The Reformer

by Stephen F. Williams

  18.Maklakov reviews this in “1905–1906 gody” [The years 1905–1906], in Vinaver i russkaia obshchestvennost nachala XX veka; sbornik stateĭ [Vinaver and Russian society at the start of the twentieth century: Collected articles] (Paris: Imp. Cooperative Étoile, 1937), 53, 84–88; and in Pervaia Gosudarstvennaia Duma, 196–202. Benjamin Beuerle, “A Step for ‘The Whole Civilized World’: The Debate over the Death Penalty in Russia,1905–1917,” in One Law for All?: Western Models and Local Practices in (Post-) Imperial Contexts, ed. Stefan B. Kirmse (Frankfurt am Main, New York: Campus, 2012), 39–66, 50 and n.22.

  19.Maklakov, Pervaia Gosudarstvennaia Duma, 88–89 (quoting Vinaver).

  20.Duma Address to the Tsar, First Duma, Meeting 5, May 5, 1906, 241. See also Maklakov, Pervaia Gosudarstvennaia Duma, 90–91.

  21.GDSO, First Duma, Meeting 8, May 13, 1906, p. 322.

  22.Maklakov, Pervaia Gosudarstvennaia Duma, 284–85.

  23.Ibid., 225–30; Maklakov, La Chute, 78; Shmuel Galai, “Kadet Domination of the First Duma and Its Limits,” in The Russian Revolution of 1905: Centenary Perspectives, ed. Jonathan D. Smele and Anthony Heywood (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 196, 204.

  24.Abraham Ascher, P. A. Stolypin: The Search for Stability in Late Imperial Russia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 138 (3,611 employees killed from October 1905 through September 1906); Ascher, The Revolution of 1905, 2:95 (mock letter to Rodichev); Maklakov, Pervaia Gosudarstvennaia Duma, 99–114; Shmuel Galai, “The Impact of the Vyborg Manifesto on the Fortunes of the Kadet Party,” Revolutionary Russia 20, no. 2 (December 2007), 197, 216 (finding the Kadet position “neither very coherent nor persuasive”).

  25.Galai, “The Impact of the Vyborg Manifesto,” 199.

  26.Galai, “Kadet Domination,” 205.

  27.Maklakov, Pervaia Gosudarstvennaia Duma, 57–59.

  28.Ibid., 321–23.

  29.Ibid., 156–57. Stolypin, who had studied natural sciences at St. Petersburg University, may have gotten the idea from Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899), who had said, “There are in nature neither rewards nor punishments—there are only consequences.”

  30.Ibid., 155–59.

  31.Ian D. Thatcher, “The First State Duma, 1906: The View from the Contemporary Pamphlet and Monograph Literature,” Canadian Journal of History 46 (Winter 2011), 531–61, summarizes that literature as generally reflecting the Kadet perspective, along with Trudovik advocacy of greater militancy.

  32.Ascher, The Revolution of 1905, 2:202–9; Protokoly, 1:12 (from “Tragediia kadetskoi (konstitutsionno-demokraticheskoi) partii” [The tragedy of the Kadet (Constitutional Democratic) Party], by the editorial board of the collection); Kizevetter, Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii, 435.

  33.Aronov, Pervyi spiker, 168–74.

  34.V. A. Maklakov, “Delo o Podpisavshikh Vyborgskoe Vozzvanie” [The case against the signers of the Vyborg Manifesto], in V. A. Maklakov, Rechi: Sudebniia, Dymskiia i Publichniia Lektsii, 1904–1926 [V. A. Maklakov, Speeches: Judicial, Duma and public lectures, 1904–1926] (Paris: Izdanie Iubileinogo Komiteta, 1869–1949), 52–59.

  35.Mandelshtam, 1905 god v politicheskikh protsessakh, 357. The translation is mine, but has benefitted from that of Samuel Kucherov in his Courts, Lawyers, and Trials under the Last Three Tsars (New York: F. A. Praeger, 1953), 242. The word that I have translated as “rights” is ambiguous in Russian, and could mean “law.” Mandelshtam’s editor assumed it to be law, and then posed a question based on the assumption that law could be tsarist (bad) or proletarian (good). Maklakov noticed this, and, quoting the Mandelshtam passage and his editor’s question in his memoirs, answered in terms imputing to Mandelshtam (and thus to himself) the “rights” meaning. V. A. Maklakov, Iz Vospominanii (New York: Chekhov Publishing House [Izdatelstvo imeni Chekhova], 1954), 279.

