The Reformer

by Stephen F. Williams

  41.GDSO, Third Duma, 3rd Sess., pt. 2, February 1, 1910, col. 573.

  42.V. Maklakov, “III Sessiia Gosudarstvennoi Dumy” [The third session of (the Third) State Duma], Russkaia Mysl [Russian thought] (February 1911), 104.

  43.GDSO, Third Duma, 3rd Sess., pt. 1, November 2, 1909, cols. 1201–12; ibid., pt. 2, February 1, 1910, cols. 564–71.

  44.Burbank, Russian Peasants Go to Court, 245–57; Corinne Gaudin, Ruling Peasants (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007).

  45.Maklakov, “Local Justice in Russia,” 139, 141.

  46.GDSO, Third Duma, 3rd Sess., pt. 1, November 2, 1909, cols. 1201–1203.

  47.Assa, “How Arbitrary Was Tsarist Administrative Justice?,” 1, 38.

  48.GDSO, Fourth Duma, 2nd Sess., pt. 2, February 18, 1914, cols. 818–37.

  49.Ibid., cols. 823–24.

  50.Ibid., cols. 831, 833–34; Ekaterina A. Pravilova, Zakonnost i Prava Lichnosti: Administrativnaia Iustitsia v Rossii [Legality and individual rights: Administrative justice in imperial Russia] (St. Petersburg: Obrazovanie-Kultura, 2000), 182–83. Maklakov also argued that nothing supplied the Senate with the authority to set aside administrative acts that violated the law. GDSO, Fourth Duma, 2nd Sess., pt. 2, February 18, 1914, col. 833. That was not actually true, as Count Emmanuel Bennigsen pointed out later in the debate, without attempted refutation by Maklakov. Ibid., February 28, 1914, col. 1283.

  51.Ibid., February 18, 1914, col. 825.

  52.See, e.g., ibid., cols. 820, 825–26, 828, 829.

  53.Ibid., col. 827.

  54.Pravilova, Zakonnost i Prava Lichnosti, 182, 182–84.

  55.See GDSO, Fourth Duma, 2nd Sess., pt. 2, February 28, 1914, col. 1283 (Count Bennigsen).

  56.Ibid., February 28, 1914, cols. 1283–84, 1289–90; see also GDSO, Fourth Duma, 2nd Sess., Prilozheniia, Item No. 197 (committee report on Bill No. 813), 98–99 (text of Art. 751 as proposed by committee). Another amendment eliminated Senate review of ministerial and agency orders; Maklakov thought that review at publication would preempt review in a concrete case, thus likely neutering the latter review, which was potentially more valuable. GDSO, Fourth Duma, 2nd Sess., pt. 2, cols. 1287–88. Another amendment narrowed the Senate’s authority to deny publication to rules of Duma and State Council to cases of non-compliance with the statutes or administrative rules governing those bodies’ formal procedures, a change that Maklakov said followed from their not being subordinate to the Senate. Ibid., cols. 1279–80.

  57.B. Maklakoff, “La Russie de 1900 à 1917, Vers la Révolution: Le Dénouement,” Revue de Paris 5 (1924), 508, 512. This is the first of a series of three articles, all with the same title (except that the second and third bear the additional legend, “suite”).

  58.Maklakov, “III Sessiia Gosudarstvennoi Dumy,” 98–100.

  59.For an excellent general review, see Marc Szeftel, “Personal Inviolability in the Legislation of the Russian Absolute Monarchy,” American Slavic and East European Review 17, no. 1 (February 1958), 1–24.

  60.Pravilova, Zakonnost i Prava Lichnosti, 231–32.

  61.Ibid., 229; GDSO, Third Duma, 5th Sess., pt. 1, November 18, 1911, col. 2149.

  62.GDSO, Third Duma, 5th Sess., pt. 1, November 18, 1911, col. 2156; see also Szeftel, “Personal Inviolability in the Legislation of the Russian Absolute Monarchy,” 5–6; Pravilova, Zakonnost i Prava Lichnosti, 220–24; Richard Wortman, “Russian Monarchy and the Rule of Law: New Considerations of the Court Reform of 1864,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 6, no. 1 (Winter 2005), 154.

