to be reporter (dokladchik) for the bill and prepared a comprehensive report. His recommendations included a revised bill, somewhat expanding the equalization measures of the original decree and of the government bill. Above all, his report recognized that the peasants’ status as a separate estate was the keystone of an elaborate but decayed edifice. It could be removed; but its removal, unless accompanied by a host of other changes, would leave only a pile of rubble. His true accomplishment in 1916 was to put the task of replacing the obsolete estate system on the agenda—an agenda, to be sure, that was likely to move slowly because of the regime’s foot-dragging and the war. The replacement would have to transform the nature of local government. The estate concept, itself a legacy of serfdom, would have to go, and with it the practice of requiring peasants to provide local services (roads, bridges, police, and so on) without pay. A new system, necessarily an all-estate system, would have to be created, a system in which peasants had a voice and financing depended not on “free” work but on revenues collected from all.
As to property rights, the Stolypin reform of 1906 had set Russia on a course toward private ownership, a somewhat rickety course, to be sure.3 An understanding of the issue starts with the meaning of the term “allotment land.” This refers to the land allotted to peasants in the course of emancipation, carved out of the land formerly owned by the serfs’ owners. Peasants had had the legal right to acquire ordinary, non-allotment land since 1848, and when they did so they held it under the same rules that applied to anyone else.4 They had increasingly taken advantage of that right over the years, but even by 1910 the overwhelming bulk of their interests in land continued to be allotment land. Stolypin’s reform sought to transform this situation, enabling peasants to opt out of the commune’s de facto collective ownership and into individual control.
In his 1910 report to his constituents in Russkaia Mysl, Maklakov explained that he hadn’t had much to say on the property-rights issue, not only because of disagreement with his party but also because his own views on the subject weren’t firm.5 Indeed, his article didn’t develop any strong position. His statements reflect some sympathy for both sides. That balance seems typically Maklakovian, but on this subject it was rather shapeless. He contrasted the Kadet “desire to take from the rich and give to the weak,” with the government’s desire “to take from those who cannot or do not want to farm their allotment land successfully, or don’t use it, those who wasted or ruined it, and give it to the ‘stronger peasants.’” He put “stronger peasants” in quotes because the phrase was an allusion to Stolypin’s explanation—he had said his proposal was a “wager on the strong.” Maklakov’s wording in his Russkaia Mysl article implicitly recognized that by “strong” Stolypin meant those who, if given independent control over their land, could and would farm it successfully, or at least were likely to do so, not peasants who were already well off. His wording also implicitly recognized the force of one of Stolypin’s basic policy judgments—that it was generally desirable for productive resources to flow into the hands of those most likely to enhance their productivity (as resources would in a well-functioning market economy).
But Maklakov’s 1910 discussion also used some of the rhetoric of Stolypin’s most vituperative critics, suggesting that the reform would “take” from one set of peasants and “give” to another. In fact, although the reform was more advantageous for some peasants than for others (as would be true of any adjustment in legal rights), it didn’t “take” land from or “give” land to anyone—except to the extent that it shifted rights within a given peasant family. That shift represented the reformers’ replacement of family ownership, which had governed allotment land, with individual ownership.
That adjustment was the subject of Maklakov’s severest criticism in his 1910 article. Formerly, if we put aside the uber-ownership of the commune (with its power to control the timing and character of cultivation, and periodically to redistribute the parcels so that each peasant family’s land would be roughly proportional to its supply of labor), the nearest thing to an “owner” of allotment land would have been an extended family unit. That meant that any decision to transfer land (itself difficult at best under commune conditions) would have involved all members of a multigenerational group. Under the Stolypin reform, ownership was reallocated to the oldest male of the family. The change had obvious potential for unfairness to the other members of the family.
Maklakov gave the example of a man with six children, whose father (the grandfather of the six) received the family’s land under the reform’s rule of giving the land to the senior male; he had then sold it, leaving the man and his six children poverty-stricken. Of course this is a risk in any economy with individual ownership (though it is sometimes qualified by rules like dower to protect widows or minimum shares for children at an owner’s death); we depend for the most part on ordinary decency and parental affection and loyalty to keep the risk relatively low. A system that gives every family member the right to veto a sale tends to tie up resources inefficiently, but an abrupt shift to individual ownership can do violence to expectations. Maklakov believed that the reform hadn’t adequately addressed the ill effects.
