Although Maklakov had consistently downplayed the significance of the 1906 decree, and even more the bill (whose main effect was to change the legal status of the decree’s rules), Kerensky suggested that Maklakov had claimed that the decree had repealed the estate condition of the peasantry, a claim Maklakov had never made.60 Kerensky also seemed to feel it useful to insult those supporting the decree and the bill (even though he was actually among them), saying that “if you cared about justice, you would start, as did the First Duma, with repeal of the privileges of the gentry.”61 What useful purpose could he have expected to achieve with the implication that the active proponents of the bill didn’t care about justice? And Kerensky’s comparison to the First Duma was way off. As Maklakov pointed out, it had done nothing like repeal of the gentry’s privileges, though it had entertained and sent to committee any number of general proposals to be developed into bills.62 Finally, it was absurd of Kerensky to pretend that he favored complete removal of all distinctions: if that occurred, peasant allotment land would, like ordinary property, be fully marketable to non-peasants as well as peasants, while in fact Kerensky and his fellow travelers staunchly opposed full marketability, believing it would lead to peasants’ selling off their land and falling into penury.63
Two nonsubstantive aspects of Kerensky’s speeches are striking. First, he often gives a slanted version of a supposed quotation from Maklakov (from either the Report or his speeches in the Duma), and when called on the distortion produces a bowdlerized version of the initial statement in defense. Maklakov was probably foolish to call him on any of these, but one can understand his irritation. Second, while his own speeches were wall-to-wall ad hominem arguments, he reacted with high dudgeon to the slightest criticism of himself. A thin skin doesn’t look well on a bully.
Maklakov’s wind-up on June 9 is worth quoting:
Between Kerensky and his fellow travelers and me there is no common language. And the reason is quite clear. We have completely different tactical positions. Mine is to advance this law, not to make beautiful speeches. And to advance it means to keep it within its boundaries and to remove all that would likely destroy it. While we live in a constitutional order we must know that constitutional life requires compromise. Kerensky has a different position. He would be glad if the Duma rejected the law, and threw off the mask, as they like to say. This would expose the illusion and show that it’s impossible to hope for peaceful legislation in a June 3 Duma. Of course in truth the peasants would gain nothing, but then they could read his attractive, beautiful speech. . . .
Sometimes I listen with great surprise to the praise of the First Duma that comes from the benches of the extreme left. The position that its fellow travelers had taken at the time was that their task was to discredit the Duma, and they couldn’t find enough swear words to reproach it for its timidity, its pliability, its backwardness. And when the party to which I belong proposed a law requiring that public meetings be allowed without the government’s permission, the left called this a prison law. Perhaps if enough time passes you will have a kind word to say about the decree of October 5.
And I don’t doubt that you, Alexander Fedorovich Kerensky, will enjoy cheap laurels, but laurels all the same. You will have success for a day. But the main thing is that it is easier to give the most eloquent speech than to resolve even the smallest question in peasant legislation. (Applause from left, center, and the left part of the right.) But woe to the popular legislature that believed that by such acts of legislation [the sort of broad proclamation favored by Kerensky] one could resolve the peasant question, woe to the country that, sympathizing with you, failed to understand that by such measures freedom cannot be obtained: freedom isn’t easily secured—by these measures you might win a battle, but you would always lose the campaign. (Stormy and prolonged applause from left, right, and center.)64
Typically Maklakov received applause from the left and perhaps the center, plus, rarely, from “scattered benches” on the right. Here his speech seems to have resonated across the spectrum.
One cannot reach a final judgment on a political figure simply from his performance in a single two-week debate. Certainly I don’t want to suggest that Maklakov would have been able to succeed where Kerensky so obviously failed—in leading the Provisional Government to a just peace and a stable, liberal form of government. But it was members of the Fourth Duma, most of them likely present for large portions of the June 1916 debate, who chose the Provisional Government’s first cabinet. What could they have been thinking?
