The Reformer

by Stephen F. Williams

  But as these activities are distinct from the topic that brought me to Maklakov—the question of how citizens can advance the cause of liberal democracy—I will cover them only briefly. Once in exile, Maklakov soon recognized that he and his fellow émigrés could do little to affect events in Russia. Because his thoughts on the limited role of émigrés were an outgrowth of his earlier strategies toward the imperial government, and because they led to his taking the most controversial step in his forty years of exile, I’ll address them first and then turn briefly to the three projects—postwar diplomacy, advice to the Whites, and help for Russian refugees—before closing with a word about day-to-day life in Paris and Maklakov’s last years.

  Despite his efforts to counsel the White forces, Maklakov recognized, even before the end of the civil war, that he and his fellow exiles were virtually powerless. In an April 1920 letter to Bakhmetev (well before serious fighting ended with General Pyotr Wrangel’s withdrawal of his forces from the Crimea in the fall of 1920), he wrote that he found an article by Miliukov “dishonest at the core” in its apparent assumptions about the émigré community’s influence over Russian events. “What we can do from abroad comes down merely to giving explanations of what is happening in Russia, and holding foreign powers back from mistakes. We can do that, and, unfortunately, we do it inadequately. Anything more is pure illusion.”4

  His realism about émigré influence was coupled with a firm position on how any liberalization of Bolshevik rule might occur. His view not only parallels his approach in 1905–17 but also has been partially—if belatedly—vindicated. He staunchly opposed supporting terrorism or violent rebellion, such as the peasant revolts that Savinkov sought to stir up. Even if violence managed to overthrow the Bolsheviks, he thought, it would not produce a healthy state. Reform, when it came, would come from Bolsheviks who saw the need. “Only Bolshevism can save Bolshevism,”5 he wrote, and “Salvation will come not from the emigrants but from the midst of the Bolsheviks.”6 History, in a sense, proved him correct. While the reforming zeal that swept the Soviet Union in the second half of the 1980s drew heavily on non-government, non-party figures, and on the sentiments of ordinary people, it also depended vitally on high officials such as Gorbachev, Shevardnadze, and Alexander Yakovlev, whose liberalizing convictions brought censorship virtually to an end and launched a brief era of truthful accounting for Soviet times.7 Such a belated vindication may seem no vindication at all. It happened sixty-five years after Maklakov was writing, so much later that the label “Bolshevik” applies awkwardly to the reformers of the 1980s. But writing in 1920 and 1921 Maklakov could hardly have anticipated the extreme events that tended to delay any amelioration, such as Stalin’s accession to power and World War II; with adjustments for those shocks, the prediction seems pretty good.

  That said, his vision of Soviet developments was for a time blurred. In late 1944, for example, he included in a letter to his friend Ariadne Tyrkova-Williams the astonishing statement that the “USSR is developing into a rule-of-law state on new foundations.”8 Though the references to “developing” and “new foundations” serve as qualifications, it was sheer fantasy to suggest that late Stalinism in any way approximated, or was progressing toward, the rule of law.

  Maklakov wrote the letter during a relatively brief period in which he appears to have been carried away by his patriotic admiration for his countrymen, who had borne the brunt of Allied casualties in defeating the Nazis. Besides the scale of Russian sacrifices and the horror of Nazi rule, he noticed that to rouse the Russian people Stalin had had to start speaking of Russia,9 invoking patriotism rather than socialism, “the revolution,” or the party. Also, in language somewhat reminiscent of his speech just before the June 1917 offensive, saying that victory under the Provisional Government would vindicate the February Revolution, he appeared to see a comparable vindication for the Soviets in the victory over Hitler; at least they had been able to forge a state capable of defending the nation.10 And his work on the problems of Russian refugees in France brought home to him the devastation inflicted on many of them through loss of the opportunity to practice their professions or earn a decent living; this recognition gave his hopes for improvement in Russia a special urgency. In a 1934 letter he had expressed his sickness at reading in the newspaper an endorsement of the thought that France should expel those “who violate the elementary rules of hospitality.” For the French to impose restrictive work rules that drove willing workers into the streets and then call them “vagabonds” seemed monstrous—a “pitiless state’s sacrifice to Moloch.”11 And of course he was familiar on a day-to-day basis with talented, well-educated émigrés scraping by as taxi drivers, doormen, and waiters. The situation led him to a belief that émigrés thwarted in France should be able, if they chose, to take the risks of returning to Russia.12