His concern was doubtless genuine. He elaborated on the problems in two extensive lectures that he delivered in December 1916.6 (When the Rasputin assassins explained to him that they had the night of December 16–17 in mind for the deed and wanted him available to give legal advice in its wake, he told them his commitment to give these lectures in Moscow that very evening made it impossible; see chapter 16.) The lectures gave an elaborate account of the differences between the social premises of general civil law relating to inheritance of land (where the blood relationship tended to be key) and those of the peasants in regard to allotment land (where work, such as that of sons-in-law who labored with the family, gave rise to entitlements). Maklakov, being staunchly committed to ending the artificial division of the population into estates, clearly could not propose a reliance on the estate concept to protect peasant expectations. Instead he proposed that a special set of rights should apply to allotment land itself: although his proposal would not disturb the Stolypin reform’s provision allowing a family to withdraw its property from control by the comm
une, it would, for that land, reestablish the intra-family property rights that had been applicable before the reform. Gradually, he proposed, blocks of land would be released from the intra-family ownership system and converted to the rules governing property rights in all other land. But he gave no details on this process of gradual release, did not address the problems of conflicting interests in getting consent to the release of a block (assuming it was to be consensual), and never confronted the costs in lost productivity for land tied up in familial ownership.
Maklakov’s last intervention on property rights before the Bolshevik Revolution was a speech to the Kadets’ Eighth Party Congress in May 1917.7 He advanced a decidedly less intrusive approach than that of his party: a progressive land tax that would favor small farms but would not at one blow break up the larger, more productive properties. It may seem surprising for Maklakov to have even attempted offering a proposal at such variance with the party line, but circumstances in the spring of 1917 may have given him hope for a respectful hearing. He could reasonably have thought that wartime exigencies had softened the party’s insistence on its program of massive compulsory redistribution, which, whatever one thought of its ultimate merits, was certain in the short run to upend the cyclical work of planting and harvesting. Moreover, his proposal favored small-scale over large-scale agriculture, and thus peasants over gentry, so it would have advanced oft-stated Kadet goals.
Maklakov characterized the Kadets’ policy of compulsory redistribution as merely a means to the end of supporting small-scale agriculture, especially farms worked entirely by the owners and their families. This was quite an incomplete statement of the party’s goals, as Maklakov well knew. After all, Miliukov and other party members actually looked forward to nationalization of the land, and for that reason opposed creating genuine property rights in the peasants who were to be the nominal recipients of the redistributed land.8 Indeed Miliukov had scoffed at the idea that individual ownership was either a Russian dream or a Russian reality.9 But Kadet orators had spoken warmly of small, family-worked farms, so it was only fair to take them at their word and offer policies that matched the rhetoric. Enough Kadet representatives might have placed that goal above compulsory confiscation to produce a majority for a policy that helped small, family-operated farms without disruptive effect.
Maklakov laid the groundwork for his proposal by referring to the accepted understanding that small-scale Russian agriculture was considerably less efficient than medium- and large-scale production. Indeed, not only did larger tracts have higher productivity, but their productivity edge had been steadily and markedly increasing from 1861 through 1910.10 Pointing to the wartime need for agricultural produce (the Provisional Government, as desperate for grain as its tsarist predecessor, had imitated the latter in forcing peasants to supply grain at government-fixed, below-market prices) and the long-run need for productivity imposed by international competition, he urged that it was folly to break up large agricultural holdings. The superior productivity of the large farms was not axiomatic, he said, just a function of current Russian conditions, so the government could reverse it over time, with policies helping small-scale producers to catch up. He also addressed the enthusiasts for breaking up “latifundia” who had argued that the large tracts broken up for purposes of redistribution could then be reunited for purposes of cultivation through cooperatives. Maklakov replied with the rhetorical question—did it make sense to artificially break them into pieces and then have to put them together again?
His solution was a land-tax with progressive rates, higher for large holdings, lower for smaller ones. Maklakov argued that such a tax would push the owners of large tracts either to enhance productivity, or, failing that, to sell them off into smaller parcels (for which buyers would be ready to pay more because of the lower taxes). As Maklakov saw it, this would nudge the country “painlessly and smoothly” toward both high productivity and the flourishing of small farms.
