The Reformer

by Stephen F. Williams

  Were there realistic alternatives to the outcome in February? Did Maklakov’s preferred outcome—preserving the Duma and the monarchy—have a chance? Maklakov makes a case that the Duma was in fact the focal point for opposition to the regime. It had defied the tsar at least by informally refusing to disperse. Its Council of Elders, plus members acting “unofficially,” had formed the Duma Committee and thus the Provisional Government, and its president had signed the proclamation announcing that formation. Soldiers of the mutinous garrison had paraded before the Duma, with their flags and military music.53 In addition (though not mentioned by Maklakov), the series of strikes occurring a week before the wave that started February 23 had been aimed in part to coincide with and celebrate the Duma’s reopening.54 And Vasily Shulgin reports that when he and Shingarev drove to the Duma on February 27, the young workers who were limiting access (“Take the car back! No passage!”) cheerfully let them through when they said they were Duma members.55 A historian writing recently, A. B. Nikolaev, stresses that at least one of the creators of the Duma Committee, the Council of Elders, was a legal organ, and that through the prompt activities of its commissars the Duma Committee had in important ways seized the reins of authority.56

  Yet Maklakov’s account slides over the point later made by Schapiro: it was not the Duma itself that formed the Duma Committee and thus the Provisional Government. That had been achieved by members meeting unofficially and the Council of Elders; even the latter, though created under the Duma’s constitution, could hardly claim the Duma’s own status for purposes of giving the seizure of power a stamp of political legitimacy. Nor does Maklakov reply to Miliukov’s argument that the Duma’s popularity was due less to its status or achievements than to its being the forum where a handful of speakers (most obviously himself and Maklakov) had voiced the public’s unrest.

  Maklakov himself recognized that the Duma’s history had impaired its legitimacy. It owed its composition to the electoral law of June 3, 1907, which was both a sharp contraction of the prior franchise and an unlawful coup—hardly a solid foundation for a liberal democratic institution. In addition, the Duma had not warmly embraced the insurrection but instead had formed an alliance with it out of a kind of necessity: given the regime’s intransigence, the Duma could not morally align itself with the regime against the mutineers.57

  What of the monarchy? Even the Petrograd insurgents’ loathing of Nicholas and Alexandra seems not to have fully enveloped the institution and the family. When Shulgin and Guchkov arrived back in Petrograd after having received Nicholas’s abdication, both spoke to the crowd gathered at the railway station. Shulgin delivered a passionate speech calling for people to unite for the salvation of Russia, ending it, “Long live Emperor Mikhail II”; the crowds responded with hurrahs. Guchkov, in contrast, was received with great hostility—but hostility directed against the members of the Provisional Government, not the imperial family. A speaker asked the audience a rhetorical question: had they made their revolution in order “to install a prince [Lvov] and an owner of tens of sugar factories [Tereshchenko] into the revolutionary government?”58

  Further, Russian hostility to the monarchy apparently was deeply confused. The British ambassador, George Buchanan, reported that in the early days of the revolution a soldier told him, “Yes, we need a republic, but at its head there should be a good Tsar.”59 Countless examples of such muddled thinking exist.60 And though a multitude of tracts and flyers depicted Nicholas and Alexandra venomously, even in these texts the grand dukes, including Mikhail, appeared as “positive characters.”61 In short, the Provisional Government seems to have been more hasty than the people in tarring the entire monarchy with a brush fit for the departed monarchs.

  However one assesses the choices made by the Duma Committee and the Provisional Government, it’s hard not to be struck by the casualness with which the latter abandoned Russia’s institutions. In the initial meeting to confront Nicholas’s purported handover to Mikhail, only Miliukov spoke up for a serious effort to preserve the monarchy. And even he, though stressing the monarchy’s symbolic role and sensibly aiming at Russian masses not caught up in Petrograd’s revolutionary fervor, appears not to have fully developed the case for constitutional continuity—or, indeed, for constitutionalism itself.

