Yet specific accomplishment—perhaps achieved by a focused negotiation and even horse-trading with potential allies in other parties—might have nudged Russia nearer to the rule of law and made it better able to avert chaos in the face of wartime stress and disaster. Reforms themselves could give citizens some sense that their lives were not subject to the whims of a free-range bureaucracy. Even more importantly, the very process could have helped the Duma develop into an institution capable of taking charge later, when army mutinies precipitated the tsar’s abdication and the anarchy that Durnovo had predicted.
Despite Miliukov’s priorities, a number of politicians made tries at legislative coordination among the relatively moderate parties. Maklakov was among them. Shipov recounts an attempt as early as the spring of 1908, originated by the editor of Slovo (Word), a paper closely attached to the leaders of the Party of Peaceful Renewal. The original invitation went to three members of that party (including Shipov and the editor of Slovo), three Kadets (including Maklakov and Struve), and three Octobrists. All agreed to the idea of coordination in principle. But the three Octobrists soon cooled, saying that they needed to consult the Octobrist fraction and that further efforts should be put off till the fall. The representatives of the Party of Peaceful Renewal took the message as a device to back out without doing so explicitly. Shipov chalked the failure up to party antagonisms and a failure to recognize the need for agreements in the interest of advancing shared goals of reform.31
A similarly fruitless effort occurred in January–March of 1914, bringing together Kadets such as Maklakov and Chelnokov, Progressives like Konovalov and Riabushinskii, some left Octobrists, some non-party intellectuals, and even a Bolshevik (I. I. Skvortsov-Stepanov). The first meeting, in Konovalov’s St. Petersburg apartment, was aimed largely at legislative cooperation. But despite Kadet and Progressive readiness to compromise on local self-government reforms (rural and urban), the effort apparently foundered on Octobrist resistance to the very idea of creating an opposition center in the Duma. The second set of meetings, in Konovalov’s and Riabushinskii’s Moscow apartments, looked toward mobilizing pressure outside the Duma, pressure that was seen as being broad in scope (workers, peasants, bourgeois), but of somewhat unclear methods. Again the Octobrist leadership resisted, arguing that the rise of political strikes suggested a risk of return to the upheavals of 1905–1907.32
Miliukov’s insistence on pure democracy (the universal franchise) and pure parliamentarianism was clearly not the sole cause of the opposition’s remaining splintered, perhaps not even a principal cause. As Shipov remarked, the moderates lacked an urgent sense of the need for unity in pursuit of feasible reform. Ben Franklin’s caution, “We must all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately,” was not for them. Though not the whole reason for the moderates’ failure to coalesce, Miliukov’s devotion to the unattainable surely played a role.33
Explicit alliances with other parties might have been a palliative for Maklakov’s frustration with his own, but such alliances failed to develop (until the formation of the Progressive Bloc in 1915, discussed in the next chapter). What of an effort to capture the leadership of the Kadets, to found a new party, or to bolt to an existing alternative? That Maklakov was restless is perfectly clear. In a conversation in 1908 with a political admirer, Evgenii Efimovskii, he said, “I don’t understand you, why do you stay with this political rot?” The context made the site of the “rot” ambiguous, but it proved that Maklakov was referring to the Kadet party. He went on: “You’re young. You have a right to a good career. You can’t have it in the Kadet party. We’re too full of old maids.” Efimovskii turned the question around, “Why do you, one of the leaders of the party, give me this advice?” Maklakov: “Me—I’m another matter. I need credentials. I have them in the Kadet party.” But Efimovskii believed that by not founding a party Maklakov had failed to seize his chance to be “a political eagle,” and lived instead in a political “desert” where he could not fulfil himself.34
As to seizing the leadership of the Kadets, the numbers simply weren’t there. In February 1914 an article in Rech sneered at Maklakov explicitly “for his very small group of supporters, having no influence over the party or the Duma fraction.”35 While the language was in part an effort to cow the opposition (“mau-mauing,” to use Tom Wolfe’s phrase), a reader of the reports of either central committee meetings or party conferences comes away convinced of Miliukov’s domination.
