as part of a fateful move by the liberation movement toward alliance with the revolutionaries, an “anti-state” movement—meaning a movement that saw no value in government institutions designed, however imperfectly, for the resolution and compromise of conflicting interests. He calls this anti-state element the “Acheron,” invoking Juno’s declaration in the Aeneid,
flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo
(If I cannot deflect the will of Heaven, I shall move Hell.)
While the defense lawyers’ new tactic might isolate the autocracy, it would do so at a cost, creating a liberalism of a new type, one that “after victory could not manage the state.”21 By scorning state procedures for justly resolving cases, the lawyers were undermining the tools needed for a liberal state and denigrating the sort of self-discipline and realism needed to shift the Russian state from autocracy to constitutionalism.
For virtually all the clients discussed above, Maklakov plainly worked without compensation. To support his fairly comfortable lifestyle—hunting and fishing in Zvenigorod and vacations in France, for example—he clearly needed paying clients. He appears to have had them in abundance. He had a preference for criminal over civil cases because, he said, he didn’t like to work through the sort of large organized apparatus needed for full-scale participation in civil litigation. Rather, he operated as a “strolling player.” Thus he liked to participate in such cases only to address some basic issue of principle or to speak in court. His records show involvement in major libel cases involving newspapers and in a large group of high-stakes commercial cases involving major Russian enterprises.22
Maklakov found setting fees a troubling activity. It embarrassed him to recall from childhood how little his father—a distinguished doctor and professor—had been paid compared to what he earned as a young and inexperienced lawyer. In civil cases fees were set by law and custom, and they varied with the amount at stake. Not so for criminal cases, and there the comparison with his father made him propose rather low fees. This led to some curiosities. In one case at an early stage of his career, he suggested 500 rubles, which he thought was suitable; the potential client said he needed to think about it. Maklakov assumed the client thought it too high. Then he learned that the client had hired someone else for 5,000 rubles; he evidently took Maklakov’s proposal as a signal that he was a lawyer of low quality. Occasionally fellow lawyers protested that he was undercutting them by applying what they saw as his unsuitable comparison with his father. He sometimes tried asking the client to name a fee, but this too presented problems. If it was too low, Maklakov would just decline, as he didn’t like to bargain, but that would irritate the potential client.23
In one case—one that his memoirs don’t mention—his fee elicited public criticism. In 1912 he defended one G. E. Tagiev, an entrepreneur in Baku involved in oil, textiles, and fish, who was accused of mistreating an employee. An article by Trotsky made a snide suggestion that the case showed that Maklakov’s integrity was for sale, and the editors of Trotsky’s collected works say that the fee took a toll on his reputation.24 Perhaps not a heavy toll, as he was soon reelected to the Duma (the Fourth) with a still higher majority than in his election to the Third.25
Maklakov plainly earned a good living, as shown by his frequent vacations in France. But at least in some respects he exercised considerable thrift, perhaps recognizing that the excess of his earnings over those of his intelligent and hardworking father was partly due to pure luck. We learn that later, in Paris, he always rode the subway second class; he explained it to a friend as part of a desire to avoid arrangements in his private life that might foster “closed compartments and categories in society which would forever separate one man from another.”26
As we saw, Maklakov’s association with Plevako launched his career, and the two remained close, very often serving together as joint defense counsel. (In Russia, contrary to British practice, private lawyers did not serve as prosecutors, so there seems never to have been a case where Plevako and Maklakov opposed each other.27) While he had good reasons for not apprenticing with Plevako, he regarded him as “the first lawyer in Russia” and noted that his name had become in popular speech a generic word for a master of eloquence and law, as in, “Find another plevako.”28 As both were famous orators of the era, the St. Petersburg Society of Lovers of the Oratorical Arts naturally sought out Maklakov to speak at a gathering in honor of Plevako after his death in 1908.
Maklakov speaks with some awe of Plevako’s “ability to fluently find the necessary words and form them into correct and flowing phrases.” “He never had to search for words or think over phrases. The words in an obedient crowd poured into perfect sentences, perfectly expressed thoughts.” In one case a prosecutor in summation made a stupid statement, and Plevako wrote on his scratch pad the single word “Fireworks.” When Plevako reached the issue in his response, he addressed it with a true fireworks of thoughts and words, including “quotes from the Gospel, reliance on statutes, examples from the West, a summons to the memory of Alexander II.”
Plevako prepared drafts ranging from a complete speech to notes of a few words, but wherever his preparation fell on that spectrum, his final words bore only a slight relation to what he had written. Often the whole structure of the speech changed. He might use a successful expression or a pointed phrase from the preparations, but those were the exceptions, which only underscored the general rule.
After a case on which they had cooperated, Plevako was preparing an appellate brief, and Maklakov asked him to send him drafts. He did so—a whole slew of drafts (five or six) successively typed out by Plevako on his Remington. All were without strikeovers or revisions, yet all were quite different and had plainly been started afresh. When Maklakov spoke to him about it, Plevako said it was always easier for him to start from the beginning. He acted with words, says Maklakov, “the way a rich man might casually throw money to the wind.”
As Plevako had no need for advance preparation to find the necessary words, what purpose did his notes serve? Only, says Maklakov, to assure himself that he had an abundance of material. As a result, if a new topic struck him during a speech, he could leave his plan without fear or regret.
When Plevako lapsed from spontaneity his oratory paid a price. Maklakov cites his summation in M. A. Stakhovich’s suit against Prince Meshcherskii, a high-profile, politically sensitive libel case on which the two cooperated. Evidently nervous about the political implications, Plevako hewed fairly closely to his text, and in Maklakov’s view the speech suffered from length and ornateness, drawbacks in Plevako’s writing. Though very good, it fell short of his usual work. In another situation, Plevako sent a reporter a segment of a speech that had been written (or at least polished) after the speech was delivered; Maklakov thought it “a cold-blooded creation of the office, which lay like a pale patch on the brilliant background of improvisation.”29
Maklakov seems never to have described his own methods. Apart from his awe of Plevako’s spontaneity, there are other clues to Maklakov’s approach—a preference for knowing in advance fairly exactly what he would say. His friend and fellow Kadet deputy in the Duma, Mikhail Chelnokov, told a mutual friend that on the eve of his speeches Maklakov would often go to him and deliver the next day’s speech with the same voice and urgency as he would later use from the Duma tribune.30 This suggests preparation down to the finest detail. Georgii Adamovich, who was Maklakov’s first Russian biographer and had known him and many of his contemporaries, reports that listeners were divided, some believing Maklakov memorized every word and every detail, such as pauses for thought, and others believing that he could deliver a lengthy speech with advance preparation of only its general content.31 Whatever the method (likely a combination of the two), the effect was one of conversational spontaneity. Vaclav Lednitskii, son of the Lednitskii for whom Maklakov almost apprenticed, affirms that Maklakov could write and deliver a speech so that it sounded like the spoken, rather than the written, word.32
In
