The Reformer
Page 38
A related issue was accepting Jews as members of the armed forces. Denikin refused to do so, on the ground that the resulting attacks on them would have to be punished, thus propelling a cycle of hatred. Maklakov appears to have been equivocal on this point. He reportedly endorsed this reasoning at a meeting in Rostov in October 1919, but soon afterward, in a letter to the finance minister of Denikin’s government, he argued that any such exclusion was simply a capitulation to anti-Semitism.35 Even assuming the oral statement in Rostov was correctly heard and reported, his written position is more in tune with his general thinking and more likely to have had an effect. He also urged Denikin to appoint at least one Jew to the government, an idea Denikin dismissed as only “a demand of Parisian Jewry.”36
Maklakov made more headway with Denikin’s successor, Wrangel, who impressed him with his “temperament, pragmatism, and decisiveness.” Most concretely, he wrote to Wrangel’s prime minister, Krivoshein (longtime minister of agriculture in the tsarist regime), encouraging the Wrangel government to reenact (or, if it was still in effect, to start applying) an old provision of the tsarist penal code punishing civil disorders based on religious hatred. Use of the provision, he argued, would frame the issue as attacking pogroms “from the perspective of their danger to civil order.” Krivoshein evidently responded favorably. He also sought to appoint a Jew as finance minister, and indeed extended offers to two Jews in succession, but both declined—it was late in the day for the White movement and no one wanted “to climb aboard a sinking ship.”37
Maklakov’s fall 1920 trip to the Crimea yielded dismaying evidence of resurgent anti-Semitism. At Wrangel’s request, he spent an entire night and morning talking with Sergei Bulgakov, his old colleague in the Second Duma and one of the four who visited Stolypin on the eve of the June 3, 1907, coup d’état, the group who jokingly called themselves the Kadets’ “black hundreds.” Now it seemed less of a joke. Wrangel had asked Maklakov to speak with Bulgakov in order to get the more educated members of the Orthodox clergy (Bulgakov was now an Orthodox priest) to discourage the Orthodox from engaging in pogroms. As Maklakov reported to Bakhmetev (in obvious dismay at the evolution of his old friend’s thinking), Bulgakov told him that he preferred Bolshevism to democracy (thinking it would lead to a rebirth of the spirit of Christianity), and that he opposed constitutional monarchy and would prefer a return to autocracy. Although Bulgakov seemed not to “personally” believe that the world was controlled by a single Jewish syndicate, “he has serious misgivings.” When Maklakov asked Bulgakov to discourage the circulation of a leaflet that Wrangel thought likely to provoke pogroms, Bulgakov replied, “I wrote it myself.”38 In an interview with a New York Times correspondent, Maklakov said the principle of equal rights was “nonnegotiable,” but he pointed to several difficulties of putting it into practice. Many local people believed that most Bolsheviks were Jews (which was false, but even if it were true, was a bad reason for disliking Jews, much less for subjecting them to pogroms), and the Bolsheviks themselves had tried to “turn the population against Denikin by claiming he defended Jews.” “[I]t takes time and an iron hand to control the unchained passions of a country which has been so stirred up.”39
In his first years defending the interests of Russian refugees, Maklakov acted in his role as quasi-ambassador. In 1924 France brought that to an end by recognizing the Soviet Union, but it then created a substitute in the form of a Central Office on Russian Refugee Affairs (Office Central des Réfugiés russes en France), to be linked with an Emigrants Committee via a single head for the two. Though George Lvov laid claim to the office, both left and right in Russian émigré circles joined to support the candidacy of Maklakov. As Budnitskii explains, “Besides his political inclusiveness (rare for a Russian politician) and his reputation as a first-class jurist, the authority that he commanded among French authorities played a role.” He thus continued to be the voice of émigré Russia in France, with a population in Paris alone of nearly one hundred thousand.40
Part of his work was simply enabling Russians to secure the right to stay in France, in part through identification papers that the committee was authorized to issue.41 Even today these efforts give him a reputation among descendants of the beneficiaries. A recent novel by the nephew of a soldier from Wrangel’s army, for whom he secured papers in 1922, gives Maklakov a cameo appearance.42