Maklakov’s analysis received support from Rodichev and a few other Kadets, but not from the bulk of party representatives. Although a modern economist could poke a number of holes in his argument, that was not the ground of Kadet opposition. The party reporter for its position on agricultural policy, N. N. Chernenkov, swept Maklakov’s analysis aside, saying that his and Rodichev’s arguments were “so far from the basic party line that discussion of the differences of opinion would be completely fruitless.”11 The conference proceeded to adopt the standard Kadet nostrum, explicitly rejecting an amendment under which the peasant recipients would receive the land as private property.12
In this May 1917 speech Maklakov made no mention of the deprived heirs, even though the subject had been central to his Russkaia Mysl discussion of agricultural policy and his 1916 lectures. Of course by May 1917 there was no point in criticizing Stolypin, who had been assassinated in 1911, and in the Provisional Government’s perilous situation it made sense to focus on reconciling Kadet attitudes with the need to produce adequate food supplies. The problem of intra-family claims made a brief appearance in an analysis he published in 1923 in a British scholarly journal, but there he passed rather quickly over to “the infinitely greater difficulties” connected with general governance issues in the countryside.13 And in a 1927 preface to the French edition of the stenographic minutes of the Provisional Government’s investigative commission, which he used as an opportunity to analyze the old regime’s collapse, he seemed to give Stolypin his full due. Speaking of the agrarian reform, he didn’t allude to the occasional child who lost out to the rapacity or self-indulgence or incompetence of an ancestor. Rather, he spoke of the “remarkable audacity and energy [with which Stolypin] cut the Gordian knot” and contrasted Stolypin’s approach favorably with the policies and attitudes of his Kadet brethren.14
In a letter to Maklakov in 1944, his old friend and ally Ariadne Tyrkova-Williams criticized him for coming to his understanding of the peasant problem late in the day.15 Her letter didn’t say just when she thought he really got a handle on it: my guess is that she would have seen such an understanding in his shepherding the rights-equalization bill through the Duma in June 1916 (our next topic). But that was indeed late in the day. The Stolypin reform had been a central political issue since no later than November 1906. Four years later Maklakov tackled it, but concentrated on what he later (1923) acknowledged was a peripheral issue, perhaps in part because of a desire to agree with at least a sliver of his party’s viewpoint. But from November 1906 onward, Maklakov’s intellect and eloquence could have enriched the debate on the reform and perhaps led to important improvements, especially in 1910 when the Third Duma debated the reform and enacted it, somewhat amended, into a regular law. Tyrkova-Williams’s rebuke seems just.
We now turn to the issue of Maklakov’s work on the equalization of peasant rights and responsibilities. In the spring of 1916 Maklakov took up this issue, together with the closely related challenge of integrating peasants into local government. On March 2 he received the assignment to be reporter for the government’s bill turning the October 5, 1906, equalization decree into a real statute. On April 4 he completed the committee’s comprehensive report,16 which included a revised bill, somewhat expanding the equalizations of the original decree and of the government bill. As Maklakov frequently acknowledged, in the report and on the Duma floor, the measure left a great deal to be done, even with the committee’s enhancements.
Maklakov’s work on the bill seems to have deepened his appreciation of how radically the Russian state was askew and how much it reflected the selfish interests of the landowner class. Observations of this sort appear constantly in his personal correspondence after the revolution. In a letter to Boris Bakhmetev, the Provisional Government’s ambassador to the United States, for example, he wrote of how a moment can come in a society when a minority in a country begins to be “a burden and a cage preventing the country’s development,” and cites a passage in Anna Karenina for its “sharp observation about how hard
it is for a person to condemn a situation that is personally advantageous for him.” In the passage, Kitty’s father observes that his son-in-law, Stiva Oblonsky (the husband of Dolly), has acquired a “post as member of a committee of a commission and whatever else, I don’t remember. Only there’s nothing to do there—what, Dolly, it’s not a secret—and the salary’s eight thousand. Try asking him whether his work is useful and he’ll prove to you that it’s very much needed. And he’s a truthful man. But then it’s impossible not to believe in the usefulness of eight thousand.”17
The bill largely absorbed the Duma’s calendar through the first half of June, taking seven days of debate. Throughout the discussion Maklakov was master of the Duma. The beginning was stormy. His initial explanation—the speech that his Bolshevik friend Alexandra Kollontai said was “very powerful, exact and successful”18—drove the Duma’s fringes into a frenzy. Monarchists to right of him, revolutionaries to left of him, volleyed and thundered. But unlike the unfortunate six hundred in the charge of the Light Brigade, Maklakov rode not into the valley of Death but into a thorough vindication. Every amendment he opposed fell, every amendment he supported passed. After he had guided his sections through (a different reporter handled some special provisions relating to the Baltics), there was a call to recognize his accomplishment, leading to “prolonged applause for the reporter for the committee on judicial reform, Duma member Maklakov.”19
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