he reports, Maklakov used to wear a Russian cap, which, with his beard, gave him the appearance of a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century Russian—hardly the convention for an up-and-coming member of the bar in the twentieth century. When he came to Paris in 1917 as ambassador-designate of the Russian Provisional Government, he replaced the cap with a beret.33
Maklakov’s memorial address on Plevako ranged far beyond his oratory. Painting a picture of a fellow lawyer, a deeply patriotic Russian, a public figure, and a friend, the talk also portrays the portraitist himself and his time. As a foil for describing Plevako, Maklakov uses Vekhi (Landmarks, or Signposts), a famous book published the same year as his address, which skewered (or sought to skewer) the Russian intelligentsia. Without endorsing the book’s accuracy, Maklakov notes a number of attributes that it ascribed to the intelligentsia, most notably irreligion and lack of national feeling. He argues that Plevako lay at the antipodes from Vekhi’s characterizations. Plevako was, in fact, highly religious and dedicated to the Orthodox Church, giving it large sums of money. But at the same time he was an ardent defender of the Old Believers in the face of their persecution by the church and the regime, and was reverent toward Tolstoy’s theological works. For him, defense of religious freedom did not grow out of indifference to religion. Maklakov suggests he had a loose affinity for Tolstoy’s view of the state: “By instinct [Plevako] was an anarchist, though intellectually he understood the need for the state.”34
Besides the implicit anarchism, Maklakov depicts Plevako’s ability to form a bond with the sinner, who, in his profession, was often the defendant. “He could penetrate the interest, the grief, the suffering of whoever he was defending. . . . He immediately saw what was best in a person, what to others might be invisible.” And more broadly, in terms echoing the “Grand Inquisitor” passage in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Maklakov writes, “There was nothing that could make him sacrifice a person: no belief in the saving character of any specific form of government, no devotion to doctrine, none of the intolerance arising out of such devotion.” Adamovich remarked that in Maklakov’s summation for Setkin, pleading that even a verdict of acquittal could not whitewash him, his spirit and tone were Plevako’s.35
In addressing Plevako’s sense of national feeling, Maklakov tells the story of a winter trip the two took to defend a case.
The harness came undone. I was angry not only that we were going to be forced to freeze in the field, but because all this happened close to the station, where there had been time to check how well the horse was harnessed. Plevako began to comically describe how the muzhik [peasant] got up in the morning, saw that the harness was bad, but hoped to get to the station; but when he got to the station he noticed that it nearly held, and hoped that he could make it to the farrier, and so forth. He preferred Russian thoughtlessness to American enterprise or German precision.36
While Maklakov may have felt more irritation than Plevako at the peasant’s haphazard ways, he clearly shared Plevako’s affection for the Russian people and their way of life. This was part of what it meant, for both of them, to love Russia.
In Plevako’s case, sympathy for casual peasant ways may have arisen partly from identification. “His vagueness was legendary.” Once, having asked people to his home, he found it necessary to change the time and place and then arranged meetings with them for another time, but in three different places. “At the named hour he was at still a fourth place. This sort of thing made him enemies, and led to unflattering legends, but only among those who didn’t understand him. Many could not, and paid for it [in loss of the rewards of his company].”37
Maklakov’s talk conjures up a Plevako who, far more than a brilliant lawyer, was a great soul.
You can teach yourself much—logic, and rhetoric and real eloquence. But it’s impossible to teach yourself such an understanding of life, such an attitude to people. To be an orator such as Plevako was, you need to be a person such as he was—not by talent, not by a gift of words, all that is secondary, but in his spiritual cast of mind, love of man, inability to indulge righteous or even justifiable hatred, in the ability to look at things not through the eyes of this world, which made him so unlike others.38
As the relationship with Plevako suggests, Maklakov was by no means a solitary lawyer. He became deeply involved in lawyers’ voluntary associations. During the reactionary reign of Alexander III, the government generally tried to limit the rights of lawyers’ assistants, but there had been a revival of the bar in the second half of the 1890s, when Maklakov was starting his career. Young lawyers started “wandering clubs,” so-called because their meetings migrated from one member’s apartment to another’s. They talked about mutual problems and current affairs, but they also arranged for free advice to workers and peasants. Maklakov saw the wandering clubs as “breathing life” into the bar, trying to turn it from a group simply enhancing the members’ professional skills and prosperity to one that served society.39
Among their activities were confronting and overcoming technical legal restrictions on service in the provinces by lawyers from the capital cities who had not advanced from “assistant” to “sworn attorney.” The young lawyers largely succeeded, aided by the cooperation of judges who responded conscientiously, even though the presence of better representation for defendants increased their work. These trials in the provinces (Maklakov uses the term uezd, or “district”) were not only helpful for the accused but “the most outstanding school” for the young lawyers. Defense was not a matter of rhetorical razzle-dazzle but was aimed at ordinary jurors; the jurors created a businesslike mood that the lawyers had to echo. Later, on the stump in Duma elections, he was impressed by the voters’ similar seriousness of purpose.40
Lawyers involved in defense of political cases formed an association, and Maklakov naturally played a leadership role. On November 20, 1904, the association called for a constitution for Russia, and, according to fellow lawyer Iosif Gessen, Maklakov was quite proud of the lawyers for doing so.41 But the association took a new turn as a result of the tsar’s decree of February 18, 1905, which invited Russians to express their concerns about the state and its direction. The Union of Liberation responded with efforts to encourage the creation of other “unions” revolving around particular professions or concerns: there were unions for “agronomists and statisticians,” for “pharmaceutical assistants,” for “equal rights for Jews,” and so on. Galai lists fourteen such unions, to which others were added. The association of lawyers providing defense in political trials now embraced the spirit of the Liberation Movement.42
It isn’t clear whether Maklakov was very active in the lawyers’ association after it was enveloped by the Liberation Movement’s unions. Certainly in retrospect, Maklakov criticized it as having only one activity—the adoption of political resolutions, specifically what he called the “cliché template.” The cliché consisted of a call for a constitution drafted by a constituent assembly, in turn to be chosen by “four-tailed suffrage” (“four-tailed” was the liberals’ phrase for a universal, direct, equal, and secret franchise). He argued that the resolutions didn’t arise from any professional skill or expertise, but only from the fact of the intelligentsia’s having settled on the package. The peasant’s union43 had joined the cliché template, though, as Maklakov joked, they really wanted the landowners’ land and regarded calling for a constituent assembly with four-tailed suffrage as “a cheap price to pay for land.” In later chapters I’ll consider his affirmative objections to the cry for a constituent assembly and the liberals’ favored franchise, but for now it’s enough to say that Maklakov saw the outburst of these preprogrammed platforms from synthetic organizations as a natural result of the autocracy’s having so long stifled genuine expression of opinion.
People close to the process knew that they represented only themselves. But the ease with which the inexperienced and disturbed society submitted to the intelligentsia’s propaganda, and accepted any position, justified this imposture. Where