  Discussing these attitudes later, Maklakov attributed them to a general indifference about governmental structure, extreme confidence based on the public welcome of Duma members’ speeches, and lack of concern about the possible menace from the far left. He perceived all those features as flowing from the liberals’ years without practical political experience, itself the result of the autocracy’s success in politically marginalizing almost the entire country. The liberals’ prior activity had “presupposed the existence of a normal state of affairs, in which press, speech and the vote were the sole means of combat.”62 Invoking Stolypin’s line (a Maklakov favorite), “In politics there is no revenge, but there are consequences,” he viewed the unrealism of February’s winners as the direct result of the old regime’s stifling of political activity. “The attitude of the moderates was the first consequence of our past, the immensity of the disaster the second.”63

  Maklakov’s concern for constitutionalism was grounded in recognition of the need for institutions that could bring together a working coalition. He envisaged that coalition as drawing from “the old force of the overthrown state, the army, and the popular leaders of opinion.”64 But could such a coalition, even if embodied in plausibly legitimate institutions, have enabled Russia to address its problems—above all, to maneuver through the war?

  At the core of the February Revolution was a policy split between those who saw it as enabling Russia to fight the war more effectively and those who saw it as enabling the country to stop fighting altogether. Maklakov was remarkably inattentive to that clash and must in part be considered a creature of Russia’s underdeveloped civil society. Unlike his liberal colleagues, he turned to the peasant deputies for assistance on the equalization of peasant rights and then on the government’s grain policy. But these conversations evidently did not reach much beyond those immediate issues. What a missed opportunity! The bulk of the army’s enlisted men were, after all, peasants. While the peasant deputies may not have perfectly represented peasant views, they surely were a potential source of information. But if Maklakov queried them on the war at all, he did not report his findings. To judge from an October 1916 report of the tsarist secret police, recounting the peasants’ resentment against the government (and other social classes) and their complete lack of faith in a successful outcome for the war,65 the secret police were more realistic about Russia’s social divide than were the elite leaders of the February Revolution.

  Maklakov’s failure to fully grasp the depth of Russia’s problem underscores the soundness of his basic thesis: that centuries of autocracy had stunted the growth of civil society. In the decades before the revolution, to be sure, economic forces were gradually breaking down the barriers of estates and distance and were fostering the growth of civil associations, many of which cut across classes and interest groups. These developments gave Russians opportunities to negotiate solutions for themselves, to build leaders, to learn the necessity and the art of compromise—in short, to create the building blocks of liberal democracy. But Russia was still far behind western Europe, and the government was energetically (if haphazardly) fighting the process with bans, fines, requirements of police “permission,” and so on.66 Again, one thinks of Maklakov’s line from the poet Nekrasov: “It’s not easy to correct the work of centuries.”

  All this is not to say that accidents of timing were not critical. We saw how the moment in February when the armed forces got the upper hand was brief, but just in time to scuttle an effort at cooperation between the government and the Duma. Another bit of bad timing—though perhaps a more fit characterization is liberal hesitancy—was the slow motion of the various coup plots preceding February. Had these plots promptly ac
hieved their aim, liberalism might have set down roots strong enough to survive the chaos caused by the downturn in the war and February’s grain supply crisis. Maklakov touched on this issue in a speech on May 4, 1917, before one of the assemblies of deputies from all four Dumas:

  But there came a moment when it became clear to all that it was impossible to carry the war through to the end, to prevail, under the old regime. And for those who believed that revolution was ruinous, for them the task arose of saving Russia from revolution from below by means of a coup from above. That was the task that lay before us and that we didn’t fulfill. And if our posterity curses this revolution, then they will curse those who did not understand at the time by what means it could have been averted.67

  The speech of course reflects the priority Maklakov gave to winning the war. But it also suggests the benefits of a timely coup, removing Nicholas and Alexandra and making way for a regime with less baggage and more competence. Delay in their removal meant that liberalism as represented in the Duma had no choice but to support the embryonic revolution in the streets—even with the recognition that without the Duma’s support on February 27 the revolution could not have survived: “The Duma understood that its participation in the movement was a matter of honor [given the hopelessness of Nicholas and Alexandra]. It knew that it was taking a path leading to revolution and in the name of patriotism and the rescue of Russia it destroyed the old regime.”68 Having failed to coalesce around a reform program, the moderates and the monarchy left Russia to extreme alternatives—either a fairly brutal counterrevolution or the chaos and uncertainty of the Provisional Government and its replacement by the Bolsheviks in October.