He also served on a League of Nations group developing an international convention on the treatment of refugees, adopted in 1933. It was in some respects more generous in spirit than a post–World War II version, but the French, at least for the pre-war Russian refugees, continued to apply the 1933 agreement.43
Some of his work was more exotic—smoothing over feelings aroused by the crimes of émigrés. Two extreme cases were assassinations. In May 1932 a deranged Russian named Paul Gorgulov fired fatal shots at Paul Doumer, the incumbent French president, as he was opening an exhibition devoted to great writers of World War I. It fell to Maklakov to apologize on behalf of France’s Russian guests. In another case, the Russian community had to be calmed. In 1927 a Russian named Boris Koverda assassinated Pyotr Voikov, the Soviet ambassador to Poland, in a railroad station in Warsaw; Koverda apparently acted in revenge for Voikov’s role in the killing of Nicholas II and his family. (Voikov’s story still roils the waters, thanks to the Soviets’ naming a Moscow subway station after him.) The Polish authorities assigned the case against Koverda to a military tribunal, an assignment that outraged the émigrés in France, who evidently thought this would mean the sort of rush to judgment familiar to them from the infamous field courts martial, or would at least make the death penalty possible (as it would have in tsarist Russia). Maklakov feared that the Russians’ mood might lead to dangerous actions. By a lucky coincidence Vaclav Lednitskii, the son of his old colleague Alexander Lednitskii, was visiting Paris from Warsaw. He assured Maklakov, on the basis of high-level political gossip in Poland, that the shift to the military courts had been ordered by the Polish head of state, Józef Piłsudski, to be absolutely sure that he (Piłsudski) would be able to prevent imposition of the death penalty. With this information, Maklakov was able to calm a meeting of overwrought Russians, who had been on the verge of adopting an inflammatory resolution. In the end, Koverda was sentenced to a long prison term, which was soon commuted to a few months.44
The German occupation interrupted Maklakov’s work. The Nazis promptly shut down both the Central Office on Russian Refugee Affairs and the Emigrants Committee (along with about eight hundred Russian organizations in France). On April 28, 1942, they arrested Maklakov and kept him in La Santé prison until July. The Nazis gave no reason, leaving their thinking to speculation, which has been abundant. In fact, the arrest seems, as social scientists say, “overdetermined.” Among the obvious causes appear to be his leadership of the Emigrants Committee, his known liberalism, and his Russian patriotism. Some scholars have mentioned Maklakov’s being a Mason, a fact occasionally invoked to explain aspects of his behavior (in my opinion quite unconvincingly). As a possible element in Nazi thinking, however, it seems plausible here—they would naturally have been anxious about any clandestine group. One writer has in part explained Maklakov’s arrest by reference to the spirit of a pithy expression attributed to Goebbels: “When I hear the word culture, I reach for my revolver.” Apparently the Germans didn’t torture Maklakov, and he used his prison time to work out a mental map of what became his history of the Second Duma. The Germans conditioned his release on his going to the countryside; his old Kadet colleague Baron Nolde put him up, and there he wrote the book he had conceived in prison.45
He and like-minded Russians were in touch with the Resistance, working to counter pro-Hitler propaganda among the émigrés and in some cases sheltering Jews. At least one member of the group was arrested—Igor Krivoshein (son of the tsarist minister). Maklakov was on the Germans’ list of people to be whisked away to Germany at the approach of Allied troops, but the Allies moved too fast fo
r the Germans to carry out the plan.46
After the war, both the Emigrants Committee and the Central Office on Russian Refugee Affairs were reestablished. One might suppose that by this time the need for regularizing Russian émigrés’ positions in France would have been fully satisfied. But problems with labor and residence permits continued. And Liberation created a whole new concern. As many Russians were staunchly anti-Communist, including émigrés who had unequivocally supported Russian victory over the Nazis, they were attractive targets for French Communists seeking to exploit the immediate postwar assault on collaborators, real and imagined, in some cases wanting to burnish their own anti-Fascist credentials. Maklakov’s friend Nina Berberova was tied up and threatened with hanging by a Communist neighbor; in some instances such threats were carried out. Between Liberation and October 1946 Maklakov wrote more than four thousand letters interceding to prevent such miscarriages of justice. The earliest, sent to the Paris prefect of police on September 1, 1944, said that many Russian immigrants had been recently arrested and subjected to savage interrogation. While the Emigrants Committee would do nothing for those who had helped the enemy, they staunchly protested arrests simply on the basis of anonymous denunciations.47