CHAPTER 13
Reforms and Reform
An Appraisal
MAKLAKOV WAS IN THE DUMA from 1907 to 1917. Did he and the Duma accomplish much by way of reforms, and, more subtly, did the Duma gradually mature as a legislative body? On the first question, the record of real accomplishment is painfully skimpy.
First, did Maklakov’s and others’ work spotlighting misbehavior by the regime actually change that behavior? With a minor and debatable exception, the answer appears to be no. The exception is the possibility, suggested in chapter 7, that Maklakov’s depiction of the field courts martial as a state-destroying rather than a state-saving institution might have led the government to taper off its use more quickly than in the absense of his speech. But the case for any such link is highly speculative. The trend of its use was already down sharply, and we don’t know either the government’s earlier plans or the severity of the crimes allegedly involved (which might tell us whether Stolypin carried through on his apparent commitment, on the floor of the Duma, to limit its use to the worst offenses). As to reliance on the extraordinary security laws and agents provocateurs, the most that could be said is that regime misconduct may have declined roughly in step with the decline in anti-regime violence; but recall Maklakov’s wonder at how the ministry of internal affairs managed to find 2,000 people worthy of exile per year as of 1910, when the 1905 Revolution’s unrest had largely abated. And there appears to be no trend line in the executive’s practices of muscling the judiciary and appointing tractable people, forms of misbehavior that would be hard to detect or to measure objectively. The use of Article 87—which was in any event relatively unimportant, because its own rules severely limited the life span of Article 87 decrees that the Duma really disliked—was too episodic to create any kind of meaningful pattern. And Maklakov failed in his effort to limit the executive’s ability to remove troublesome deputies through a narrow interpretation of the rules on exclusion of Duma members convicted of crimes.
What of actual reform legislation? The only realm where we can identify real success is the judiciary, where the reform finally enacted in 1912 advanced judicial independence and law-based adjudication: the justices of the peace were restored to the countryside under terms that (thanks in part to Maklakov) were more protective of judicial independence than in the government’s bill, and the role of the ministry of internal affairs in control of the township courts (in both selection of judges and appeal) was extinguished. And the newly restored rural justices of the peace were free of such interference. Both systems were integrated with higher-level courts that were potentially capable of developing legal norms. These aren’t trivial accomplishments, but they occurred so late in the day that they had little chance, before Russia’s entry into the war, to sink roots in the countryside or inspire the Duma to enact follow-on reforms.
As to the rest, there were three different stages at which Maklakov and the views he propounded might fail: rejection in the Duma; succumbing to Duma inertia; or acceptance in the Duma followed by rejection or inertia in the State Council. He experienced each kind. His efforts to protect national minorities—by thwarting government efforts to undermine Finnish legislative independence and the status of Poles—were rejected in the most emphatic way: the Duma voted up the very legislation he attacked. On two very big issues, ending the Pale of Settlement and improving the meager remedies available against lawless officials, his advocacy failed to carry the bills t
hrough to Duma approval. Finally, the bill on Old Believer freedom passed the Duma but failed to overcome resistance in the State Council.
In the middle of the Third Duma’s life span, Maklakov himself offered an appraisal on a par with this lugubrious report card. In his report to his constituents that was later published in Russkaia Mysl, he noted that interest in the Duma had fallen. He attributed this to various unidentified “scandals,” but dismissed them as optical illusions and unimportant for the working of the Duma as a legislature. He relayed some then-current (1910) opinion on the Duma, including the accusation that it accomplished nothing. “It improved nothing, it made nothing worse. It vindicated neither the hopes nor the fears held for it.” But he argued that, in fact, in its 3rd Session the Duma had failed to meet even that low standard: “The session wasn’t fruitless; it made matters worse.”1 His main examples were its actions on the Finnish and Polish nationality issues, where, as we’ve seen, it didn’t merely fail to adopt reforms but affirmatively approved the government’s nationalistic proposals.2
Every so often Maklakov used the Duma itself to deliver similarly gloomy ratings. In December 1908, for example, he expressed his frustration with its inability to push the government toward observance of the spirit of the October Manifesto.