And Maklakov’s personality may not have fitted him for party leadership in any event. A diary entry of his good friend and ally Tyrkova-Williams for June 19, 1915, starts with her listening to Miliukov deliver a rehearsal of his forthcoming speech to the Duma and continues:
Cold. A lot of trivial, old empty phrases. Shingarev, Maklakov and many others had to remind him that he needed to welcome the army. (“I implied it,” he said.) . . .
Maklakov, agitated . . . told how he’d spent the whole day “energizing” Rodzianko. Evidently he directly wrote a speech for him.
“That’s what I’d like to be tomorrow, chairman of the Duma, to be able to say all that needs to be said. Miliukov’s speech won’t do the job.”
“Right, it’s bad. Only you could give a good speech, but you sold your place for a mess of pottage.”
“You want me to become leader?”
“No, I don’t. You’re too flip. To me it’s a shame that your talent goes to waste and Miliukov doesn’t have any.”36
Despite her admiration for him, she clearly saw his personality, encapsuled in the idea of having a tendency to be “flip,” as making a bad fit with party leadership. And whatever the allusion in her mess-of-pottage line, it surely suggests a susceptibility to letting his energies be diverted, and perhaps a leaning to the role of maverick.
Some other remarks of Tyrkova-Williams hint at additional characteristics militating against him as a party founder. In a letter she observed that his popularity in widely different circles enabled him to see aspects of government policy that other Kadets were unaware of. That of course seems natural in someone who manifested, as Miliukov put it, the lawyer’s tendency to see “a share of truth on the opposite side, and a share of error on his own.” And her diary quotes Nikolai Nekrasov (a Kadet closely aligned with Miliukov) as saying that Maklakov never told the leadership in advance what he would be speaking about, “so I don’t consider his speeches to be ones of our fraction.”37 Of course a wide acquaintance and an ability to get along with people of diverse views are great assets in a politician. But those admirable qualities, when combined with his being so independent that he didn’t even alert fellow Kadets about his speaking intentions, evoke the image of a gadfly, and a gadfly who revels in his status as such. Not for him the tedious work of herding cats.
What of joining another party? Maklakov implicitly addressed the subject in an October 30, 1912, letter about the Octobrists, who had just suffered severe reverses in the elections to the Fourth Duma; indeed, the Octobrist party leader, Guchkov, had been unseated in Moscow by a Kadet. Maklakov wrote that he had often thought and occasionally observed in print that “Octobrism, as a form of liberalism distinct from Kadet radicalism and democracy, was a necessary condition for successful development of a constitution. Guchkov, as an opposition leader, is more impressive than Miliukov, and the interests of political liberalism demand that he not be cut off at the knees right now. I tried as much as I could to point our electoral campaign in that direction, and if it proved impossible it was not only because of the opposition of the party leadership but much more because of the complete lack of sympathy on the part of the voting masses.”38
If a jump to the Octobrists was unpromising on the grounds of electoral math, what of the Progressives? I’ve encountered nothing on that specifically. But consider Maklakov’s letter to Tyrkova-Williams in 1943:
I could have jumped parties, but there was nowhere for me to go. There was not a single party in which I would have felt at home.
. . . To do what was often suggested to me, to start a new party, would have been to rebuke my old comrades. I didn’t like our party leaders, but the rank-and-file Kadets, the ordinary voters, whom I met in electoral meetings and with whom I often spoke, were familiar and close to me. But they themselves didn’t like the leaders. I made peace with those who had support among these ordinary voters (especially in Moscow)—but to quarrel with the party leadership seemed useless and uninteresting. . . . And it wouldn’t have made any difference. “It’s not easy to correct the work of centuries.”39
In the end, Maklakov’s intuitive Burkean conservatism may have persuaded him to stick with the imperfect institution that he knew, and to work against the odds for its amelioration, rather than to migrate to another one, also surely imperfect.