Until his death Maklakov continued to head the committee and the office and to work on Russian refugee issues, but the burst of activity in 1944–46 may have been his last opportunity to engage intensively in a project critical to his compatriots. Up to the very end he retained both his mental acuity and his dazzling memory as well as his oratorical gifts. But to exercise these gifts he increasingly had to overcome deafness, which the hearing aids of the era couldn’t completely correct. Through deafness, infirmity, and the death of old friends, loneliness stalked him; he mentions it quite mournfully in letters to Tyrkova-Williams.48
Still, even into extreme old age his joie de vivre and zest for sociability remained unabated. A film snippet that must date from very late in his life—it shows him somewhat infirm and wearing a hearing device—reveals him absorbed in vivacious conversation with Ivan Bunin. (At a Russian celebration of Bunin’s receiving the Nobel Prize for literature in 1933, which may have been the last great gathering of the Russian emigration, Maklakov had been the sole speaker.) Seated with fellow émigrés around a table, he talked with the same animation as he had in the Duma. Typically a similarity between a public figure’s speeches and dinner-table conversation would not augur well for the latter, but not so for Maklakov, given his engaging and conversational speaking style.49
Through all these years he was fortunate to have the companionship and assistance of his sister Mariia—a woman of enterprise and talent in her own right, cofounder in 1920 of a school in Paris for the children of émigrés. For about thirty years, starting shortly after his forced removal from the Russian embassy, she had served as his secretary and kept house for him in his modest apartment on the rue Péguy, which had long attracted the cream of the émigré community.50
Unluckily for him, she died before him. His young friend Lednitskii gives a vivid account of a visit in April 1957, just before Mariia’s death and three months before Maklakov’s. When Lednitskii phoned to propose coming by, Maklakov’s hearing was so poor that he could barely determine who was calling. And when Lednitskii arrived, Maklakov offered him wine but apologized that he lacked the strength to pull the cork. The focus of the visit was his concern for Mariia, who was sick and in a clinic; Maklakov was terribly anxious, torn between her desire to return to the apartment and his hope that the clinic could cure her.
Her death left him distraught. His nephew Iury Nikolaevich Maklakov, son of Nikolai, Vasily’s estranged brother whom the Bolsheviks had shot in 1918, reported Maklakov’s reaction to a glowing obituary of Mariia published in a Russian newspaper. Paper in hand, he rushed into her old bedroom, saying, “Marusia, look at what they’re writing about you.” When Lednitskii visited again after Mariia’s death, Maklakov was still more distracted; he had trouble getting to his feet and constantly said that he must get out of Paris.51
He succeeded. Somewhat anomalously for a man who had loved Paris ever since his visit as a college student in 1889, he died in Switzerland, on July 15, 1957, taking a cure not far from Zurich. With him was his nephew Iury—evidently these two branches of the Maklakov family had reconciled. Maklakov had brought along from Paris a copy of the New Testament. Grasping it in one hand and indicating it with his eyes, he said, speaking thickly, “Vot”—another untranslatable Russian word, in this case probably meaning “There it is—what people need to know.”52 Though religion was surely peripheral in Maklakov’s life, his first Russian biographer, drawing on recollections of Maklakov’s friends, summarizes their collective portrait as showing a person who “loved life, though not closing his eyes to its dark side,” and was “grateful to his creator for the very fact of his existence.”53
Though he died in Switzerland, Maklakov is buried in the cemetery of St. Geneviève des Bois just outside Paris, along with several thousand Russian émigrés, including many whose words or deeds have appeared in this story—Struve, S. N. Bulgakov, Kokovtsov, George Lvov, Yusupov, Bunin, Nekrasov.
