an exchange that occurred while he was a member of the Third Duma. One of his sisters met a professor who had written a favorable review of Maklakov’s essay. Knowing she was the sister of the deputy Maklakov, the professor inquired if she happened to know what had happened to the young scholar of the same name who had published work on ancient Greece and then had disappeared over the scholarly horizon. Learning that the scholar and the deputy were one and the same, he appeared for a long time not to believe it and then said with a sigh, “But we expected so much of him.”56
Maklakov’s university years included a tragedy that haunted him the rest of his life. He had met one Nicholas Cherniaev through the Novoselov colony, where Cherniaev’s sister had lived. For a long time Cherniaev was his closest friend, and they saw each other daily. Cherniaev had been drawn to Tolstoy by his understanding of Christ’s teachings and could never reconcile those teachings with the world. To him, activities of the state and of revolutionaries seemed the denial of those teachings. He solved it by concentrating entirely on science. Maklakov thought that Cherniaev was stuck in a dilemma from which there was no exit, and they silently agreed not to talk of these matters.
When Maklakov was working at home on a paper, Cherniaev’s younger brother, a medical student, came and asked him to come home with him. Cherniaev, he said, had been burning his papers, and the brother feared some misfortune. Maklakov’s paper was due the next day, and he didn’t go. In memoirs written in his mid-80s, he wrote that he could not forgive himself for that. The next morning the brother came to his apartment and told him that Cherniaev had killed himself in the park, leaving a letter saying only that he’d used potassium cyanide and that no one was to blame for his death.
He had written letters for various friends, including several for Maklakov. One said that Maklakov had great talent, but nothing else, and went on in that vein. “I don’t believe in your heart, nor in your strength. You always exaggerate; you show more than you are.” He ended the letter with these words, full of passion: “I thought despite all that you loved me, but I was mistaken; you haven’t taken notice of my life, and you don’t notice anyone’s life, anyone’s grief. You are no Christian, and without that there is little value in all your talents. Farewell.” He added a postscript: “I wrote this a while ago, and now with a few hours left alive I have lost my pride and approach you asking for a favor: don’t forsake my Lisa [his younger sister]. Visit her, if only occasionally, bring her a book, and help preserve God in her.” Maklakov observes that she herself preserved God in herself and became a scientist, like her brother.57
At the end of Maklakov’s time in the history faculty, he accepted the invitation of a relative—the brother-in-law of his stepmother, an artillery general—to do his military service in Rostov. The venture was preceded by yet another Maklakovian scrape, this time for acting as the party responsible for a student party that he didn’t attend but that got out of hand. He was banned from Moscow for three years after his military service—a ban that was soon dissolved. The military service was of a special type reserved for educated persons and known by the extraordinary term volnoopre-deliaiushchiisia. The service proved extremely easy, as his relative was the principal person in town, and he had loads of free time and could live in an apartment rather than in the barracks.58
But on May 4, 1895, his father died of endocarditis, a then incurable disease leading to inflammation of the brain and aphasia, at the young age of 57. Maklakov said it was the end of his “spoiled life.” He had basically lived his whole life in a state apartment, and now he and the remaining members of his family had to clear out. His military unit was moved to Moscow, the ban on his living there was accordingly dissolved, and the military required no more of him. He resolved to do something with himself—to change his life and turn to the bar.59
He and a brother and sister took an apartment together, and he arranged to prepare for the law faculty exams in a year. Because of the coronation ceremonies for Nicholas II, the exam date was moved up to March 1896, and the year that he could normally have counted on shrank to nine months. Though helped by such law as he had learned in historical studies, he was still compressing into nine months what would normally have taken four years to complete. He spoke of it later as “the great sporting achievement of his life.” Although he occasionally took time off for skating at Patriarch’s Ponds, he put a sign over the door to his room—“Guests should please stay no longer than two minutes.” He was greatly helped, he reported, by a professor who secured for him a copy of the lectures of another professor, V. M. Khvostov, who had explicitly refused to be of any help to him at all. In the end he added a second degree to his earlier degree in history, both “excellent.”60
MAKLAKOV’S DECADE as a trial lawyer developed his analytical and rhetorical skills, exposed him to facets of Russian life rarely brought home to a Russian intellectual, and gave him the opportunity to hone his powers of persuasion on countless juries of ordinary Russians. The simplest way to describe this period and highlight the features of Maklakov’s character that it reveals is through a series of vignettes and anecdotes. I postpone to later chapters discussion of his two most famous trials, which occurred after he had turned almost entirely to politics. One was the Vyborg Manifesto trial, where Kadet Duma members were charged with distribution of offensive material in a call for civil resistance to the tsar’s proroguing of the First Duma in July 1906 (see chapter 6). The other was the defense of Menahem Beilis, whose prosecution arose entirely out of Beilis’s being Jewish (see chapter 9).
In principle a Russian could become a full-fledged lawyer—could move from “assistant” to “sworn attorney” (from pomoshchnik to prisiazhnyi poverennyi)—only after serving a five-year apprenticeship. Happily the apprenticeship rules allowed an apprentice to engage in independent representation of a client without reaching the position of sworn attorney. For the many talented Jews hoping to become lawyers, the rules had a more serious impact, often preventing them from even securing status as an apprentice. If they overcame that hurdle, however, the barriers to their becoming sworn attorneys were of largely symbolic effect—the regime’s way of expressing its attitude toward Jews.1 Apart from these pointless obstructions, the apprentice rules did little to achieve their nominal training goals; in the words of one observer of patrons and their apprentices, “the first did not supervise, the second did not help.”2
Maklakov’s apprenticeship was especially odd. In one sense, he had two apprenticeships; in another sense, none. A friend of his father, the very distinguished lawyer Fyodor Plevako, asked him to apprentice with him and even seemed to assume he would do so. But Maklakov declined because he thought that Plevako, awash in clients, had accumulated so many assistants that they included quite a few of “deservedly questionable reputation.” Consultation with his mentor L. V. Liubenkov, an elderly justice of the peace, confirmed his intuition and added an additional reason for avoidance. In choosing a patron, Liubenkov advised him, “Don’t go with a famous one; there you won’t learn anything. Don’t go with an unknown; there you won’t find enough work. Go with one who isn’t famous, but soon will be.” Liubenkov believed Alexander Robertovich Lednitskii met that standard, and Maklakov signed on with him. Events, in fact, made that apprenticeship a dead letter, but the two became good friends. When Maklakov set off from Russia for Paris in October 1917 to take up his post as ambassador, the Provisional Government’s wartime security measures kept his travel information largely secret; among those in the know, only Lednitskii came to see him off at the Finland Station.3
Though Maklakov turned up at Lednitskii’s at the appointed time to start his apprenticeship, he never worked with him. Because of
