The Reformer

by Stephen F. Williams

  But these moves by the tsar proved not to introduce a period of reconciliation. On August 1 and 8, 1915, Maklakov lambasted the government for allowing a split between the ministers of war and trade to paralyze government policy on fuel supply.16 On the 28th, he execrated the old (pre-June) government but argued that its replacement had failed to improve the situation. “We know that [the old government] was a government of ill will, blind and foolish, which could be tolerated only because its ill will was paralyzed by its lack of gifts and intelligence. But then we saw a new government and we were willing to trust it. A month after it came in we held back from any word of criticism. Now, with a new government we refrain from any criticism, but two months have passed, and we can ask whether it has justified our expectations. It is a government of good intentions but of no strength. It reminds one of a debtor who runs away from a creditor, hoping that the creditor will forget him.”17

  Between the first and last of these August speeches, two critical events occurred—formation of the “Progressive Bloc” and the tsar’s move to staff headquarters, to take (nominal) charge of Russia’s military effort.

  Consisting of Kadets, Octobrists, and Progressives, the Progressive Bloc came together in part at the initiative of Maklakov,18 the culmination of his and others’ longtime efforts to form a political center in the Duma. (Like-minded members of the State Council formed a similar bloc there.) What made it possible for a center at last to jell? The war plainly helped create a sense of urgency. A specific manifestation of this was Miliukov’s retreat from his usual insistence on solutions to the “three locks.” Indeed, the demands for a universal franchise and removal of the State Council seem to have disappeared altogether, leaving only his requirement of a ministry responsible to the Duma. Even this proviso faded a bit. In the Kadets’ June 1915 party conference, Miliukov—over the opposition of the party’s left—now favored a ministry of “public confidence,” that is, a ministry tied to the legislative majority more vaguely than in the standard parliamentary regime. The war effort required subordination of all other goals. Maklakov offered a slightly different formula, a ministry of “national defense,” but at the party conference Kokoshkin—probably correctly—denied any contradiction between the two formulae. The resolution adopted by the conference seemed even more general, asking for creation of a cabinet to secure “a proper organization of the home front, maintenance of internal peace, and close cooperation between government and society.”19

  But the Miliukov-Maklakov harmony did not bring the whole Kadet party together. Kokoshkin reported to a Kadet central committee meeting on August 19 (after the Progressive Bloc was formed, on August 11–12) that at a meeting of Kadets, Octobrists, and Progressives Maklakov had argued that a ministry of “public figures” would be dangerous because it would be considered “a signal for action in the streets, outside legal institutions”; he preferred that Krivoshein be the premier. Though only minister of agriculture, Krivoshein was a longtime state official who was widely seen as effective. According to Kokoshkin, the gathering responded to Maklakov with irritation.20

  In any event, no matter the hurdles that had been overcome in negotiating the bloc into existence, the timing undermined its usefulness. As Maklakov said later, “There ought to have been a Progressive Bloc under Stolypin, but when Stolypin sought it there was no Progressive Bloc. When there was a Progressive Bloc in 1915, there was no Stolypin.”21 After negotiations between the Progressive Bloc and a deputation of ministers, a majority of the cabinet voted in late August to recommend to Nicholas that he replace the present cabinet with one having the confidence of the Duma. The cabinet majority also expressed its opposition to Nicholas’s decision to relocate to the front and take command of Russian forces. The reason they gave the tsar for resisting the move (a reason they genuinely believed) was that he would thereby be assuming responsibility for any military reversals. Among themselves they also expressed another reason—fear that the move would increase Rasputin’s influence in the capital. Prime Minister Goremykin emphatically disagreed with his cabinet colleagues on both the proposed cabinet changes and the tsar’s relocation to the front. Immediately after the cabinet vote in favor of a ministry with the support of the Duma, he went to staff headquarters to exhort the tsar to reject both of the cabinet’s ideas and instead to prorogue the Duma. The tsar agreed, moved by various factors, evidently including improvements in the military situation, expressions of support from his conservative base, and the advice of Nikolai Maklakov, who on the occasion of his discharge had told Nicholas that the slightest concession to liberals would only lead to further demands.