CHAPTER 15
War—and the Mad Chauffeur
IN THE SUMMER OF 1914 Europe marched off to war. In Russian historiography, it’s a hotly contested issue whether “the Revolution”—that is, a revolution roughly equivalent to that of 1917, including not only the collapse of tsarism in February but also the Bolshevik seizure of power in October—would have occurred if Russia had stayed out. For what it’s worth, a couple of highly placed regime insiders, both of whom we already know, predicted that war would spell revolution: the first is Pyotr Durnovo, whom we first saw telling Maklakov’s father that punishments of students for trivial matters would dissuade them from fooling around; the second is Vasily’s brother Nikolai, minister of internal affairs. Durnovo wrote a lengthy memorandum to the tsar in February 1914 predicting that war would bring revolution—not a liberal but a socialist revolution. Nikolai Maklakov, shortly after the fateful cabinet meeting that sealed Russia’s entry into the war, warned General Sergei Dobrorolskii, head of the General Staff’s Mobilization Section, that the revolutionaries would welcome war, but he added sadly, “One cannot escape one’s fate.” Had he spoken up in the cabinet meeting, he would likely have been brushed aside.1 Stolypin, who had been minister of internal affairs as well as prime minister and thus held direct responsibility for possible internal threats, might well, if he had lived, have had the same insight and been able to put up an effective fight.
Wherever the truth may lie, the war plainly created its own set of social tensions.2 Maklakov’s activity, from the start of the war until his setting out for Paris to assume his ambassadorship in October 1917, manifested an increasing readiness for risky actions in pursuit of two partially contradictory goals, victory in war and avoidance of revolution. His actions included speeches vividly decrying the government’s increasing detachment from all levels of society, publication of an allegory that some of his contemporaries read as calling for a coup d’état, participation in plots to effect a coup, and entanglement in the assassination of Rasputin.
In his correspondence after the revolution he more than once expressed the view that without the war there would have been no revolution.3 But he seems not to have explored the thought in his public writings. Simple embarrassment may explain the silence. If he thought that the war helped bring on the revolution, he would surely have to proceed to the implications: that he had been part of a nationalistic chorus, that the chorus’s activity likely increased the risk of Russia’s going to war, and that he had thus helped trigger conditions that brought to power the most extreme of the revolutionaries and cost Russia most of what he held dear.
Regardless of the war’s role, no one should think that pre-war Russia was on a smooth course toward political reform. In April 1912 soldiers had intervened unnecessarily in a gold miners’ strike near the Lena River in Siberia. After the government arrested the strike leaders, the miners marched toward the mining company offices to deliver a protest. Soldiers blocked their path and then shot into the crowd, killing between 150 and 300 miners. A judge, noting that scarcely any miners had been shot in the front, observed archly that the miners had “attacked the soldiers with their backs.”4 In the Duma, Maklakov pilloried the government for interfering in labor-management relations, for failing to fulfill the October Manifesto, and for failing to protect the weak. In such a case “the first duty of an honorable and conscientious government . . . is repentance.” Instead, the government had tried to cover up its responsibility, to characterize the strike as political rather than economic (thus using the familiar scare tactic of waving the red banner of revolution), and to induce drafters of an official report to bend the truth.5 It was the sort of episode that a sound system of judicially enforced remedies against official misconduct might have prevented or (partially) redressed.
At the end of January 1914, Nicholas II had fired Prime Minister Kokovtsov and replaced him with Stolypin’s predecessor, Goremykin. Though Kokovtsov had hardly been a dynamic leader in the Stolypin mold, that deficiency was not the reason for his dismissal. Kokovtsov himself speculated that it was because of the empress’s antipathy, which he saw as arising from his failure to stifle criticism of Rasputin in the press and the Duma.6 Other explanations are available, including hostility of his fellow ministers to his insistence on government thrift, his heavy reliance on revenue from the vodka monopoly, and the tsar’s false friends’ exhortations to him to reassert his power over his officials.7 Still worse, why did the tsar once more choose Goremykin? The reader may recollect his disastrous handling of the First Duma and Kokovtsov’s devastating enumeration of his inadequacies just before his first appointment as prime minister, coupled with the tsar’s apparent agreement with Kokovtsov and his explanation that, having offered Goremykin the appointment, he must follow through on it (chapter 5). Even Goremykin seemed to view himself as unsuitable. On his second appointment as premier, he spoke of himself as being “pulled like a winter coat out of mothballs.”8
The tsar’s uninspired selection of a prime minister matched a sense of ennui prevailing in the Duma. The Soviet historian A. Ia. Avrekh quotes a number of private letters exchanged in mid-January, even before the cashiering of Kokovtsov and resurrection of Goremykin, awash in language of fatalism and dismay. A deputy writes: “The Duma opened [after Christmas break] with half its numbers on hand, like a dead fly. They gossip, discontent, and they split apart. No one believes in the future. In a word, tedious, gray and wretched. About a hundred deputies have taken leave already, for two-to-four weeks. Many want to leave the Duma. Paralysis in the government, paralysis in the Duma, paralysis in the zemstvos. . . . Even the proverbial ‘discontent’ is somehow non-partisan, impersonal, mediocre. Not ‘divine discontent,’ but ‘Katzenjammer.’”9 Maklakov appears to have shared this somber mood. As we’ve seen, his Duma speech on the Beilis trial in the spring of 1914 sounded a newly despairing note: “We already feel what before we only foresaw, we see fields of grief, tears and, perhaps, blood.”10
The onset of war produced a momentary surge of patriotic fervor, at least among the groups well represented in the Duma. Miliukov switched position radically, now championing the so-called union sacrée in support of the war effort. This patriotic spirit even reached into portions of the opposition extreme enough to be in exile. The return of one exile, Vladimir Burtsev, precipitated yet another clash between the Maklakov brothers.