  63.GDSO, Third Duma, 5th Sess., pt. 1, November 18, 1911, col. 2156.

  64.Ibid., cols. 2159–60. See also GDSO, Third Duma, 4th Sess., Prilozheniia, Item No. 271, 19–20, pp. 71–74 (Art. 1096 as proposed by committee); GDSO, Third Duma, 5th Sess., pt. 1, November 18, 1911, col. 2296 (the Kadets’ proposed text).

  65.Ibid., November 19, 1911, cols. 2287–98; the vote is recorded at ibid., cols. 2296–97.

  66.Pravilova, Zakonnost i Prava Lichnosti, 224–25.

  67.GDSO, Third Duma, 5th Sess., pt. 1, November 22, 1911, cols. 2364–68. Under modern U.S. law officials are typically personally liable for violations of law—but only ones that a reasonable officer would have recognized as illegal at the time he acted. See Harlow v. Fitzgerald, 457 U.S. 800 (1982).

  68.GDSO, Third Duma, 5th Sess., pt. 1, November 22, 1911, cols. 2366–69.See also Wortman, “Russian Monarchy and the Rule of Law,” 154. Pravilova points out additional problems, such as (1) the agencies’ ability, in cases where a private party seeks relief against an unlawful order, to drag matters out and keep the challenged order in place for years, (2) very broad concepts of official immunity, and (3) the likely inability to collect from relatively impecunious bureaucrats. Pravilova, Zakonnost i Prava Lichnosti, 56, 57–58. See also Szeftel, “Personal Inviolability in the Legislation of the Russian Absolute Monarchy,” 6 (explaining absence of any relief for unlawful arrest and obstructions to relief when the unlawfully arrested person is later acquitted). Maklakov returned to these issues on March 21, 1914. See GDSO, Fourth Duma, 2nd Sess., pt. 3, March 21, 1914, cols. 15–25, 63–77.

  69.GDSO, Third Duma, 5th Sess., pt. 1, November 22, 1911, col. 2387; Pravilova, Zakonnost i Prava Lichnosti, 230.

  70.D. C. B. Lieven, “The Security Police, Civil Rights, and the Fate of the Russian Empire, 1855–1917,” in Civil Rights in Imperial Russia, ed. Olga Crisp and Linda Edmondson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 258–61.

  CHAPTER 12: PEASANT RIGHTS

  1.Bakhmetev-Maklakov Correspondence, 1:460 (Maklakov to Bakhmetev, August 30, 1921). The other great sin he identified in this passage was the monarchy’s fear of and hostility to industrial capital.

  2.V. A. Maklakov, Vtoraia Gosudarstvennaia Duma [The Second State Duma] (Moscow: Tsentrpoligraf, 2006), 171; V. A. Maklakov, Iz Vospominanii (New York: Chekhov Publishing House [Izdatelstvo imeni Chekhova], 1954), 395.

  3.For the many ways in which the reform fell short of actually establishing private ownership, see Stephen F. Williams, Liberal Reform in an Illiberal Regime: The Creation of Private Property in Russia, 1906–1915 (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 2006), 216–23, 243–48.

  4.Victor Leontovitsch, The History of Liberalism in Russia, translated by Parmen Leontovitsch, with a foreword by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012), 88.

  5.V. Maklakov, “III Sessiia Gosudarstvennoi Dumy” [The third session of (the Third) State Duma], Russkaia Mysl [Russian thought] (February 1911), 106–9.

  6.V. A. Maklakov, “Pereustroistvo krestianskago byta” [“Reconstruction of peasant life”], Vestnik grazhdanskovo prava [Bulletin of civil law], no. 8 (December 1916), 29–52; no. 1 (January 1917), 29–69.

  7.V. Maklakov, Rech na Sezd K-D [Speech to Kadet Conference] (Moscow, 1917). This is a separately printed pamphlet containing only his speech. It is unclear who published it; given its deviation from Kadet orthodoxy, it is surely not one of the pamphlets of Maklakov speeches that the party often published and circulated.