  Soon after the tsar’s relocation to the front, Maklakov published in Russkie Vedomosti an allegorical fable expressing the dilemma that the government’s halting and seemingly inept war management posed for any Russian who hoped that the country might emerge relatively well—possibly with “victory” or at least without calamity beyond the war itself.

  A Tragic Situation

  . . . Imagine that you are driving in an automobile on a steep and narrow road. One wrong turn of the steering-wheel and you are irretrievably lost. Your dear ones, your beloved mother, are with you in the car.

  Suddenly you realize that your chauffeur is unable to drive. Either he is incapable of controlling the car on a steep gradient, or he is overtired and no longer understands what he is doing, so that his driving spells doom for himself and for you; should you continue in this way, you face inescapable destruction.

  Fortunately there are people in the automobile who can drive, and they should take over the wheel as soon as possible. But it is a difficult and dangerous task to change places with the driver while moving. One second without control and the automobile will crash into the abyss.

  There is no choice, however, and you make up your mind; but the chauffeur refuses to give way . . . he is clinging to the steering-wheel and will not give way to anybody. . . . Can one force him? This could easily be done in normal times with an ordinary horse-drawn peasant cart at low speed on level ground. Then it could mean salvation. But can this be done on the steep mountain path? However skillful you are, however strong, the wheel is actually in his hands—he is steering the car, and one error in taking a turn, or an awkward movement of his hand, and the car is lost. You know that, and he knows it as well. And he mocks your anxiety and your helplessness: “You will not dare to touch me!”

  He is right. You will not dare to touch him . . . for even if you might risk your own life, you are travelling with your mother, and you will not dare to endanger your life for fear she too might be killed. . . . So you will leave the steering-wheel in the hands of the chauffeur. Moreover, you will try not to hinder him—you will even help him with advice, warning and assistance. And you will be right, for this is what has to be done.

  But how will you feel when you realize that your self-restraint might still be of no avail, and that even with your help the chauffeur will be unable to cope? How will you feel when your mother, having sensed the danger, begs you for help, and, misunderstanding your conduct, accuses you of inaction and indifference?22

  The reference to the observer’s “beloved mother” is, naturally, to the “motherland.”

  To let the mad chauffeur continue at the wheel seemed to assure disaster. But to grab the wheel—to oust the tsar, or at least the tsarina, whose meddling was notorious, simple-minded, and incompetent—risked outcomes quite possibly as bad. Successor authorities might prove no more competent, and seizing authority could unleash revolution, with a certainty of violence and a risk of disaster.

  Scholars have reached quite different conclusions as to the meaning of Maklakov’s fable; many refuse to read it as simply stating a dilemma. One (Pearson) dismisses the article as “a striking metaphorical apologia for the weakness of Octobrist policy.” (In the author’s account, “Octobrist policy” encompasses the approach of all the relatively moderate political figures, a group that at this stage included many Kadets, such as b
oth Miliukov and Maklakov.)23 Another (Katkov) seems to see it as a virtual incitement to revolution; he says that press stories about the article communicated “the seething atmosphere of the Moscow [party] congresses of September 1915 . . . to wide circles of the newspaper-reading public in Russia.”24 What of Maklakov himself? In a letter to him long afterwards, his friend Tyrkova-Williams mentioned that she read his fable to mean that he was uncertain which course was riskier;25 his letters in response do not refer to that interpretation. His failure to correct her (as he often does on other matters), the fable’s careful balancing of hazards on either side, and his later ruminations on the revolution suggest that she was right. But whatever the fable’s “true” message, it was a bold move to suggest—even through allegory—that the disruptive effects of ousting the tsar were the main, perhaps the sole, reason not to oust him.

