Bureau, it formed a small committee that included, either as a member or at least an attendee, someone who wasn’t involved in zemstvo matters at all, Miliukov himself.26 Miliukov managed to arrange the selection of F. F. Kokoshkin as leader of the delegation, a choice that Miliukov himself recognized as signaling to Witte that the zemstvo bureau was not ready to compromise.27 The committee charged the delegation to tell Witte that the only solution to the present situation was to call a constituent assembly, to be chosen by a “four-tailed” franchise; and that a constitution “granted” by the tsar would be completely unsatisfactory. (This insistence on immediate democracy at the outset, including a democratic method of generating a constitution, seems based on Miliukov’s belief that a developed and organized democratic society “can be created only by an active political life,”28 that is, that the onset of democracy would itself be enough to generate the skills needed to make democracy functional, to enable it to survive amid countervailing forces such as reaction, populist demagoguery, and interest-group machinations.) Obviously Witte could not accept such terms.29 Witte soon thereafter invited Miliukov himself in for consultation, and, curiously, Miliukov’s direct advice to Witte was quite different from the standard Kadet notion that the only way forward was through a constituent assembly. Writing of it later, he explained that with Witte he conceived of himself as acting in a non-party capacity:
I came [Miliukov reported] not as representative of anyone but in my capacity as a private person, whose advice was sought by the highest representative of the authorities of the moment, when it was being decided what direction Russian history should take. And on the question then put to me by Witte, what should be done, I decided to answer according to my conscience and personal conviction, not binding myself to the generally approved political formulae of my intellectual fellow travelers. I wanted to take the discussion down from academic heights to the sphere of real life.30
Miliukov’s explanation of his answer does not really bridge the gap between his public position and his advice to Witte. If important decisions “for Russian history” were at stake (as they were), it would be startling to think that Witte would want anything other than Miliukov’s real views, or that he would prefer notions from the “academic heights” rather than ones from the real world. It seems a sad commentary on the politics of the Kadet party that there was such a gulf between its leader’s “conscience and personal conviction” and the “generally approved political formulae” that he and his “intellectual fellow travelers” had enthusiastically adopted.
The substance of Miliukov’s advice was no less otherworldly. He told Witte that, although he still thought that a constituent assembly was the ideal way to get to a constitution, it was unsuitable in the circumstances and that the tsar should just grant one. Yes, he acknowledged, society would complain (in part because Miliukov himself had been constantly insisting that only a constituent assembly would do), but in the end it would work.
Specifically, he proposed that Witte arrange translation of either the Belgian or the Bulgarian constitution (presumably chosen as reasonably liberal written constitutions, and, in the Bulgarian case, one that had survived since 1879 in a country with scant liberal tradition), get the tsar to sign it the next day (whichever constitution it happened to be), and publish it the following day. Miliukov’s constitutionalism seemed to be wrapped in a passion for labels, for form regardless of substance: when Witte refused to use the word “constitution” and explained that the tsar was against it, Miliukov, by his own account, broke off the discussion, telling Witte, “It is useless for us to continue our conversation.”31
Maklakov says, with some justice, that Witte must have taken the constitutional proposals as a joke. At stake was a new order for a huge country of different ethnicities, different “estates” (a historical legacy that Maklakov was determined to eradicate),32 and different levels of education. Its political relations were encrusted with complications that had accumulated over centuries. And Miliukov was saying that for this transition, it was enough to adopt the constitution of one of two very small countries, with apparent indifference as to which it should be.33 All told, he took a “flick-a-switch” view of how to transition to liberal democracy.
Maklakov’s critique of the Belgian/Bulgarian solution operates on two practical levels. The first is the matter of political power. The tsar had not been defeated. To be sure, his issuance of the October Manifesto had not delivered the hoped-for calm. Indeed, a major insurrection had arisen in Moscow right after its promulgation. But as suppression of the uprising in December was to show, the regime could protect itself. It was naïve and even arrogant to think that under those circumstances the tsar would accept the role of a figurehead in a purely parliamentary regime.
The other element of absurdity in the Belgian/Bulgarian option lay simply in the broader issues of social and political evolution. If a new regime in Russia was to live as a rule-of-law state, it could not instantly transform all the actors’ accustomed roles by fiat. Change to an alternative system of arbitrary rule would be simple enough. But in Maklakov’s view transformation to the rule of law was a different story: people’s old practices, expectations, and habits of mind inevitably shape their behavior to some degree, and Russia’s historic ones would not match the kind of full-blown democracy that Miliukov contemplated.
After the failure of negotiations between the Kadets and Witte, revolutionaries launched a general political strike in Moscow with the hope—which proved well-founded—that it would develop into an armed uprising.34 (Some school students were accused of having started the uprising. Maklakov defended them, and a fellow lawyer and observer wrote later that “never did Maklakov’s talent sparkle so brightly” as in the defense, laying bare the weak spots of the prosecution and leading to acquittal.35) In Maklakov’s view, any constitutional regime would have felt obliged to suppress it. Witte’s choices were whether to do so in alliance with liberal society or with the right. Even in an autocracy, a prime minister needs allies. Finding himself unequivocally rejected on the liberal side, Witte predictably turned to the right, unleashing Minister of the Interior Durnovo to repress the revolution.
Maklakov makes no bones about the savagery of this repression. He describes the use of artillery against neighborhoods, selective shootings of individuals on lists provided by the Okhrana (secret police), and the slaughter of students for no offense other than being a student at large on the streets of Moscow. He recounts one poignant case, in which a father kept his student son at home all day, but then ventured out into the streets with him at night, with the son wearing a coat that covered his student clothing. Police wrenched the son from the company of his father and hustled him off; the father saw him again only in a morgue.36
It is of course speculation that repression by a government at least loosely allied with the liberals would have been less savage. But Witte in his diary entries repeatedly laments his isolation at this period.37 It seems plausible that, if he could have pointed to some liberal support, he might have adopted, or persuaded the tsar to adopt, less ruthless methods of repression.
Instead the Kadets stood aloof, if anything signaling sympathy with the revolutionaries by organizing medical aid, never uttering a public word of criticism of the revolutionaries, and never expressing any recognition that government—any government—has some duty to prevent popular violence. In the central committee of the Kadet party Maklakov and N. N. Lvov favored Kadet condemnation of the uprising but didn’t prevail.38
The Kadet response to the October Manifesto and its aftermath was in Maklakov’s view a failure on many fronts. The most immediate effect of their refusal to work with Witte was the de facto rightist control over suppression of the Moscow uprising. More broadly, it strengthened the right and undermined moderates in the bureaucracy. It also meant, in Maklakov’s view, the abandonment of a key opportunity for the sort of activity required for constitutionalism. A leitmotiv of his writings is the idea that a workable rule-of-law state requires that citizens follow certain behavior patterns, developed and nurtured by experience.