  8.Ingeborg Fleischhauer, “The Agrarian Program of the Russian Constitutional Democrats,” Cahiers du Monde russe et soviétique, no. 20(2), (1979), 4–5. Article VI of the Kadet proposal specified that the recipients of redistributed land would receive only a long-term right to use the property, with no right of sale, exchange or gift (“assignment”). GDSO, First Duma, Meeting 6, May 8, 1906, 250. A maverick Kadet, L. I. Petrazhitskii, made a carefully honed argument that this approach would prevent transactions that could be expected to benefit sellers and buyers alike, and indirectly the public interest, ibid., 451–58, an argument that the major Kadet speaker (Mikhail Gertsenshtein) seemed not to fully grasp, much less rebut, ibid., 465–71.

  9.George Tokmakoff, P. A. Stolypin and the Third Duma: An Appraisal of the Three Major Issues (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1981), 34 and n.27 (citing GDSO, Third Duma, 1st Sess., pt. 1, November 16, 1907, cols. 343–4
8.

  10.See A. A. Kaufman, Agrarnyi vopros v Rossii [The Agrarian Question in Russia] (Moscow: Moskovskoe Nauchnoe Izdatelstvo, 1918), 221; Peter Toumanoff, “Some Effects of Land Tenure Reforms on Russian Agricultural Productivity, 1901–1913,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 32, no. 4 (July 1984), 861–72; and see the discussion in Williams, Liberal Reform in an Illiberal Regime, 102–3.

  11.Sezdy i konferentsii, 3:610.

  12.Ibid., 624. Rosenberg says that the conference adopted “the conservative position on almost every point,” but he refers to rejection of proposals such as one under which landowners would receive no compensation whatever. See William G. Rosenberg, Liberals in the Russian Revolution: The Constitutional Democratic Party, 1917–1921 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), 129.

  13.Basil Maklakov, “The Peasant Question and the Russian Revolution,” trans. Bernard Pares, Slavonic Review 2, no. 5 (December 1923), 244.

  14.Maklakov, La Chute, 49.

  15.Tyrkova-Williams Diary and Letters, 403 (letter of April 28, 1944).

  16.“Doklad po zakonoproektu ob otmene nekotorykh ogranichenii v pravakh selskikh obyvatelei i lits byvshikh podatnykh sostoianii” (Vysochaishii Ukaz 5 Oktiabr 1906 g.) [Report on a bill for repeal of certain limits on the rights of village inhabitants and persons of former taxed status (Imperial Decree of October 5, 1906)], GDSO, Fourth Duma, 4th Sess., Prilozheniia, Item No. 235 (hereafter cited as “Report”); GDSO, Fourth Duma, 4th Sess., Meeting 53, June 9, 1916, col. 5011.

  17.Bakhmetev-Maklakov Correspondence, 3:400 (Maklakov to Bakhmetev, February 23, 1928); Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volkhonsky (New York: Viking, 2001), part 8, chapter 16.

  18.See the Kollontai-Maklakov letters at http://ru-lib.3dn.ru/publ/kollontaj_aleksandra_mikhajlovna_pisma_k_v_a_maklakovu/1-1-0-460, letter no. 14. See chapter 3.

  19.GDSO, Fourth Duma, 4th Sess., Meeting 56, June 14, 1916, col. 5392. After reviewing the provisions on the Baltics, the Duma approved the bill as a whole. Ibid., Meeting 59, June 18, 1916, cols. 5665–68.

  20.Ibid., Meeting 51, June 3, 1916, col. 4816.

  21.Ibid., Meeting 55, June 13, 1916, cols. 5320–23.

  22.Ibid.; see also V. A. Maklakov, Vlast i obshchestvennost na zakate staroi Rossii (Vospominaniia sovremenika) [State and society in the twilight of old Russia (Recollections of a contemporary)] (Paris: Izdanie zhurnala “Illustrirovanaia Rossiia,” 1936), 579–80, 587–88, 593–95; Maklakov, Vtoraia Gosudarstvennaia Duma, 172–75.

  23.Ivan Strakhovskii, Peasant Law and Institutions (Krestianskie prava i uchrezhdeniia) (St. Petersburg: Izdatelstvo Obshchestvennaia Polza, 1903).

  24.This was an exaggeration, to be sure. In 1848, at long last, for example, peasants received the right to acquire land on their own, i.e., non-allotment land, held in the conventional manner. Leontovitsch, The History of Liberalism in Russia, 88.