  About the time of the Mad Chauffeur article, the tsar, at the urging of Alexandra, not only prorogued the Duma but also dismissed two liberal ministers (September 26) and then Krivoshein (October 26). These maneuvers launched what came to be called “ministerial leapfrog”—a phrase coined by Duma deputy Vladimir Purishkevich (of whom more shortly). Between September 1915 and February 1917, the leapfrog game gave Russia four prime ministers, five ministers of internal affairs, three ministers of foreign affairs, three ministers of war, three ministers of justice, and four ministers of agriculture. Finally, the tsar allowed Rasputin to return to the capital, enabling him to become (or at least be generally thought to become) the ringmaster of the ministerial leapfrog. Before these steps by Nicholas, the stars had come as close to an alignment in favor of a reconciliation between society and the regime as they had ever been or were ever to be—but obviously not close enough.26

  The Progressive Bloc struggled on, rent by divisions. Miliukov, supported by Maklakov, continued to beat down the left-wing Kadets’ demands for a more aggressive policy toward the government. Some of the moderates’ specific hesitations may have been ill conceived. But later scholars’ denunciations of their strategy, calling it “craven” and a form of “sedation of all opposition inside and outside the Duma,”27 overlook the mad chauffeur dilemma. Calling “the street” into play, either directly or by actions likely to have that effect, would risk defeating the moderates’ hope of bringing the war to a nondisastrous end. That hope may been naïve or ill-considered on a wide variety of grounds, but for politicians preserving that hope, it made sense to continue a moderate line.

  Nonetheless, on November 1 and 3, 1916, Miliukov and Maklakov successively delivered dramatic anti-regime speeches in the Duma. Miliukov’s was both savage and unfair. He pilloried now–prime minister Boris Stürmer, successor of the luckless Goremykin, for allegedly contemplating a separate peace. Paragraph by paragraph he pointed to real or alleged mistakes by the regime, closing each paragraph with the rhetorical question “Is it stupidity or is it treason?” Given the widespread though totally unfounded rumors that Alexandra was a German agent, or at any rate rooting for Germany (she was, by birth, a German princess), the speech played to the mob’s most paranoid impulses. Miliukov also attacked the recent appointment of Alexander Protopopov as acting minister of interior, an anomalous attack in view of his relatively liberal disposition and close association with the Duma leadership. A plausible explanation for the attack is liberal concern that the tsar was coopting the Progressive Bloc’s supposed dedication to appointment of a ministry of public confidence: if the tsar himself started choosing exemplary ministers of this sort, it would cut off the bloc’s power to do so.28

  Maklakov’s speech, two days later, made no accusation of treason but was still incendiary.29 He suggested that Russia’s military leaders were beginning to panic. “Why is there panic among the warriors? There’s only one reason—they have stopped believing in their leaders. They feel that the dispositions of the authorities are muddle-headed and harmful, that they aren’t taking care of things. The fearful cry, ‘They’re betraying us,’ has stolen up on them, and when the thought of the general welfare is lost, the readiness to obey is lost. Each begins to think of how to save himself, sauve qui peut, and then panic is on us.” Echoing the “leapfrog” epithet, he spoke of a “ministerial kaleidoscope, where we don’t even succeed in seeing the faces of ministers who fall.” He charged the regime with choosing appointees on the basis of their “ability not to be excited, to be quiet,” their connections, and their devotion to the regime rather than to the country. Posing the question of how this situation could persist, his answer at times sounded like a call for revolution:

  I ask why does Russia stick to this government which is destroying Russia? Is it accident? No, gentlemen, it is not accident, it is the system. It is not accident when we know that among us the trust of the country undermines a ministry, that the country’s hatred strengthens it. . . . No, it is not an accident, it is the regime, this cursed, old regime that has outlived its time but is still alive, that is the basic cause of everything. (Voice from the left, “Bravo, right.”).

  Again hitting the theme that the regime chose officials not for competence or devotion to the country but for being good toadies, he quoted a line of Pushkin from the 1830s: “Woe to the country where only slaves and flatterers can approach the throne.”