  36.Aronov, Pervyi spiker, 174.

  37.Maklakov, Iz Vospominanii, 361.

  CHAPTER 7: THE SECOND DUMA: CHALLENGING STOLYPIN, ENGAGING STOLYPIN

  1.A. A. Kizevetter, Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii: Vospominaniia [On the Border of Two Centuries: Memoirs] (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1996), 455–56.

  2.V. A. Maklakov, Vtoraia Gosudarstvennaia Duma [The Second State Duma] (Moscow: Tsentrpoligraf, 2006), 107–8.

  3.Kizevetter, Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii, 446.

  4.Maklakov, Vtoraia Gosudarstvennaia Duma, 75–79.

  5.See Kroner, The Debate Between Miliukov and Maklakov on the Chances for Russian Liberalism (Amsterdam, 1998), 112–14; Vestnik Partii Narodnoi Svobody no. 1 (1907), 45, 46, 48.

  6.S. V. Shelokhaev, D. N. Shipov: Lichnost i obshchestvenno-politicheskaia deiatelnost [D. N. Shipov: The Person and the public and political activity] (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2010), 111–12.

  7.Abraham Ascher, The Revolution of 1905, 2 vols. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 2:51, 284; Don C. Rawson, Russian Rightists and the Revolution of 1905 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 196–97. There are very small differences in classification between Ascher and Rawson.

  8.J. W. Riddle to Secretary of State Elihu Root, March 15, 1907 (n.s.). Numerical and Minor Files of the Department of State, 1906–1910, National Archives Microfilm Publication no. M862, roll 20, case nos. 69/66–79/135, no. 15, images 712 ff., https://catalog.archives.gov/id/19106425.

  9.Shmuel Galai, “The Jewish Question as a Russian Problem: The Debates in the First State Duma,” Revolutionary Russia 17, no. 1 (June 2004), 31, 48–49.

  10.Abraham Ascher, P. A. Stolypin: The Search for Stability in Late Imperial Russia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 138–42; Maklakov, Vtoraia Gosudarstvennaia Duma, 27–28.

  11.Melissa Kirschke Stockdale, Paul Miliukov and the Quest for a Liberal Russia, 1880–1918 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996), 165.

  12.Sezdy i konferentsii, 1:623 (Central Committee member N. A. Gredeskul is quoting Maklakov to that effect in an effort to resist claims that the Kadet faction should have been more aggressive).

  13.Ascher, P. A. Stolypin, 187.

  14.GDSO, Second Duma, Meeting 5, March 6, 1907, cols. 106–20. Duplicated in P. A. Stolypin, Nam Nuzhna Velikaia Rossiia [We need a great Russia] (Moscow: Molodaia Gvardiia, 1991), 50–62.

  15.GDSO, Second Duma, Meeting 5, March 6, 1907, cols. 167–69. Duplicated in Stolypin, Nam Nuzhna, 64.

  16.Maklakov, Vtoraia Gosudarstvennaia Duma, 123–24.

  17.Ibid., 124.

  18.Anna Geifman, Thou Shalt Kill: Revolutionary Terrorism in Russia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 20–21.

  19.Maklakov, Vtoraia Gosudarstvennaia Duma, 134–37.

  20.GDSO, Second Duma, Meeting 8, March 12, 1907, col. 390.

  21.Ibid., col. 392.

  22.Ibid., Meeting 9, March 13, 1907, cols. 513–14.

  23.GDSO, Second Duma, Meeting 9, March 13, 1907, col. 517.

  24.See the discussion in Stephen F. Williams, “A Kadet’s Critique of the Kadet Party: Vasily Maklakov,” Revolutionary Russia 23 (2010), 29–65.

  25.Tovarishch [Comrade], April 20, 1907, 3. This table excludes 42 death penalty verdicts in September from the “voenno-morsk. polevykh sudov.” The table also excludes figures from the ordinary military district courts (voenno-okr), and there are some discrepancies among the issues of Tovarishch. For example, the March 3, 1907 issue (p. 5) has February figures of 19 for the field courts martial and 22 for the military district courts. It may be that figures originally attributed to the military district courts were found later to be properly assignable to the field courts martial.