  Maklakov’s flirtation with the Soviets reached its zenith on February 12, 1945, when he led a delegation of Russian exiles to a meeting at the Soviet embassy (the same building at 79, rue de Grenelle, where he had served as quasi-ambassador until France’s recognition of the Soviet Union in 1924). In the spring of 1944 he had organized a “Russian Émigré Action Group,” aimed at expressing a centrist view among the émigrés; it would fall between the Union of Russian Patriots’ unabashed Sovietophilia and the hopes of some, such as General Denikin, for violent overthrow of the regime.13 After rejecting two invitations to the embassy by Alexander Bogomolov, the current ambassador, Maklakov finally accepted the third. He brought to the parlay eight others, ranging in pre-revolutionary political position from Right Kadet to Right Socialist Revolutionary.14 Although the Soviets’ choice of Maklakov over the Russian Patriot group outraged the latter, it seems obvious that Soviet propagandists would gain far more from a lukewarm recognition by Maklakov than an ardent embrace by apologists for Stalin.

  The event featured speeches by Maklakov and Bogomolov and by the eight in Maklakov’s group. Maklakov, after reviewing émigré attitudes toward Soviet Russia before and during Stalin’s alliance with Hitler, turned to the period after Hitler’s invasion. He spoke of how the émigrés then felt themselves “on the same side of the barricade” as the Soviets and how they recognized “Soviet power as a national power” (not just usurpers). Thus he saw an opportunity for reconciliation between the emigration and Soviet power. He included a seemingly favorable reference to the Stalin constitution of 1936 but followed it with a comment that Russia’s evolution was “far from complete”; he didn’t say what he thought was needed for the evolution to be completed.

  After recounting the words of Bogomolov and of those accompanying him, Maklakov records, “The ambassador proposed a toast to ‘the Soviet people, the Red army and Marshal Stalin,’” followed by toasts to the ambassador and to everyone present.15

  The main historian of this reception calls it “the biggest sensation in ‘Russia Abroad’ since June 22, 1941”—Hitler’s invasion of Russia.16 This is surely an exaggeration, but word of the event did trigger powerful reactions. Kerensky was initially outraged but somehow became convinced that Maklakov had acted under orders from de Gaulle,17 which seems an implausible scenario—Maklakov would almost certainly not have made a serious turn in his relationship with the Soviets at the behest of a foreign head of state, even of his host country. Vladimir Nabokov, the novelist and son of Maklakov’s fellow Duma member and Kadet leader, wrote to a fellow émigré:

  I can understand denying one’s principles in one exceptional case; if they told me that those closest to me would be tortured or spared according to my reply, I would immediately consent to anything, ideological treachery or foul deeds and would even apply myself lovingly to the parting on Stalin’s backside. Was Maklakov placed in such a situation? Evidently not.

  Nabokov went on to catalogue émigré attitudes toward Soviet Russia, starting with the “philistine majority, who dislike the Bolsheviks for taking from them their little bit of land or money,” and running through “fools” and several ot
her categories, finally reaching the group in which he presumably included himself—“decent freedom-loving people, the old guard of the Russian intelligentsia, who unshakably despise violence against language, against thought, against truth.”18 Doubtless because of the toasting outrage, Nabokov didn’t recognize that Maklakov belonged in this last group. Evgenii Efimovskii, a friend and admirer of Maklakov, says in a memorial appreciation that Maklakov didn’t touch the champagne poured for him.19 Maklakov’s own account suggests nothing of the kind, and such an excuse would make him out to be a bit of a weasel.