For us the lessons of Maklakov’s life and career lie in his struggle to reform Russia, mainly by enhancing the rule of law, hoping not only to avert violent revolution but also to bring Russians the political conditions needed for better, freer, more creative lives. Reflections on that challenge follow in the next chapter. But Russians may treasure other aspects more. One of his Russian biographers writes:
Vasily Alekseevich was very old, so his death could hardly be thought unexpected. But he was clearly necessary to people, and his existence acted as a guaranty of continuity, as a pledge that the old Russia—or what was best in the old Russia—would continue. With his death something was torn away, and this feeling shone through in the memorials devoted to him.54
Russia found in Maklakov an articulate, scholarly, balanced rule-of-law advocate, concerned for genuine justice—and recognized him as, besides all that, deeply Russian.
CHAPTER 20
Coda: The Rule of Law as the Thin End of the Wedge
WHETHER MAKLAKOV had a strategic design in his emphasis on building the rule of law is not clear. His experience as a lawyer and legislator directly exposed him to ubiquitous rule-of-law deficits in Russia and honed his skills for mending those deficits, both in detail and in broad political strategy. Further, the concept of the rule of law advanced his strongest political goals—to develop a state strong enough to protect individual rights from private assault and to carry out the other necessary functions of government, yet constrained from violating individual rights itself. In our political culture, this vision has been most logically and eloquently expressed by James Madison:
If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.1
The themes recurred endlessly in Maklakov’s public life. Most of the time his focus was on “oblig[ing the state] to control itself.” But at key points a parallel concern for state effectiveness was evident. It was on that account that he reminded the Kadets at the initial meeting in October 1905 that the party itself, once in office, wouldn’t want the state to be thoroughly hamstrung. And in the June and August 1917 speeches discussed in chapter 18 he expressed his acute anxiety about the Provisional Government’s inability to perform its basic functions. A term that Maklakov frequently used in his speeches and historical writings, gosudarstvennost (literally “stateness” but defying precise translation), captures this feature.
The rule of law has by now earned a clear place in Western aspirations for reform in authoritarian countries. Elections, even moderately open elections, are plainly not enough. Such elections occur with r
egularity in one of the two great post-Communist behemoths (Russia), and from time to time in much of the Middle East, but friends of liberal democracy take little comfort from these events. Without institutions to protect citizens from overbearing executive officials, elections count for little.
But should the rule of law enjoy a special priority as a path to reform rather than simply being an element of the hoped-for end state? One can rest a case for such priority on two intuitions: First, the rule of law benefits the governors as well as the governed, thus perhaps making it easier to secure than reforms that impinge more directly on the rulers’ privileges. Second, it facilitates the compromise resolution of issues that might otherwise precipitate violence and even civil war.
I don’t want to exaggerate the advantages of rule-of-law reforms. If these reforms were always clear win-win opportunities, they would be ubiquitous, which of course they are not. Moreover, the people whose action is needed to establish the rule of law—the people subject to lawless governments and the people running those governments—have their own priorities. Among citizens, for example, particular government offenses provide chances for mobilizing opposition; for them, the opportunities of the moment are much more vital than theories of reform. But while specific government outrages—a stolen election here, concealment of government malfeasance there, indifference to environmental calamity elsewhere—may rally popular support, there is nothing to prevent a two-track strategy: citizens can seize those protest opportunities and at the same time spotlight the lawlessness that is (commonly) a part of the government outrage. And rule-of-law concepts can figure among their proposed remedies.