  26.For perspective on the tsarist regime in relation to its successors, consider that in the relatively tranquil years from 1962 through 1990, the Soviet Union executed about 24,000 people, or an average of nearly 1,000 a year, with 3,000 executions in 1962 alone. Frances Nethercott, Russian Legal Culture before and after Communism (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 135. Another point of comparison might be the toll from the shooting of hostages in one day after Fanny Kaplan’s attempted assassination of
Lenin. It’s fair to estimate that the day’s work exceeded eight months of the field courts martial, since 553 hostages were executed in Nizhny Novgorod and Petrograd alone, according to Izvestiia. Jonathan W. Daly, “Political Crime in Late Imperial Russia,” Journal of Modern History 74, no. 1 (March 2002), 62, 100.

  27.Bakhmetev-Maklakov Correspondence, 1:473 (Maklakov to Bakhmetev, August 30, 1921).

  28.For Maklakov’s Duma speeches on the subject, see the original attack on the field courts martial, GDSO, Second Duma, Meeting 8, March 12, 1907, cols. 390–91; ibid., Meeting 21, April 3, 1907, cols. 1586–91; ibid., Meeting 30, April 30, 1907, cols. 2297–2305. Maklakov recounts the full story in Vtoraia Gosudarstvennaia Duma, 188–97.

  29.GDSO, Second Duma, Meeting 49, May 28, 1907, cols. 1300–1305.

  30.Maklakov, Vtoraia Gosudarstvennaia Duma, 274–75.

  31.Ascher, The Revolution of 1905, 2:322–25; Maklakov, Vtoraia Gosudarstvennaia Duma, 262–85.

  32.Geifman, Thou Shalt Kill, 217–20; see also Stockdale, Paul Miliukov, 165–67.

  33.I’m using the Western term village not to mean a political entity but the economic and political unit technically called an obshchina, typically translated as “commune.”

  34.For some detail on the differences, see Stephen F. Williams, Liberal Reform in an Illiberal Regime: The Creation of Private Property in Russia, 1906–1915 (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 2006), 216–17, 220–23.

  35.V. Maklakov, “The Agrarian Problem in Russia before the Revolution,” Russian Review 9, no. 1 (January 1950), 3, 13.

  36.Ingeborg Fleischhauer, “The Agrarian Program of the Russian Constitutional Democrats,” Cahiers du Monde russe et soviétique [Notes on the Russian and Soviet world] 20, no. 2 (1979), 173, 184–86; V. V. Shelokhaev, “Agrarnia programma kadetov v pervoi Russkoi revoliutsii” [Agricultural program of the Kadets in the first Russian revolution], Istoricheskie Zapiski [Historical notes] 86 (1970), 172, 204–7.

  37.Fleischhauer, “The Agrarian Program,” 186.

  38.Leonard Schapiro, “The Vekhi Group and the Mystique of Revolution,” Slavonic and East European Review 34, no. 82 (December 1955), 56, 67.

  39.Maklakov, Vtoraia Gosudarstvennaia Duma, 173, 297–98.

  40.Ibid., 291.

  41.Ibid., 295; Tyrkova-Williams Diary and Letters, 875 (Maklakov to Ariadne Tyrkova-Williams, September 1, 1943).

  42.Maklakov, Vtoraia Gosudarstvennaia Duma, 296.

  43.Ibid., 297–98. Maklakov was convinced that the June 3 coup d’état would not have occurred if Stolypin had been sure that the law of November 9 would be accepted, albeit with major changes. See Bakhmetev-Maklakov Correspondence, 3:32 (Maklakov to Bakhmetev, July 4, 1923).

  44.Maklakov, Vtoraia Gosudarstvennaia Duma, 297–99.

  45.GDSO, Second Duma, Meeting 36, May 10, 1907, cols. 444–45; Maklakov, Vtoraia Gosudarstvennaia Duma, 301. The Stolypin speech is duplicated in Stolypin, Nam Nuzhna, 96.

  46.Maklakov, Vtoraia Gosudarstvennaia Duma, 303.

  47.Ibid.

  48.Ibid., 304–9; Tyrkova-Williams Diary and Letters, 401 (Tyrkova-Williams to Maklakov, April 16, 1944).

  49.Kizevetter, Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii, 463–64.

