you suddenly felt uneasiness; isn’t that natural? . . . And we both tried to find the right mood. But the question remains a question. Are conditions responsible for the fact that this interest always remains intellectual? . . . all the same, I’ve a right to have a really good relationship with you. I give you what is due and I know your value. Today I even sketched your silhouette in my notebooks. But, you know, there is something unclear, not individual about you—your relationships with women. To characterize you—one needs to find other strings to [the structure of] your soul. You aren’t one of those who would be characterized by your love life. And that’s especially curious in you, in whose life so many kinds of women have always been intertwined. But do you really distinguish between them? . . .
Do you ever hear the effect you have on a woman’s soul? You simply have no ear for that. In this we are not alike. I, unfortunately, hear very well what develops in my partner’s soul, and it horribly complicates relationships. But there is another mark that brings us together [she never seems to say what this is]; but you do not love that, her individuality, nor her love for you, but rather your own experience. You forget the name, face, the specialness of the woman, however fascinating she may have been, but you never forget if you yourself went through something sharp, special. You know this. But what must exasperate them, your future loved ones, is your absolute inability to reflect the image of the loved one. Especially for women who are not too gray, they much more than men love to have a mirror in the face of their partner, in which they can be loved. But you, among the very rarest varieties distinguish only “gender” and “species,” like a naturalist. Those poor women! A question interests me: how is it then that you captivate them?48
Kollontai’s questions, of course, remain unanswered, as do our own more prosaic or bourgeois questions about his failure to find—perhaps ever to seek—what he called the “crown” of worldly blessings, a happy family life.
Into Politics—and Early Signs of Deviance from Party Dogma
AN OFFICIAL INVESTIGATION into the needs of agriculture elevated Maklakov from a distinguished young lawyer to something of a public figure. Russia’s finance minister, Count Sergei Witte, in 1902 urged Tsar Nicholas II to order an inquiry into agrarian matters through a Special Conference, headed by Witte. The conference, in turn, created committees of inquiry at the province and district (uezd) levels of government. One such committee was organized for Zvenigorod, where Maklakov owned land for hunting and fishing.
Maklakov found the committee’s discussion dispiriting. Count P. S. Sheremetyev, the chairman, quite rightly tried to give preference to peasant participants, but they tended to raise very narrow, specific complaints that could not readily be reframed as ideas for remedial legislation. Even when peasants got the idea that the committee was interested in identifying general problems, they gave up easily when they were told that the committee had no authority to adopt solutions—“There’s nothing we can do.” Maklakov did not think the peasant committee members were stupid; rather he thought that they lacked experience in the sort of reasoning required to analyze and address social and political problems. As to offerings from the intelligentsia, he found that, although they often spotted concrete questions and fundamental evils, they offered no solutions.1
Though by his account he had generally viewed agrarian problems with the “indifferent eyes of the city dweller,” Maklakov believed that his rule-of-law ideals might well offer solutions. After seeking the blessing of a mentor, L. V. Liubenkov, he prepared a brief report, which he later disparaged as “rather elementary.” But it drew from a basic premise that agriculture is a form of industry, so that its flourishing depended on social characteristics similar to those required for other industries, primarily freedom of initiative and security of rights. His eight-page memo not only offered a devastating critique of government policy in the countryside, at least as it worked in practice, but also developed the themes that preoccupied him in the Duma: the arbitrariness of government behavior; the absence of impartial, law-governed courts that might protect the peasants; and the solidarity with which officials backed up their subordinates’ abuses. He pointed specifically to the “land captains,” a special type of official created in 1889 that wielded both executive and judicial powers and whose arbitrary behavior even included interference in peasant efforts to vote in zemstvo elections. He deplored the government’s failure to encourage (indeed, its active frustration of) private initiative and the prevailing “police point of view.” All this, he thought, led not only to distrust of government but also to skepticism of the very idea of law. And he assailed the separation of peasants into a separate estate.2
The memo generated controversy. Many members of the local committee regarded it as not germane to the needs of agriculture. When Maklakov was addressing the issue of government responsibility for lawlessness, one of the land captains on the committee said, “Now seriously, V.A., what relation does this have to agriculture?” But then a peasant with a peasant coat (armiak) and a long beard, who had never taken part in the discussions, unexpectedly stood, turned to the chairman, and said, “Your honor, this [referring to Maklakov’s depiction of pervasive government arbitrariness] is the most important thing.”
Maklakov’s theses passed the committee unanimously. Sheremetyev wanted to publish a book of the reports, but the provincial governor would allow it only if Maklakov’s paper were excluded. Sheremetyev refused to submit unless Maklakov agreed to the omission. The matter was ultimately settled by publishing only Maklakov’s “theses” (which he had articulated carefully as argument headings) and the comments of others, excluding Maklakov’s development of his theses. V. M. Gessen, later a fellow Duma deputy, asked him for the report, and in a book on the work of the Special Conference he dedicated more attention to Maklakov’s theses “than they deserved,” as Maklakov wrote in his memoirs. But the report and the rather enigmatic comments on it stirred up the educated public’s curiosity and attention.3
The paper’s moderation—in contrast to the usually extreme expressions of members of the Liberation Movement—found support. In his memoirs Maklakov noted sardonically that “even” his brother Nikolai (then a tsarist official in Tambov) wrote to him expressing satisfaction with the memo. “In those days it didn’t take much to become a hero of society.”4
As a direct result, he was invited to join Beseda (meaning “Symposium”), a tiny “semi-conspiratorial” organization whose members were important players in the Liberation Movement and, later, in the nonrevolutionary political parties competing for power in the legislative elections made possible by the October Manifesto. Its membership was limited to people engaged in “practical work,” meaning that they held elective office in Russia’s embryonic system of local self-government—a duma in the city or a zemstvo in the countryside. The criterion was a natural one, as Beseda had been formed in response to a 1903 memorandum by Count Witte that had attacked the compatibility of zemstvo self-government with autocracy and, at least implicitly, indicated that, of the two, it was zemstvo self-government that ought to go. Beseda was created precisely to oppose that idea. Maklakov held no elective office, but Beseda made a special place for him as “secretary.”5
Viewpoints in Beseda represented a broad range of reformist but nonrevolutionary opinion. Liberal constitutionalists favored a representative legislative body. The Slavophiles, who believed Russia could be better reformed by restoring healthy Russian practices than by adopting Western ones, split into at least two camps. Liberal Slavophiles favored reforms altering the structure of government but falling considerably short of an elected legislature; conservative ones favored policy reforms,
