on the opposite side, and a share of error on his own.”3
Maklakov deviated from Kadet and Octobrist orthodoxy on several key issues. The Kadets were firmly committed to a drastic agrarian policy: the state should take the land of non-peasant landowners, giving some compensation but not market value, and should transfer it to the peasants. But the peasant recipients themselves would not get full title—only a temporary right to use the land, subject evidently to endless further bureaucratic redistribution (a point the Kadets soft-pedaled in their quest for peasant votes).4 Someone who favored serious protection for private property, though recognizing limits on that protection, could not be fully at home among the Kadets. But the Octobrists generally opposed equal treatment for Jews, Poles, and Finns and staunchly resisted anything like autonomy for Poles and Finns. This isn’t to say that the Kadets were utterly indifferent to property rights or that the Octobrists were anti-Semites and extreme nationalists to a man. But anyone who favored the rule of law and private property rights and an end to state discrimination against Jews and Russia’s “national minorities” was bound to be a bit uncomfortable in either party. Maklakov cast his lot with the Kadets, but the relationship was always a somewhat awkward marriage of convenience.
Maklakov brought to that marriage above all his skills as a brilliant and persuasive advocate, referred to in virtually every appraisal of him by his contemporaries. He had mobilized these skills for the first time in a controversy at Moscow University. A student chorus and orchestra had traditionally given a concert for the benefit of impoverished fellow students, but the famine of 1891 led to a proposal that the concert proceeds should go instead to famine relief. The issue was to be decided at a public meeting of the students, and those planning to speak for or against the change lined up on opposite sides of the auditorium. After Maklakov spoke in favor of famine relief, the line on the opposing side melted away, and the issue was resolved by default to his position.5
Maklakov used his advocacy on behalf of the Kadet party, both on the stump and in Russia’s parliament, the Duma. At least he did so for goals with which he was in genuine agreement, such as judicial independence, limits on government arbitrariness, dispensing with restrictions on Jews and religious minorities, and constitutional treatment of national minorities. On issues where he could not embrace Kadet views, such as their confiscatory solution to Russia’s agrarian problems, he generally remained silent.
Maklakov, in turn, enjoyed a position of influence in the party, being a member of its central committee from its founding until long after 1917. And he had the satisfaction of playing a pivotal role in mobilizing support for the party’s electoral and (occasional) legislative wins. Assuming that the Kadets comprised, from his perspective, the least bad of the parties in existence, they gave him a political home without his having to try his luck at founding a new party—a course he contemplated but rejected.
Maklakov liked to quote Antoine Pierre Berryer’s remark, “The only way to avert a revolution is to make one.” Probably most Russian liberals agreed with the general idea, with everyone understanding that the idea was to obviate a revolution by means of drastic reform. But what kind of reform? Maklakov gave no explicit answer. But his work as a member of the Second, Third, and Fourth Dumas (from 1907 to the February Revolution in 1917) provides one indirectly. He seems to have believed that Russia could curtail government arbitrariness and supplant it with something resembling a Western emphasis on the rule of law. This vision permeated his public activities and writings. Even when advocating reforms that could be advanced on many grounds, he always highlighted the rule-of-law benefits.
As the rule of law was Maklakov’s foremost reform goal, his greatest concern in strategy echoed Miliukov’s phrase “the need to see possible merits in opponents’ views.” Especially in his historical accounts, he time and again expressed the belief that Russia’s tragedy lay in a kind of twin blindness—a failure on each side to welcome, to use, and to benefit from the moderates on the other side. The regime and the opposition were each internally divided. Despite its autocratic character, the regime contained liberal elements interested in reaching out to the liberal opposition; the opposition, despite containing a powerful, and in many instances ruthless, revolutionary movement, also contained moderates who favored a gradualist path toward constitutional monarchy or at least some variety of liberal democracy. But the regime was reluctant to extend a hand to the liberals (confusing them with the regime’s true enemies, the revolutionaries), and the liberals typically failed to grasp the hand occasionally extended (confusing the regime with the far right and discounting the far left’s threat to liberalism).6
Maklakov’s relationship to his brother Nikolai, also deeply involved in pre-revolutionary Russian politics, adds a special pi quancy to his story. Representing almost opposite poles in the political spectrum, the two weave in and out of each other’s lives. A biographer sketching a person’s ancestry, upbringing, and schooling tends to rely on at least an implicit suggestion that these may partly account for the shape of his career and character. This biography will be no exception. But as to any causal link, the suggestion is muted.
Maklakov’s parents had seven children who survived infancy. At a relatively early stage Vasily appears to have been at odds with his younger brother Nikolai, to the point that in October 1895, when Vasily was only 26 years old and Nikolai only 24, Vasily expressed a wish that there be no further correspondence between them.7 Later, Nikolai seems not to have been so hostile—in a conversation about Kadets with a government colleague in 1913, Nikolai said in passing that he had a brother who was a Kadet and “he has a lot of good qualities.”8 Whatever the exact cause of the rupture, politics seems likely to have played a role. While Vasily was inveighing against the lawlessness of the ministry of internal affairs, Nikolai was an integral part of that ministry—indeed, he was the minister for two and a half years, from December 1912 to June 1915.9 While Vasily was defending Menahem Mendel Beilis against trumped-up charges of murdering a 13-year-old boy in order to extract blood for mysterious Jewish rituals, Nikolai was helping to concoct the charges and orchestrate the prosecution. Nicholas II, whom we don’t think of as a punster, was sufficiently struck to make a pun out of the brothers’ initials, NAM (Nikolai Alekseevich Maklakov) and VAM (Vasily Alekseevich Maklakov). These are Russian pronouns, and Nicholas would commonly say (in a liberal translation), “We have two Maklakovs, one NAM (ours), one VAM (theirs).”10 Actually, if he’d listened to VAM, he might have spared himself and, far more important, Russia endless grief.
It is a troubling clue to early twentieth-century Russian politics that Lenin declared, in a passage quoted in the entry on Vasily Maklakov in the first edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, “The difference between any Maklakov and the Octobrists is completely illusory.”11 Given the differences, Lenin’s lumping the brothers together, and both of them with the Octobrists, seems a triumph of venom over reality.
The rule of law has many definitions—as many, it’s been said, as there have been people writing about the subject, reflecting an inescapable amorphousness in the concept. But certainly for Maklakov, as probably for most advocates of the rule of law, the central feature was the subordination of the executive to law, sharply limiting its possible arbitrariness. These limits require, for openers, judicial independence, clear laws rather than ones whose vagueness invites arbitrary and biased application, and remedies that give relief to the victims of government arbitrariness and disincentives to officials tempted to embark on lawless behavior.
These limits on government all relate directly to formal rules and structure. But these alone cannot assure the rule of law. Parchment tenure provisions can buttress courts’ independence but cannot, alone, enable them to constrain a willful executive. As Alexander Hamilton argued, courts have “no influence over either the sword or the purse,”12 and in a state where the executive’s power is little tempered by an independent legislature, free press, or civil society, courts are unlikely to pose a serious constraint on executive authority.13