  Plainly he was trapped. Confronted with a toast to the Soviet people and the Red Army, he could hardly interrupt to insist that it was the Russian army and people whom he toasted; nor could he join the toast with qualifications—“Yes, but not Marshal Stalin.” Accepting the invitation at all was probably folly, as the prospects for honest or useful reconciliation were dim and the event surely included a risk of some sort of toast or equivalent embarrassment. But having come to the event, he had no way out of the toast that was consistent with his purpose in having come.

  Nabokov’s reaction may have been the most vividly expressed, but many others shared its basic impulse; and some had long memories. When émigrés joined to create a Russian archive in the United States (now the Bakhmetev Archive at Columbia University), to replace one previously established in Prague and rendered useless by the Communist coup d’état in 1948, several of the moving spirits objected to the inclusion of Maklakov on the committee, pointing to the embassy visit. Ariadne Tyrkova-Williams wrote an impassioned letter to Bakhmetev opposing Maklakov’s exclusion. Though she was herself categorically against the visit, and acknowledged that he had made no public confession of error, she said that in private conversation he didn’t deny that it had been a mistake. “And all this was six years ago.” From the visit onward, and indeed before, he had done what he could for Russians, and done it honorably. To exclude him from a cultural initiative (which he’d already been asked to join) would be not only cruel but also impolitic from a Russian point of view: to leave out someone who was “one of the few remaining dazzling individuals among us,” one who had made a great contribution to Russian scholarship and culture, would send a strange signal to other refugees, who ought to be taught to respect his talent, learning, and intellect. In the end the founders of the committee brought Maklakov on board.20

  Maklakov’s thinking behind the embassy visit was clearly wishful. He had powerful reasons to hope that Stalinist tyranny would abate. How wonderful if liberty and constitutionalism were to join Russian might! And in the broadest sense the visit was likely harmless, inconsequential in the long East-West battle for European hearts and minds. But if the visit’s faux friendliness was pivotal in convincing any émigrés to return to the Soviet Union, then it inflicted high, indeed astronomic costs on those returners. According to a rumor that reached Russians living in New York, the Soviet embassy in Paris was reminding Russians who inquired about moving back that “Siberia was in the Soviet Union as well as Moscow and Leningrad”; indeed, most of the few thousands who did return ended up in Siberian prison camps along with forced repatriates.21

  The “Stalin toast,” though probably the most famous episode of Maklakov’s forty-year exile, should not eclipse his productive work. These efforts started with his role as diplomat without portfolio. On arrival in Paris in 1917 he could not, given the overthrow of the Provisional Government, claim full diplomatic status. This situation deeply upset numerous Russian exiles, who felt that Russia deserved better at the hands of the Allies, in light of the country’s extraordinary sacrifices in the war. Maklakov was philosophical about it, observing to a French journalist that he was “like a newspaper placed on a chair to show it was occupied.”22 In any event, he was quite successful in forming a unified non-Bolshevik effort to influence the Paris Peace Conference; it proved, perhaps unsurprisingly, that even with unity the non-Bolsheviks could accomplish little.

  Rejecting the idea espoused by Kerensky and others that White elements should seek recognition for one of several White governments in Russia and then coalesce around that government, Maklakov argued for achieving diplomatic unity first and then working for recognition. He pointed out that picking one of the governments in advance would stir resentment from the others, as well as from national groups in the old Russian empire.23 Prevailing on that argument, he and Bakhmetev took the lead in forming the Russian Political Conference, a group stretching from Savinkov (Socialist Revolutionary) to Sazonov (longtime tsarist foreign minister), which was formally constituted in January 1919.24 A leadership group (the “Russian Political Delegation Abroad”) was formed to respond to events quickly: it comprised a similarly broad range: George Lvov, Sazonov, Maklakov, and Nicholas Tchaikovsky—a socialist leader imprisoned for a time by the old regime, a member of the St. Petersburg Soviet, and in 1919 prime minister of the White government at Arkhangel. Savinkov was later added to the group. Lvov’s title role was no more than that; Maklakov was the conference’s “guiding spirit.”25

