had emigrated. It seemed to him that this position showed how ill-prepared the party was for the practical work of governing in a constitutional structure.16
Maklakov’s two brief interventions capture his relation to the party. His legal and rhetorical skills made him useful, and his memoirs make clear that he found a deep satisfaction in political work on the party’s behalf. At the same time, he seems never to have been really content with the party’s overall direction. Paul Miliukov, in one of his works in exile, described Maklakov as always having been a Kadet “with special opinions,” a judgment Maklakov reports without dissent.17 Later, as a Kadet deputy in the Second, Third, and Fourth Dumas, Maklakov relished the independence that its Duma delegation gradually acquired vis-à-vis the party leaders; he seems never to have been content with the party’s general drift. Maklakov’s aversion to tight party allegiance seems to have been a bond with his friend Fyodor Plevako. The latter, elected to the Duma as an Octobrist, showed no devotion to (or really much interest in) the abstractions of the party program. At political meetings in the elections to the Third Duma, Plevako and Maklakov appeared as champions of their parties, but Plevako’s “tolerance and respect for opposing views disarmed opponents and angered friends and associates.”18 So, too, as we’ll see, for Maklakov.
On October 17, in the midst of the Kadets’ congress and rising unrest, Nicholas II confronted a choice between repression and retreat. He chose the latter, issuing the October Manifesto.
We impose upon the Government the obligation to carry out Our inflexible will:
(1) To grant the population the unshakable foundations of civic freedom based on the principles of real personal inviolability, freedom of conscience, speech, assembly, and union.
(2) Without halting the scheduled elections to the State Duma, to admit to participation in the Duma, as far as is possible in the short time remaining before its call, those classes of the population which at present are altogether deprived of the franchise, leaving the further development of the principle of universal suffrage to the new legislative order, and
(3) To establish it as an unbreakable rule that no law can become effective without the approval of the State Duma and that the elected representatives of the people should be guaranteed an opportunity for actual participation in the supervision of the legality of the actions of authorities appointed by Us.19
From the perspective of what became standard Kadet doctrine, the manifesto had serious weaknesses. First, the tsar expressed his “will . . . [t]o grant” the civil liberties named, but that was not the same as granting them. Second, the principle of “universal suffrage” didn’t live up to the egalitarian “four-tailed” suffrage (universal, direct, equal, and secret) that the Kadets demanded. (As the electoral law of December 11, 1905, would show, it was easy to combine nearly universal male suffrage [giving the vote to males over 24 years old, excepting students and military in active service] with a strong tilt toward the propertied classes. As a result of the mathematics of the indirect structure, in which curiae of landowners, peasants, town dwellers, and workers chose electors who then directly or indirectly chose Duma members, the vote of one landowner was worth the same as those of two town dwellers, of fifteen peasants, or of forty-five workers.)20 Third, the manifesto obviously did not call for a constituent assembly and thus kept the tsar very much in the picture for the ultimate crafting of any possible constitution.
But the manifesto stated a commitment to core principles of the rule of law. In the hands of a reasonable and independent interpreter, paragraph 1 had the potential of developing into a full-fledged bill of rights. Paragraph 2 meant that even if the votes of many citizens might be diluted, all or nearly all men would participate in the governmental process, thereby acquiring a say in legislation and experience in thinking about government and politics. Most important, paragraph 3 barred the tsar from changing any law without the consent of the (as yet uncreated) Duma, a wholly independent institution, and promised the “people’s representatives” a role in ensuring the legality of the laws’ administration. The manifesto thus would bar the executive, the tsar, from acting on the basis of his will alone, either by ignoring the law or by changing it unilaterally. At least as a promise, then, it brought the government under the law—the most vital but the most elusive component of the rule of law.
The Kadets who had gathered at the founding congress generally recognized the manifesto’s historic significance. As described by Alexander Kizevetter, a Kadet leader and historian, a man named Petrovskii rushed in from the editorial offices of Russkie Vedomosti (Russian news) and made his way to the podium. The presiding Kadet, Maxim Vinaver, interrupted the speaker and read out the manifesto. Writes Kizevetter, “The autocracy was over. Russia had become a constitutional monarchy. Citizen freedoms were proclaimed. Mitrofan Pavlovich Shchepkin, gray with age, trembling with emotion, said, ‘Now at last we are free.’” Kizevetter reported in his memoirs that no one could stay at home, but instead poured into the streets of Moscow, congratulating each other as if it were Easter.21
Maklakov seems to have shared the general delight among liberals. Certainly in his speeches in the Duma over the years from 1907 to 1917, he invoked the manifesto constantly, not merely as a legal standard by which to measure the government’s acts, but as an inspiration, as the founding of a new order, as a sacred text.
Miliukov, the party leader, shared none of this. He publicly responded, “Nothing has changed. The war continues.”22 When the Kadet party’s founding congress ended the next day, the party issued a statement (postanovlenie) that conveyed the same spirit without using Miliukov’s exact metaphor. Looking at the October Manifesto, the statement almost completely ignored the doughnut and focused relentlessly on the hole. Imagine if King John had preemptively issued rather than negotiated the Magna Carta, and the barons had responded by pointing out the gaps between it and a detailed constitution meeting all of their political dreams. The Kadet statement started by saying that the manifesto and Witte’s accompanying report gave “far from full recognition” to the basic principles of political freedom and the equal and universal electoral rights demanded by the Liberation Movement. The October Manifesto, in fact, did recognize basic principles of political freedom, even if they were not exactly the ones demanded by the Liberation Movement, and even if full elaboration was left to the future (as under the American Bill of Rights). After making the important point that the manifesto didn’t repeal the extraordinary security laws (which allowed officials of the ministry of internal affairs to exile people for up to five years without any recourse to judicial process), the statement went on to argue that for various reasons the Duma soon to be elected could not be recognized as a genuine popular representative assembly, so that (non sequitur alert!) the Kadet party’s goal must remain as before—a constituent assembly elected on the basis of four-tailed suffrage.23 In short, the statement reflected Miliukov’s insistence that society and the authorities remained at war. In a zemstvo congress about a month later, Miliukov offered a resolution recognizing the October Manifesto as a “precious achievement” of the Russian people. But his zemstvo congress audience represented a far more moderate body than the Kadet party; Miliukov was sugar-coating his views to enlist its support for the Kadet program.24
Soon afterward, Witte launched a set of negotiations aimed at forming a cabinet relatively acceptable to the nation. First he asked Dmitri Shipov, the leader of liberal Slavism, to call on him, and asked him to join the cabinet as state controller. Shipov declined the job offer, but proffered some advice. As Witte had clearly invited Shipov in order to learn a zemstvo viewpoint, Shipov advised him to turn to the zemstvo leadership, in the form of the Bureau of Zemstvo Congresses, and ask it to send him a delegation. Shipov expected that at the Bureau’s scheduled meeting on October 22 he would have a say in naming the delegates. But the process moved too swiftly. Witte sent the invitation to the Bureau by telegram, which (in Maklakov’s words) “whipped up” the Bureau’s self-confidence. Seeing the request as a sign of the government’s weakness and a capitulation, the Bureau began to act with great self-confidence.25