  In short, then, a timely coup might have spared the Duma its February dilemma: having to support an intolerable regime or to stand against the authorities and implicitly in favor of insurrection. But even the institutions emerging from a coup would have had to navigate the war. Could they have had the political capacity to forge a broadly acceptable policy?

  CHAPTER 18

  In the Maelstrom

  The Liberals in Office

  THE FEBRUARY REVOLUTION brought liberals into office; it didn’t bring liberalism into practice. To be sure, the Provisional Government adopted measures that, at least on paper, halted much of the old regime’s lawlessness. It did away with administrative deployment of criminal sanctions; it purported to abolish distinctions based on religion or estate; it adopted a principle of liberty of the press and assembly.1 But while changes like these surely restrained the state’s lawless use of violence, other actors took up violence on a large scale, and law did little to constrain them. Peasants seized land, workers took control of factories, and peasants and workers assaulted landowners, factory owners, and managers who stood in their way—sometimes with fatal results. Although the government did not authorize these acts, it either turned such a blind eye, enforced the law so irresolutely, or was so powerless that the actions became commonplace and the participants had little reason to think their behavior illegitimate.

  A few examples suffice. The Provisional Government authorized establishment of local “land committees” for the purpose of gathering data for “reform” proposals. In many places, however, the committees embarked on a much broader program, imposing restrictions on rents and mortgages, on sharing of equipment and livestock, and on management of land that was “not being fully exploited” by its owners. Decisions reached by these committees could be appealed to commissions in Petrograd and were often reversed, but the local committees commonly plunged right ahead.2 Committees in the factories, nominally elected by workers but in practice often dominated by politicized outsiders, exacted wage hikes and other changes in working conditions. These pressures forced many enterprises to close and reduced the “bulk” of them to operating at a deficit.3 But spontaneous violence was not directed solely at institutions of contract and property. Anti-government violence also broke out—a problem that was largely of the government’s own making. It continued the old regime’s wartime assault on free contracting, ordering peasants to deliver their crops to the state at fixed prices (which were always out of date), minus a vaguely determined allowance for the producers’ own consumption. Peasants naturally resisted the state collectors, often violently.4

  On top of the violence from self-help “reform” and resistance to state seizures came the activity of soldiers (typically deserters). Many of these had participated in ethnic cleansing of Jews and German Russians near the front. Although the military leadership had approved this extralegal violence at a general level, many of the troops had added their own ruthlessness. Back home or on the way home, they applied the unspoken lesson more broadly, pillaging the citizenry at large.5

  Thus, if one follows the classical definition of the state as the holder of a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, the era of the Provisional Government witnessed the Russian state’s disintegration. Its monopoly on legitimate force broke down. Nonstate violence burgeoned—so little deterred (perhaps even countenanced) by the state that it qualified as at least quasi-legitimate.

  Some of the chaos of March 1917 was due to a kind of spontaneous crumbling of the state, exemplified by the fading away of the ordinary police. But some was due to the new government’s excesses of zeal, such as its immediate discharge of all governors and deputy governors, without having named replacements, and its dismissal of the secret police and the Corps of Gendarmes.6 Of course replacement of the tsarist governors and reform of lower-level enforcement institutions were in order, but abruptly zeroing them out left a gap that Russian civil society was ill suited to fill.