  50.Maklakov, Vtoraia Gosudarstvennaia Duma, 314–15.

  51.Ibid., 315.

  52.P. A. Pozhigailo, ed., P. A. Stolypin glazami sovremennikov [P. A. Stolypin through his contemporaries’ eyes] (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2008), 118–19. See also what seems like a rather fanciful account by Vladimir Kokovtsov, Out of My Past (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1935), 185.

  53.Letter of Ambassador J. W. Riddle to Secretary of State Elihu Root, June 22, 1907 (n.s.). Numerical and Minor Files of the Department of State, 1906–1910, National Archives Microfilm Publication no. M862, roll 20, case nos. 69/66–79/135, no. 51, images 791 ff., https://catalog.archives.gov/id/19106425.

  54.Richard Pipes, Struve: Liberal on the Right, 1905–1944 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), 63. Pipes generally draws his account from Maklakov’s and tells us that Struve confirmed Maklakov’s version. Ibid., 61n125.

  55.Iosif V. Gessen, V Dvukh vekakh: Zhiznennyi otchet [In two centuries: A life’s account], Arkhiv Russkoi Revoliutsii 22 (1937), 250. See also M. L. Mandelshtam, 1905 god v politicheskikh protsessakh: Zapiski zashchitnika [The year 1905 in political trials: Notes of a defense counsel] (Moscow: Izdatelstvo polikatorzhan, 1931), 360–63.

  56.Maklakov, Vtoraia Gosudarstvennaia Duma, 316.

  57.Pipes, Struve, 65.

  58.Ascher, The Revolution of 1905, 2:353–55.

  59.V. A. Maklakov, Iz Vospominanii (New York: Chekhov Publishing House [Izdatelstvo imeni Chekhova], 1954), 362.

  60.See A. Ia. Avrekh, Stolypin i Tretia Duma [Stolypin and the Third Duma] (Moscow: Izdatelstvo Nauka, 1968), 85–86; GDSO, Third Duma, 5th Sess., pt. 1, Meeting 10, October 29, 1911, cols. 818–20.

  61.V. Maklakov, “Zakonnost v Russkoi zhizni” [The Rule of law in Russian life], Vestnik Evropy, May 1909 [Public lecture delivered March 17, 1909], 238, 259–63.

  62.See Anthony Kroner, The Debate between Miliukov and Maklakov on the Chances for Russian Liberalism (Amsterdam, 1998), 110–11; Anthony Kroner, “The Debate between Miliukov and Maklakov on the Chances for Russian Liberalism,” Revolutionary Russia 7, no. 2 (1994): 239, 250 (citing Vestnik Partii Narodnoi Svobody, no. 1 [January 4, 1907], 48); Maklakov, “Sredi izbiratelnii” [Among the voters], Russkie Vedomosti [Russian news], March 26, 1906, 2; Maklakov, “Gde vykhod” [Where is there a way out?], Russkie Vedomosti, May 20, 1906, 2; Maklakov, “Zakoldovannyi krug” [A vicious circle], Russkie Vedomosti, August 27, 1906, 3.

  63.V. A. Maklakov, Pervaia Gosudarstvennaia Duma [The First State Duma] (Moscow: Tsentrpoligraf, 2006), 94–95.

  64.Tyrkova-Williams Diary and Letters, 282 (entry for September 29, 1950).

  65.See Stephen F. Williams, “A Kadet’s Critique of the Kadet Party: Vasily Maklakov,” Revolutionary Russia 23 (2010), 29, 52–57.

  66.P. N. Miliukov, “V. A. Maklakov mezhdu ‘obshchestvennostiu i vlastiu, II,’” [V. A. Maklakov between society and the state, II] Poslednie Novosti [Recent news], May 30, 1937, col. 5.

  67.P. N. Miliukov, “‘Sovremennye Zapiski,’ kn. 56,” [“Contemporary notes,” vol. 56] Poslednie Novosti [Recent news], July 16, 1939, col. 5; “Liberalizm, Radikalizm i Revolutsiia,” in Sovremennye Zapiski (1935), 285, 312–13; “V. A. Maklakov mezhdu ‘obshchestvennostiu i vlastiu, II,’” in Poslednie Novosti [Recent news], May 30, 1937, col. 3.