  Rejecting the idea (shouted from the rightist benches) that he was calling for revolution, he said, “Russia will not answer you with an uprising, I hope.” Rather, he thought, Russia might settle for “a shameful peace, peace to a draw.” But the country would know “that if that happens, Germany will not have defeated us, rather it will be this cursed regime, whose representatives constantly exchange ministerial places with each other, that has defeated us. And when Russia calls them all to account, it will give mercy to no one, I repeat, no one. (Prolonged applause from center, left, and right; voice, ‘Bravo.’)”

  He closed in somewhat Manichean language:

  If the authorities embark on escapades that lead us to catastrophe, the Duma may still be needed. It may in the future be the sole support of authority, the sole bulwark of order. But for it to be able to play that role, it will have to have the right to look the country in the eye without blushing. And for that we must say to the authorities, it’s either us or them. Our life together is impossible. (Prolonged and stormy applause from center, left, and right; a voice, “Bravo.”)

  However we view this rhetoric (the Kadet party loved it, and distributed millions of copies of Maklakov’s and Miliukov’s speeches),30 two features seem far outside the familiar Maklakov of moderation. First, equating “peace to a draw” with a “shameful peace” was an indulgence in precisely the rhetoric that makes useless bloodletting hard to stop. As the death toll mounts, so does the passion to redeem those deaths—with further bloodshed spilled in the hope of gains that would justify all the past losses. At about the same time as Maklakov was scoffing at “peace to a draw,” that is, peace without serious territorial acquisitions for Russia, the Germans were proposing a peace under which Germany would in effect occupy Belgium.31 As long as both sides define “peace to a draw” as “shameful,” the slaughter must continue. The speech’s focus on “honor” rather than results sets up (or reflects) a wall between sides, a way of thinking completely at odds with Maklakov’s usual tendency to see “a share of truth on the opposite side, and a share of error on his own.”

  Second, though the passage saying that the regime had “outlived its time” might be ingeniously reconstructed as merely a call for the tsar to compromise on the membership of the cabinet (that is, accept something like the Progressive Bloc’s proposal of August 1915), it certainly didn’t sound that way.

  In fact, Maklakov was at work on another mode of regime change. His view of coups d’état was, as we saw in chapter 7, pragmatic. In a lecture given in 1909 he had described a successful coup d’état as a “mechanism by which a legally invalid act, being politically accepted, receives recognition and becomes the law.” Citing the palace coup that brought Catherine t
he Great to power in place of her husband, the lawful tsar, he said, “Catherine triumphed. An uprising turned into a state coup, and the criminal—became empress.”32 Thus it is hardly startling to find him involved in the coup plots that swirled around St. Petersburg and Moscow in late 1916 and early 1917. The clearest evidence of his participation is a December 29, 1916, letter to Konovalov, a key center of coup planning,33 reporting on his efforts to scout out the views of another political figure.

  The letter survives only in the form of a copy made by the secret police, who often opened letters in the mail, copied them, and sent on the originals. The letter leaves the exact nature of the plan unclear and never identifies Maklakov’s interlocutor, whom Maklakov seems to be assessing for some future action. The target expressed full agreement with the “program” but was cautious. As Maklakov confides to Konovalov, “You yourself know that he’s an unstable person and it’s hard to assess his mood. He agreed with me on everything, but he left me with an anxious feeling that he agreed so readily because he was afraid. In my view he’s deathly afraid that that he’ll be called on to do something illegal, unconstitutional. At the start of the conversation he often bristled. But when he understood there was no question of that, he quickly relaxed and agreed to everything. So his agreement is unreliable.” (Was the “no question of that” line inserted as protection against liability for treason?) Maklakov then wrote that nothing was going on in St. Petersburg, and “unless you have something else for me I’ll return to Moscow. . . . One more impression: things are going much slower than it had seemed to us.”34 The scouting seems not to have been a one-off event for Maklakov.35 We’ll return in chapter 17 to the tricky relationship between coups d’état, the pressure leading to Nicholas II’s abdication, and the February Revolution itself.