  One distinguished Russian diplomat did not join—Constantine Nabokov, the novelist’s uncle and the Provisional Government’s chargé d’affaires and de facto representative in London. His refusal seems to have been due partly to dislike of being subordinated to Maklakov and Sazonov, and partly to a serious policy objection: he thought the Russian Political Conference should accept nothing less than full representation at the peace conference. He regarded the role that it did accept, representing Russia only informally, as degrading: “sitting in the anteroom.”26 Despite declining to join the Russian Political Conference, he recognized Maklakov’s role, saying in his memoirs that the “attitude of the French Government, especially in the first few months, appears to have been determined to a greater extent by the personal qualities of the Ambassador than by his official title.”27

  But obvious reasons of state pushed the non-Bolsheviks to the peace conference’s periphery. The Bolsheviks might not last, but then again they might. If they did, they would not look kindly on the great powers’ having treated their enemies as speaking for Russia. As Lloyd George put it in refuting a proposal to seat the Russian Political Conference, they “represent every opinion except the one prevalent in Russia.”28 The French suggested that any Russian representation be accompanied by an announcement that participation would act as waiver of Russia’s rights under the secret treaties.29

  On one specific issue the peace conference may have invited Maklakov to present the Russian point of view directly to the Big Four—Wilson, Lloyd George, Clemenceau, and Orlando. The question was whether the conference should recognize Romanian control of Bessarabia, which had been acquired by Russia in the nineteenth century and contained a mixed population of Russians and non-Russians. In terms of realpolitik, the issue was a conflict between Romania, a member of the victorious coalition (although it had made a separate peace with the Central Powers), and Russia—also an ally, but one that was now dissolved in civil war. Addressing the four in the summer of 1919, Maklakov asked only that a plebiscite be held; he both opened and closed his remarks with an acknowledgment of correlation of forces overshadowing his cause:

  Gentlemen: let us indulge in a dream. I imagine that before me are free people who can express their free opinion and take free decisions, and you imagine that you have before you an ambassador plenipotentiary of great Russia.

  After making his case, he closed by combining an acknowledgment of their political constraints,

  the importance of which I do not dispute. And before you is a person with no office, an ambassador without official papers. But again I thank you for listening to the opinion of the representative of Russia that you have sought.

  In trying to move the discussion to a broader frame, the remarks echo his summation defending the riotous Dolbenkov peasants. A witness reports that the eyes of the Big Four were wet. But the conference, after some delay, pronounced itself in favor of Bessarabia’s union with Romania,
with no plebiscite.30

  The Russian Political Conference devoted considerable effort to promoting Western intervention in Russia (already proceeding in a lackluster fashion), but such a policy faced a serious obstacle: military reality. As one observer has put it, the West was ready to help the White forces if they secured control of more terrain, but they couldn’t win more terrain without more Western help.31 The Russian Political Conference did help persuade the peace conference to express formal support, a kind of quasi-recognition, for Admiral Alexander Kolchak, head of the White government in Siberia. This acknowledgment came in exchange for a proclamation by Kolchak that met the demands of the peace conference for commitment to a constituent assembly and guarantee of rights for peasants and workers. The proclamation paralleled what Maklakov had urged on the Kolchak foreign ministry—“positive and solemn declarations which indicate the true face of the Russia of the future.”32 While short of outright recognition, the conference’s expression presumably gave Kolchak a boost in prestige—not enough, as it proved, to let his government survive.33

  Besides exhorting White leaders to commit to general principles of liberal democracy, Maklakov pushed them specifically to pursue decent policies toward Jews—most importantly to rein in their troops’ pogroms. Here much turned on the disposition of the commanders. He encountered a good deal of resistance from General Denikin. As he later reported, Denikin was not himself a “pogromist” but was slow to act because of concern over soldiers’ anti-Semitism: serious punishment of pogromist troops would cause unrest. Denikin ultimately took action. In January 1920, after a series of reverses and shortly before his replacement by Wrangel, he issued an order requiring “severe measures, up to and including the death penalty, against those engaging in robbery and violence,” regardless of rank.34