  68.P. N. Miliukov, “V. A. Maklakov o knige prof. Pares,” [V. A. Maklakov on Prof. Pares’s book] Poslednie Novosti [Recent news], July 16, 1939, col. 3.

  69.See Yuval Levin, The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left (New York: Basic Books, 2013).

  CHAPTER 8: THE THIRD AND FOURTH DUMAS AND MAKLAKOV’S FIGHT AGAINST GOVERNMENT ARBITRARINESS

  1.GDSO, Third Duma, 5th Sess., pt. 2, February 29, 1912, col. 3420. See also Bakhmetev-Maklakov Correspondence, 1:458 (Maklakov to Bakhmetev, August 30, 1921).

  2.Abraham Ascher, P. A. Stolypin: The Search for Stability in Late Imperial Russia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 210–11; Ben-Cion Pinchuk, The Octobrists in the Third Duma, 1907–1912 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1974), 31–34. C. Jay Smith, “The Russian Third Duma: An Analytical Profile,” Russian Review, 17, no. 3 (July 1958), 201–10. As Ascher notes, the party classifications are uncertain because of the deputies’ relatively frequent party switching. Ascher, P. A. Stolypin, 420n5.

  3.Pinchuk, The Octobrists in the Third Duma, 42–43; V. A. Maklakov, Iz Vospominanii (New York: Chekhov Publishing House [Izdatelstvo imeni Chekhova], 1954), 384–86.

  4.V. A. Maklakov, “L’Étape Actuelle du Bolshevisme,” Mercure de France, May 1, 1922, 577, 606–7 (regarding Soviet talk of independent courts in the 1920s as meaningless until the peasants, whom he regarded as the country’s sole productive force, acquired political power); see also Matthew Stephenson,
“‘When the Devil Turns . . .’: The Political Foundations of Independent Judicial Review,” Journal of Legal Studies 32 (2003), 59.

  5.GDSO, Third Duma, 1st Sess., Prilozheniia, Item No. 13, 39–41 (reciting indictment).

  6.Ibid., Item No. 69, 277–80 (reciting indictment).

  7.GDSO, Third Duma, 1st Sess., pt. 3, May 19, 1908, cols. 954–56.

  8.See Article 19 of the Statute Establishing the Duma (Uchrezhdenie Gosudarstvennoi Dumy), cross-referencing Article 7 of the Statute on Elections to the Duma (Polozhenie o vyborakh v Gosudarstvenuiu Dumu), August 6, 1905. (Article 7 became Article 10 of the statute as amended by the Act of June 3, 1907. See GDSO, Third Duma, 2nd Sess., Prilozheniia, Item No. 80, 1.)

  9.GDSO, Third Duma, 2nd Sess., pt. 4, April 27, 1909, cols. 49–52, 54–56, 58–59.

  10.Ibid., col. 111 (Koliubakin); col. 126 (Kosorotov).

  11.See generally Jonathan W. Daly, “On the Significance of Emergency Legislation in Late Imperial Russia,” Slavic Review 54, no. 3 (1995), 602, 605.

  12.GDSO, Third Duma, 1st Sess., pt. 2, April 29, 1908, col. 2390.

  13.Richard J. Robbins, The Tsar’s Viceroys (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987).

  14.GDSO, Third Duma, 1st Sess., pt. 2, April 29, 1908, col. 2397.

  15.Ibid., col. 2401.

  16.Ibid.; Third Duma, 2nd Sess., pt. 4, May 12, 1909, col. 1096.

  17.Ibid., Third Duma, 1st Sess., pt. 2, April 29, 1908, cols. 2406–2407.

  18.GDSO, Third Duma, 2nd Sess., pt. 1, October 15, 1908, cols. 22–24. See also ibid., 3rd Sess., pt. 2, February 18, 1910, col. 1779 (referring to police barring a deputy from reporting to his voters despite March 4 rules). Compare ibid. (suggesting that the March 4 rules assure freedom for unions) with Third Duma, 4th Sess., December 1, 1910, col. 2359 (arguing that all the government needs for its war on unions is the March 4 rules). And see Geoffrey A. Hosking, “P. A. Stolypin and the Octobrist Party,” Slavonic and East European Review 47, no. 108 (January 1969), 137, 150–51 (discussing Octobrist use of interpellations to shed light on government violations of March 4 rules).