  Russians could not fall back on the instinctive order of people accustomed to working out their affairs through individual and negotiated exercise of property and contract rights. Property rights did not enjoy the mystique of association with freedom that they enjoyed in the West. Furthermore, Russians had little experience with the practical benefits of property rights as a foundation for individual decisions on production, or as starting points for mutually advantageous contracts. And emancipation of the serfs did little to recast property rights in a favorable light. While the peasants received interests in part of the land they had formerly worked as serfs, they received them as communal interests rather than as the sort of individual property rights common in the West. Until the Stolypin reforms (which were implemented only in small part by 1917), a farmer had no individual right to choose his own farming strategy and possessed only a limited ability to sell his interests. And though the zemstvos developed by Alexander II provided peasants with an opportunity to participate in rural self-government, the peasant influence was slight (as they were systematically underrepresented in the zemstvo councils), and the zemstvos’ authority itself was subject to fairly arbitrary supervision by officials of the ministry of internal affairs.7 In short, both in the private sphere and in politics peasants had little experience in acting as a free people, seeking improvement of their lives by acting independently and with others in a framework of clearly established rights.

  Workers in the immediately prerevolutionary era, typically migrants from the countryside or their offspring, similarly lacked experience with the rule of law. Limits on strikes, combined with officials’ random exercises of authority—usually on the side of employers—largely denied workers a chance to pursue improved conditions through negotiation between citizens under the law. In light of this experience, it seems quite natural that they had a jaundiced view of conventional private rights.

  Symptomatic of the mindset prevailing in prerevolutionary Russia was the popular (and even elite) usage of the term “bourgeois.” The word seems tailor-made for an entrepreneur dependent on property and contract rights for the development of his business. Thus it should have been seen as encompassing groups with the greatest concern for the rule of law. But in Russia after February it became a ubiquitous term of abuse, virtually a swear word, equivalent to “scoundrel” or “blackguard,” applied indiscrimina
tely to anyone with whom the speaker disagreed.8

  Thus, in an instant Russia removed not simply a defective monarch but the monarchy itself and drastically cut back existing institutions of authority. It did so in a population long accustomed to overwhelming centralized authority, with civil society more than embryonic but less than robust. The upshot parallels the annual Tatiana Day at Moscow University, when the university’s suspension of its normally rather oppressive rules produced a student bacchanal.

  The war of course further dimmed the prospects for a liberal outcome. First, it drove politicians to defer the calling of the Constituent Assembly (conducting elections in war-ravaged Russia would have been daunting). This reluctance in turn thwarted the resolution of matters that plainly required a representative assembly, such as the peasants’ long-standing demand for gentry land. Second, the war gave special urgency to the split mentioned earlier, between those who hoped Russia could pursue the war to victory and those who hoped the country could be done with the war at almost any cost. Russians had to adopt a strategy, promptly, or German arms would settle the matter for them. A symptom of the long shadow cast by the war is the priority it assumed in Ma klakov’s activities.

  Though obviously deeply concerned by the disintegration of order—it’s a major theme of his May 4 speech, in which he expressed remorse at liberal society’s failure to circumvent the revolution with a coup against Nicholas II—Maklakov was not in much of a position to stop or even retard it. He held a number of positions under the Provisional Government, but none gave him leverage for transformative action. After initial activity as a commissar at the Ministry of Justice, he was a member of a commission producing rules for the election of the promised Constitutional Assembly, a commission fixing the financial position of the imperial house, the State Juridical Commission (which among other projects worked to improve the rules for transfer of property), and a Kadet committee to maintain liaison with party members in the cabinet. He was elected a member of the Constituent Assembly, but it assembled only after he had arrived in Paris, and the Bolsheviks then promptly and violently dispersed it. Offered the chairmanship of the commission to investigate crimes of former tsarist officials, he declined, regarding its mission as anomalous: he saw it as falling between two stools, constituted neither as a genuine pursuit of officials for actions that were crimes under the law applicable when performed, nor as an openly revolutionary body imposing “revolutionary justice.”9 (And he surely would have had to recuse himself from the inquiries into brother Nikolai.)