Several years before the war, while in exile in Paris, Burtsev had met Maklakov and had spoken of his intention to return to Russia. Maklakov had tried to talk him out of it, but promised to defend him if he did come home. When he returned at the outbreak of war, the council of ministers debated whether he should be arrested. Sazonov, the foreign minister, opposed arrest; Nikolai Maklakov favored it, and prevailed. Burtsev turned for help to Maklakov, who promptly visited him in prison. Burtsev said, “Vasily Alekseevich, I’ve kept my promise to return to Russia.” Maklakov replied, “I’ve kept mine, and have come to defend you.”
Burtsev was convicted, largely because he refused to repudiate his earlier attacks on tsarist policy, and despite Maklakov’s reminding the judge that the tsar himself had said at the outbreak of war that it was time to forget past disagreements. After the
conviction, the executive-branch fight over Burtsev resumed. The prime minister urged the tsar to release him, but again Nikolai Maklakov, seconded by Shcheglovitov, had his way. Months of Siberian exile followed, ending only when Russia’s allies convinced the tsar to let him go. Burtsev wrote of his experiences in “Arrest under the Tsar and Arrest under Lenin”11—a title many of Maklakov’s clients could probably have used, especially if “Lenin” had been broadened to “Lenin/Stalin.” The union sacrée seems to have been something of a one-way bargain.
The tsar called the Duma into session rarely during the war, generally for brief votes on funding. In the gaps, the government could adopt laws under Article 87. At the start of the war, then, the Duma failed to operate either as a catalyst or as a safety valve for public opinion. In the session of January 27–29, 1915, for example, it passed the budget on the second day and on the third was prorogued until November. There ensued a number of repressive acts that the government had evidently deferred until the Duma had come and gone: Nikolai Maklakov took steps to rein in the press, especially the liberal Russkie Vedomosti. Five Bolshevik Duma deputies were convicted and exiled, and Vasily Maklakov, Vasily Shulgin, and Pyotr Struve each received a three-month sentence—for writing (Maklakov and Shulgin) and publishing (Struve) analyses of the Beilis trial.12
Russia’s military fortunes ebbed and flowed, with successes helping the regime and reverses emboldening the opposition. In mid-April 1915 the Central Powers launched an offensive that rolled back nine months of comparative Russian success; by September they had captured all of Poland.13 The Russian debacle was in part the result of failures in munitions supply, which was more easily traceable to civilian government incompetence than defects of tactics or strategy would have been. This produced a spirit of compromise in the regime. As Maklakov put it in his later summary account of the regime’s fall, “Everywhere people called for [the Duma’s] convocation. The tsar didn’t dare resist. The Duma was convoked; as a preliminary, some of the most unpopular ministers were removed and replaced by others in whom public opinion had confidence.”14 The lead “unpopular minister,” not identified in Vasily’s account, was Nikolai Maklakov, fired on June 5. Sukhomlinov (war minister) followed on the 11th, and Shcheglovitov (justice) and V. K. Sabler (procurator of the holy synod) on the 12th. The dismissals left Goremykin as the cabinet’s only reactionary. The day before the tsar started this purge, a group of liberals including Vasily Maklakov and Struve had gathered to discuss who could be sent to ask the tsar for Nikolai Maklakov’s removal. For once, their hopes were more than realized.15
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