If [the government] has turned its back on the October Manifesto, that’s the matter of its opinions, its conscience. But we know that the country is losing its trust in the Duma, because it thinks either that the Duma is powerless in failing to implement the principles of the manifesto, or that the Duma no longer believes in those principles. This loss of the Duma’s authority flows from the anti-Duma, anti-Octobrist policy that the government follows and that it offers the Duma, which discredits the Duma and by which it seeks to finish off the Duma in public opinion.3
More optimistically, he went on to suggest that, although there was now every reason to have lost faith in the government, there was enough of a gap between the government and the Duma majority to retain some hope for the Duma.4
Then again, in May 1914, he gave a speech using the Beilis case as an illustration of the government’s utter lawlessness. In closing, he alluded to the words of the tsar at the opening of the First Duma, when he had said he hoped “to see Russia prosperous, comfortable, content.” But “these people” (unidentified public figures, perhaps the so-called court camarilla or body of reactionaries with easy access to Nicholas II, whom Maklakov saw as guiding government policy), on whom the realization of that dream depended, were either unable or unwilling to realize it. Then, in a phrase probably reflecting the Lena Goldfields massacre of 1912 but also foreshadowing war and revolution, “We already feel what before we only foresaw, we see fields of grief, tears and, perhaps, blood.”5 His peroration tried to prod both Duma and government with expressions of near despair about the absence of reform:
We must understand that if this movement [popular impatience with the government’s policy of repression without reform] passes us by, passes by the Duma, the movement which was basically lawful, but can no longer live lawfully, if this movement turns to unlawful means, working not through us but around us, that is the beginning of the end. . . . And therefore we have to understand what the historical moment we’re living through demands of us—not us the opposition, but the Duma—as the symbol of the peaceful life of our country. From you [the Octobrists] who seven years ago stood in the name of order on the side of the authorities, the historical moment demands that you show the country that you understand what is happening . . . , that at this moment, as a wise French writer [Berryer] said, “There is only one way to stop a revolution, and that is to make a revolution.” You cannot allow the country to become convinced that the Duma doesn’t count. And if you then stood on the side of the authorities in the name of order, now you must stand against the authorities in the name of order, and if they, madmen, do not understand what they are doing, you must accept the first blows of the enemy. (Prolonged applause from the left and the left part of the center.)6
In his public writings and his correspondence after the revolution, Maklakov offered a somewhat different assessment of the Third and Fourth Dumas (the “June 3 Dumas,” to use the left’s punchy label for them). In these writings his language suggests that the Duma was maturing, and that, over time and with a little luck, it could have developed into an effective force for reform and become the core political organ of a liberal democratic state. In State and Society, he referred to 1907–1914 as a kind of healthy corrective to the immediately preceding “fast jump.” The period was, he said, “a quieting and sobering up,” but not reaction. “It strengthened the existing popular representative body, it enabled the reforms of 1905 to succeed. The people who dreamed of a restoration of autocracy became fewer in those years, so it was not a real period of reaction.”7 A little later in the same book he contrasted the post–June 3 Dumas favorably with their predecessors: “For the real growth of society dramatic episodes aren’t needed. Thus it was in the gray epoch of the Third and Fourth Dumas, not in the stormy 73 days of the First Duma, that a constitutional order sank roots into Russia. The ordinary citizen felt the defects of our system.”8 I take the last sentence, about the defects felt by the ordinary citizen, to refer to citizens’ increasingly sophisticated grasp of what reforms were needed.