  25.Report, 11/1.

  26.Ibid.

  27.Ibid., 10/1–2.

  28.Report, 7/2.

  29.Ibid., 11/2.

  30.GDSO, Fourth Duma, 4th session, Meeting 51, June 3, 1916, col. 4775.

  31.Report, 12/1.

  32.Ibid., 12/2; see also Basil Maklakov, “The Peasant Question and the Russian Revolution,” 245–46.

  33.See Report, 35/2 (explaining role of the Senate’s 1904 judgment); ibid., 30 (text of Section XII, codifying the Senate decree and addressing the matter); ibid., 31 (text of Section XXII, allowing an official of village societies to refuse to perform in-kind obligations when his duties prevent his continuous presence in the village society).

  34.Report, 40/1–2, 47/1–48/2; GDSO, Fourth Duma, 4th Sess., June 9, 1916, col. 5007; ibid., June 14, 1916, col. 5375.

  35.Report, 13/1.

  36.Neil B. Weissman, Reform in Tsarist Russia: The State Bureaucracy and Local Government, 1900–1914 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1981), 190–96, 202–4; Geoffrey A. Hosking, The Russian Constitutional Experiment: Government and Duma, 1907–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 161–70; Don C. Rawson, Russian Rightists and the Revolution of 1905 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 223; A. Ia. Avrekh, Tsarizm i IV Duma, 1912–1914 gg. [Tsarism and the Fourth Duma, 1912–1914] (Moscow: Izdaletsvo Nauka, 1981), 78.

  37.P. A. Pozhigailo, ed., P. A. Stolypin glazami sovremennikov [P. A. Stolypin through his contemporaries’ eyes] (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2008), 640–41.

  38.GDSO, Fourth Duma, 4th Sess., June 9, 1916, col. 5073; ibid., June 18, 1916, cols. 5669–72.

  39.Ibid., June 3, 1916, col. 4769.

  40.Ibid., col. 4810.

  41.Ibid., June 9, 1916, col. 5011.

  42.Ibid., cols. 5014–15.

  43.Ibid., col. 4993.

  44.Ibid., col. 4996.

  45.GDSO, Fourth Duma, 4th Session, Meeting 53, June 9, 1916, cols. 5063–64.

  46.Code of Laws of the Russian Empire (Svod Zakonov Rossiikoi Imperii), vol. 14, section 205.

  47.See Alan Wood, “The Use and Abuse of Administrative Exile to Siberia,” Irish Slavonic Studies, no. 6 (1985), 65–81.

  48.Law on Termination of Permanent Exile and Restrictions on Temporary Exile Declared as a Sentence Pronounced by a Court or Community, in the Polnoe Sobranie Zakonov Rossiikoi Imperii, series 3 (1881–1913), vol. 20, Item 18839, at 758 (official publication), section II. See also Wood, “The Use and Abuse of Administrative Exile to Siberia.”

  49.GDSO, Fourth Duma, 4th session, Meeting 54, June 10, 1916, cols. 5135–36.

  50.Ibid., col. 5262.

  51.Ibid., cols. 5262–63.

  52.Ibid., cols. 5263–66.

  53.See Jonathan W. Daly, “On the Significance of Emergency Legislation in Late Imperial Russia,” Slavic Review 54, no. 3 (1995), 602–29 (saying that peasants “considered indispensable their right to subject ‘undesirables’ to administrative exile”).

  54.Maklakov, Vtoraia Gosudarstvennaia Duma, 175.

  55.GDSO, Fourth Duma, 4th Sess., June 3, 1916, cols. 4761, 4768, 4777.

  56.Ibid., June 9, 1916, cols. 5041–42.

  57.Ibid., col. 5043.

  58.Ibid.

  59.Ibid., col. 5012.

  60.Ibid., June 3, 1916, col. 4759 (Kerensky’s claim).

  61.Ibid., col. 4763.

  62.Ibid., June 9, 1916, cols. 5015, 5069–71.

  63.Ibid., June 3, 1916, col. 4774 (Kerensky); ibid., June 9, 1916, col. 5016 (Maklakov).

  64.Ibid., cols. 5016–18.

