imperial Russian minidispute. University authorities wanted the money distributed through a specific official organization created for the famine. The student board saw this as an invasion of students’ rights. But it worked out a compromise behind the scenes, with the university publicly asking only that the money be given through some official entity. The board agreed, taking the risk that the full student membership wouldn’t approve the official organization ultimately proposed (which proved to be the one originally named). The student membership voted its agreement, thus nipping a potential crisis in the bud.39
Though most events in Maklakov’s as yet brief life underscored the hyperactive character of the Russian state, his university years also provided him with a dramatic example of the state’s potential benefits. His older sister had often spoken of Mikhail Alexandrovich Novoselov, one of her gymnasium instructors, as a wonderful teacher and person. Maklakov, attending a lecture in the natural sciences faculty, found himself chatting with his neighbor, who proved to be Novoselov and who expounded his rather Tolstoyan ideas—that the state’s reliance on force made it in effect dishonorable and that revolutionaries were no better, as they just wanted to secure the power of the state for themselves. He also believed that if people saw how a community that was not founded on force worked, they would be drawn to it and would want to join, just as people who see someone actually cross a dangerous river are inspired to take the risk themselves. Novoselov proposed to found a colony based on this principle, and did so in Tver province.
Maklakov, along with some friends, went to share this experience and emerged with conflicting thoughts. He deeply admired the simplicity of the participants’ way of life; he mentions that that was the summer he gave up smoking. But he was equally clear that this was not for him. On his return to Moscow, he wrote Novoselov an enthusiastic letter, saying how the people there had found their true path, and that this was written in their faces. He soon realized that he’d overstated his position; Novoselov responded in terms clearly expecting Maklakov to return and join the colony.
In any event, the colony soon came to a tragic end. Neighboring peasants, learning that the colony believed one should never return evil for evil, tested it by stealing a couple of horses for no other reason than that they felt the need of them. The colony contemplated enlisting the aid of the local authorities, but decided against it, presumably on Tolstoyan grounds. The next day the whole neighboring village came, and the colony welcomed them, thinking they were acting out of conscience. But the peasants came to haul off everything they could—and did so. After that, no one wanted to remain in the colony. Novoselov himself became a priest.40
In the summer of 1889, when Maklakov was 20 years old and the French Revolution was 100, his father went to Paris for the World’s Fair and brought him along. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven!” Recounting the trip in his memoirs sixty-five years later, Maklakov didn’t quote Wordsworth’s revolution-inspired exclamation, but he conveyed some of the feeling. “Later, any time a group of friends discussed the happiest minute in their lives, I always answered that the minute was the month I spent then in Paris.”41 It was the start of his lif-elong love affair with France, which he often visited and to which he returned as ambassador-designate in 1917, remaining until his death in 1957.
The trip started, characteristically, with a falsehood. For an underage child to go abroad required a doctor’s certificate of illness and an endorsement by provincial authorities. Those authorities gave the endorsement without reading the papers. Why should they take the trouble? The whole exercise was a charade.
Maklakov was no simplistic fan of the French Revolution, but he was dazzled by the freedom enjoyed by the French. Political hawkers would press flyers into his hands—the presidential campaign of General Boulanger was then under way—and Maklakov at first, out of Russian caution, was afraid to hold on to them. He was struck by the common ground shared by antagonistic political actors. He fondly recalled the scene after a group of Boulangists invaded an anti-Boulangist meeting, leading to a rather violent debate, with antagonistic mobs swirling out of the meeting hall and into the street. Suddenly the strains of the “Marseillaise” were heard from the hall, and minutes later the two chief adversaries were walking off arm in arm, enveloped in the music. “The whole crowd in the street suddenly followed them, caps flew into the air, all sang and applauded and embraced. The Marseillaise, the republic—for a minute reconciled everyone.”
And the French voters impressed him. Pro-republic, they were discerning enough to reject not only outright foes of the republic but also demagogues who would compromise it (Boulanger, for example). Maklakov felt that France’s freedom had taught him a lesson in a kind of conservatism—a popular readiness to preserve a relation to the historical past. Russia, he thought, had nurtured no such readiness.42
His French revolutionary hero was Mirabeau, whom he admired, he said, not for his genius, but for his commitment to Berryer’s view that “the only way to avert a revolution is to make one.” As the French Revolution’s most eloquent proponent of averting revolution through reform, Mirabeau was obviously the perfect model for Maklakov. Later, in Russia, Maklakov was given an eight-volume work that included a biography of Mirabeau and excerpts from his speeches, many of which he memorized and retained for life. Ariadne Tyrkova-Williams—Maklakov’s longtime friend and colleague in the Kadet party and the only woman member of its central committee—reported that Maklakov would recite long excerpts from Mirabeau’s oratory. His memoirs enthusiastically quote Mirabeau’s self-description as “a man who does not believe that wisdom lies in extremes or that the courage to destroy should never give way to the courage to create.”43
The Paris trip implanted in Maklakov a belief in the affirmative value of a free state, one that recognized the independence of individuals and of society and protected them from lawlessness. He linked this to the experience of the Novoselov colony, which obviously needed government to defend its legal rights from the crowd. He even wrote to Novoselov—one hopes not gloatingly—to argue that the state was necessary for the success of undertakings such as the Tolstoyans’.44
Gregarious as ever, Maklakov naturally sought out French students and, after brief frustration because he mistakenly looked first in the cheapest cafés, found the Association générale des étudiants de Paris, whose students welcomed him enthusiastically. He declared this event the decisive moment of his trip abroad. His links gave him access to the nitty-gritty of political campaigns in which the students were active—so different from politics and student life in Russia. His father was scheduled to go home before the elections, but Maklakov persuaded him to let him stay on.
On his return the Russian state hit Maklakov with an immediate reminder of its character. He had brought along books and cartoons relating to French politics and the revolution; border guards confiscated the cartoons. Wanting to share part of his experience, he wrote an article recounting the lively, innocent, and unburdened activity of the Paris students’ association. Submitting it to Russkie Vedomosti (Russian news), the first of many pieces he ultimately published there, he was pleased at its acceptance, but dismayed that the editor had shortened it in the published version. He went to see the editor, who assumed Maklakov was coming to thank him. At the end, the editor said, “This will be a lesson to me not to have anything to do with young people who know nothing.” Maklakov replied, “And it will be a lesson for me not to have to do with old people who’re afraid of everything.” In retrospect, he saw that the shortening had done no harm, preserving the article’s message about the benefit of allowing Russian student organizations to associate with international ones.45
The French students had told Maklakov of an international students’ meeting in Montpelier and said that only Russia was sending no delegate; they urged him to come. As the time of the conference approached, Maklakov found himself barred by his involvement in the disorders that had led to his time in Butyrskaia. Somehow a substitute was found, one Dobronravov. He participated and as a result was also excluded from the university for political unreliability. To assist Dobronravov’s struggle
