quotes Bismarck as saying that the essence of constitutionalism is compromise. Bismarck’s view has been seconded by a quite different political figure, Bill Clinton: “If you read the Constitution, it ought to be subtitled: ‘Let’s make a deal.’”39 Russian autocracy, of course, provided few chances for that experience—the zemstvo being the most notable exception. The October Manifesto offered such an opportunity, and, at least as a party, the Kadets turned their backs on it.
The next major step in the regime’s halting embrace of constitutionalism was its April 23, 1906, repromulgation of Russia’s Fundamental Laws, revised to reflect the commitments made in the October Manifesto. In the next chapter I’ll tackle the question of whether those laws moved Russia seriously toward the ideal of the rule of law. Before that, we should consider Maklakov’s involvement in an effort in Paris, just before the promulgation of the revised Fundamental Laws, to thwart the government’s effort to float a massive loan (2.25 billion francs) with the aid of the French and, to a lesser extent, the British, governments. Apart from its intrinsic interest, the episode is probably the strongest ground for an argument that Maklakov was just Monday-morning quarterbacking in his later writings accusing the Kadet leadership of radicalism and folly in 1905–1907.
Indeed, at first blush, his behavior sounds rather extreme: working abroad to defeat a key foreign policy initiative of one’s country. Perhaps, in fact, it was extreme. Under our Logan Act, adopted in 1799, it would be a crime for an American to carry on correspondence or conversations with a foreign government with the intent to “defeat measures of the United States.”40 Because Russia (so far as I know) had no equivalent of the Logan Act, the key issue was political and not legal: activities of this sort might tar the liberation movement as at least non-patriotic, perhaps worse. I will lay out the facts, primarily as presented by Maklakov himself in his 1936 memoir-history, Vlast i obshchestvennost (State and society). That account squares well with the published scholarly accounts; where they diverge substantively, the scholars offer no evidence supporting their contradiction of Maklakov.41
Maklakov had participated actively in the election for the First Duma, both campaigning for party candidates himself and, as head of the Kadet speakers’ bureau, guiding others. By April 1906 he felt entitled to some time off and, following his long-established predilection for vacations in France, headed to Paris. On the train he had the company of Paul Dolgorukov, who went on directly to the Riviera from Warsaw (and who, as we’ll see, turns up later in Paris and engages in anti-loan lobbying). One of the scholars of the subject speaks of Maklakov’s having got “the idea to go to Paris and join the protest against the loan,” but it seems safe to reject the insinuation that he went to Paris to participate in the protest, given the absence of any supporting evidence and Maklakov’s longtime practice of taking French vacations.42
Once in Paris, Maklakov met one or more of the friends whom he regularly saw there,43 learned that his old friend S. E. Kalmanovich was in town, and was brought by friends to an event in honor of Kalmanovich’s daughter’s wedding. People at the party were somewhat astonished to learn that liberals in Russia had not fully shared the Paris emigrant community’s concern that the imminent loan would strengthen the autocracy vis-à-vis the liberals. Maklakov’s friends brought him to meet Pierre Quillard, a French poet, an ardent Dreyfusard, a champion of oppressed nationalities, and a leading member of the Société des amis du peuple russe et des peuples annexés. Frenchmen of a liberal or socialist bent, with the Société in the lead, had already conducted a vigorous—but quite unsuccessful—public campaign against the possible loan. Quillard proposed that Maklakov prepare a memorandum against the loan for submission to French government officials. Good connections between members of the French government and Société figures such as Quillard and Anatole France ensured delivery of such a memo.44
Maklakov agreed, and a copy of the resulting memo, evidently later obtained from French foreign office files, was published in 1961.45 In a chapter of his 1936 memoirs-history, State and Society, addressing the loan, Maklakov acknowledges that he submitted such a memo but never quotes from it, presumably because he had neither a copy nor access to the foreign office files. His account of the memo is (naturally) shorter than the memo itself, but quite accurately reports its basic thesis, which was entirely political, not legal. It made no legal claim—such as the left had been circulating in France—that the loan would be unlawful without Duma approval. In State and Society he said that he then believed that until promulgation of the Fundamental Laws the tsar’s powers continued;46 the memo is in full accord. The memo argues instead that the loan would represent an intervention on the side of autocracy, relaxing its need to accommodate the burgeoning liberal democracy. Although one of the scholars writing about the anti-loan campaign says that “no reference to this memorandum has been found in Maklakov’s major works,” in fact State and Society refers to the memo and gives its gist.47
But in two respects Maklakov’s account of the memo might be said to shade the truth. First, without actually saying so, the memo rather subtly gives the impression that Maklakov speaks for the Kadet party. In a few places he uses the first person plural (nous or notre), saying, for example, that he’s going to discuss the reasons “why our party, in harmony with the great majority of the nation, consider the foreign loan proposed by our government as disastrous [funeste] for the interests of Russia and dangerous for those of France.”48 His later account doesn’t acknowledge that he had seemed to act as a representative of the party.
Second, though Maklakov’s memoirs-history made clear the basic claim that the loan would help the survival of an absolutist regime, it gave little clue of the memo’s scathing portrait of the autocracy:
The dilemma is clearly posed: the absolutist party must either yield to the national will, and abandon its dream of restoring autocracy, or it must immediately make a supreme effort to provoke a conflict and suppress the Duma. . . .
If it is the former, the current practices of the government will continue, that is, the dilapidation of the Treasury, the weakening of industry and of commerce for want of the necessary liberties, the massacre of Jews and of ethnic minorities, of liberals and intellectuals, the destruction of what remains of the universities and schools, the suppression of the few liberties conceded to the press, the total ruin of agriculture, the final exhaustion of the country’s last vibrant forces, the daily increasing disorganization of the army and the fleet, and finally permanent recourse to more and more onerous loans ending in the inevitable bankruptcy.49
Besides savaging the autocracy and drawing on French sympathies for representative government, liberty, and ethnic fairness, the memo targets concrete French interests: France’s desire for military advantage; firming up its entente with Russia; and its hopes of ever being repaid.
The memo also claims that a decree had “annihilated” the authority of the Duma by creating a higher legislative body, the State Council, in which half the seats were to be held by appointees of the government,50 and whose agreement would be necessary for most legislative action.
Although the memo might seem to track the most intransigent voices among the Kadets, it does acknowledge that the ministry had contained at least two liberals, M. M. Kutler and Vasily Timiriazev. But it nullifies whatever sympathy that might have won for the regime with the observation that they had been removed, which the memo ascribes to the influence of “a court camarilla” of grand dukes and others.51
The memo never had the slightest chance of affecting the loan. Although it was formally executed on April 22 (n.s.), the loan contract had been signed April 16,52 and the memo bears a legend at the top saying that it had been conveyed to the French foreign ministry on April 18. When Maklakov and two other Russians (Kalmanovich and Count Anatolii Nesselrode) met with Georges Clemenceau (then minister of the interior, but soon to start his first period as prime minister, from late 1906 to mid-1909), the minister made clear that the loan had been