In his 1927 preface to the minutes of the Provisional Government’s commission investigating the old regime, he responded to the dismissal of the Third and Fourth Dumas by “liberal opinion,” a dismissal that sounds very like his own words in 1914, by pointing to specific, if low-level, contributions:
The country saw only one thing, that it was not moving forward. And this time it blamed not only the government, as was its habit, but the Duma itself. Liberal opinion was unjust. It was unwilling to acknowledge even the Duma’s serious merits: the careful examination of the budget, services rendered on its own initiative to national defense, the introduction of control even into the territory of the enemy—i.e., control over the acts of the all-powerful bureaucracy, etc. These successes, to be sure not brilliant, but real, were unappreciated. Public opinion was interested in the dramatic side of political life, scenes of conflict between the Duma and the authorities, in ringing discourses, and was deceived by the too prosaic attitude of the Duma.9
He then went on to argue that, as the country focused on dramatic conflicts between government and Duma, the revolutionaries and Duma opposition (mostly the Kadets) “rose in popularity as the Duma sank.”10
The proposition that the Duma (and perhaps the politically alert more generally) were maturing is in essence an argument that its members were actually learning something valuable. Maklakov makes that argument, perhaps obliquely, in correspondence in 1923. He addressed the claim, central to the iconography of the First Duma, that the Duma needed more power. No, he said. Most of the Duma’s conflicts with the government were a tempest in a teapot. And more power for the Duma would not have produced solutions: “It [the First Duma] didn’t understand the main question.”11 Here, Tyrkova-Williams’s reproach to him for his lateness in grasping the peasant question seems relevant. If it took even a level-headed and rather discerning deputy such as Maklakov till 1916 to see the scope of the peasant issue, then it seems reasonable to suppose that time could have advanced the thinking of most politically alert citizens, especially time in which an elected national legislative body openly wrestled with public issues. Citizens and deputies alike would presumably become more sophisticated on the issues and the need for compromise, and deputies would improve their technical skills in such tasks as drafting legislation. Maklakov himself, though already a skilled lawyer, seems to have benefitted from his legislative experience. In his memoirs, discussing his shepherding the bill on equalization of peasant rights through the Duma, he reports repeated meetings with the peasant deputies and assistance from them, and conveys an image of mutually beneficial exchange.12 He thus seems to have exemplified the process.
But Maklakov’s sh
ift from dim appraisals of the Duma during its life to cautious postmortem praise cries out for explanation. Two possibilities come to mind. Possibly the full horror of the Bolshevik revolution made the regime’s 1907–1917 recalcitrance and reaction seem less offensive than they had at the time, and therefore his own philippics against that regime (and the Duma’s seeming acquiescence) a bit overdone. (I have found no explicit acknowledgment of any such reappraisal.) Or he may have known perfectly well at the time of delivery that his philippics were overstated but felt they were justified by the need to stir the Duma to more independence and the regime to more flexibility. The two possibilities are by no means mutually exclusive.
Whether the Duma and politically conscious society were evolving in a constructive direction seems impossible to assess. Perhaps a sophisticated computer analysis of deputies’ words in the Duma, or of public intellectuals’ writings in Russia’s early-twentieth-century equivalent of today’s Op Ed columns, could detect trends in the use of invective versus serious policy arguments. Absent such analysis, we have to accept the fact that the Duma’s accomplishments were few and its maturation at best uncertain.
There remains the question of whether two of the great flaws that the left espied in the Fundamental Laws—Article 87 and the need for State Council approval for passage of a law—were of much consequence. As to Article 87, the answer seems fairly easy. There was no law enacted as a decree under Article 87 that survived for long in the face of genuine Duma opposition. The two decrees of consequence were the October 5, 1906, decree on the equalization of peasant rights and the November 9, 1906, decree on property rights in allotment land. As we saw, the Duma, including even its left, affirmatively embraced the first, though arguing (along with Maklakov) that it didn’t go far enough. As to the second, it was plainly in jeopardy in the Second Duma, and thus would likely not have survived in the absence of the June 3, 1907, coup d’état. But it was the coup d’état, not Article 87, that preserved Stolypin’s property rights measure.
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