  CHAPTER 13: REFORMS AND REFORM: AN APPRAISAL

  1.V. Maklakov, “III Sessiia Gosudarstvennoi Dumy” [The third session of (the Third) State Duma], Russkaia Mysl [Russian thought] (February 1911), 96, 97.

  2.Ibid., 119–24.

  3.GDSO, Third Duma, 2nd Sess., pt. 1, December 10, 1908, col. 2487.

  4.Ibid.

  5.GDSO, Fourth Duma, 2nd Sess., pt. 4, May 12, 1914, col. 506.

  6.Ibid., cols. 506–7.

  7.V. A. Maklakov, Vlast i obshchestvennost na zakate staroi Rossii (Vospominaniia sovremenika) [State and society in the twilight of old Russia (Recollections of a contemporary)] (Paris: Izdanie zhurnala “Illustrirovanaia Rossiia,” 1936), 14.

  8.Ibid., 28.

  9.Maklakov, La Chute, 64.

  10.Ibid.

  11.Bakhmetev-Maklakov Correspondence, 3:33 (Maklakov to Bakhmetev, July 4, 1923).

  12.V. A. Maklakov, Iz Vospominanii (New York: Chekhov Publishing House [Izdatelstvo imeni Chekhova], 1954), 366.

  13.See generally Wayne Dowler, Russia in 1913 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2012).

  14.Eric Lohr, “Patriotic Violence and the State: The Moscow Riots of May 1915,” Kritika 4, no. 3, n.s. (Summer 2003), 607–26; William C. Fuller, Jr., The Foe Within: Fantasies of Treason and the End of Imperial Russia (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2006).

  CHAPTER 14: NATIONAL LIBERALS

  1.D. N. Shipov, Vospominaniia i dumy o perezhitom [Memoirs and reflections on the past] (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2007), 520–24; Geof
frey A. Hosking, The Russian Constitutional Experiment: Government and Duma, 1907–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 224–25.

  2.V. Maklakov, Moskovskii Ezhenedelnik no. 42 (November 1, 1908), 6–13.

  3.D. C. B. Lieven, Russia and the Origins of the First World War (London: Macmillan, 1983), 125–26.

  4.Dominic Lieven, Russia’s Rulers under the Old Regime (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989), 228–30.

  5.GDSO, Fourth Duma, 1st Sess., pt. 1, December 7, 1912, cols. 328–29. On the broad domestic aspects of the December 7 speech, see A. Ia. Avrekh, Tsarizm i IV Duma, 1912–1914 gg. [Tsarism and the Fourth Duma, 1912–1914] (Moscow: Izdaletsvo Nauka, 1981), 42–43.

  6.Russkie Vedomosti [Russian news], December 6, 1912, 3–4.

  7.Hosking, The Russian Constitutional Experiment, 233–38; Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers (New York: Harper, 2012), 264–65; Andrew Rossos, Russia and the Balkans (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), 112–13.

  8.Protokoly, 2:101 (A. S. Izgoev).

  9.Ibid., 106, 109 (October 22, 1912).

  10.See Valentin Valentinovich Shelokhaev, Ideologiia i politicheskaia organizatsiia rossiiskoi liberalnoi burzhuazii, 1907–1914 [The Ideology and political organization of the Russian liberal bourgeoisie, 1907–1914] (Moscow: Nauka, 1991), 179–93 for a review of the intra-party debates; Melissa Kirschke Stockdale, Paul Miliukov and the Quest for a Liberal Russia, 1880–1918 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996), 212–20.

  11.Maklakov is presumably referring to Outer Manchuria, acquired by Russia pursuant to treaties with China in 1858 and 1860, and still Russian territory.

  12.Marina Aleksandrovna Ivanova, “Rol V. A. Maklakova v Obshchestvenno-politicheskoi zhizni Rossii” [The role of V. A. Maklakov in the social-political life of Russia] (PhD thesis, Rossiiskii Universitet Druzhby Narodov, 1997), 108, 218, nn. 56–57 (citing GIM, fond 31, delo 148, ll. 143, 149).

  13.Letter of Lucy Bresser to Maklakov, October 4, 1912 (n.s.), GIM, fond 31, delo 11, l. 54.

  14.See V. I. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii [Complete collected works] (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatelstvo Politicheskoi literatury, 1961), 22:245.