is quite dependent on the “correlation of forces,” both material and intellectual. Unless key segments of society respect the concept of law, and the laws at least broadly reflect those segments’ interests, rulings applying the law are unlikely to command adherence. Getting to such laws of course requires compromise.
Maklakov understood this dynamic. In advocating advances in the rule of law, he regularly tried to build intellectual and social foundations for a law-based state. An example is his work shepherding a bill for equalization of peasant rights through the Duma in June 1916. An imperial decree issued in October 1906 had taken serious but incomplete steps toward such an equalization, and Maklakov’s bill had limited functions—turning the 1906 decree into a regular law and expanding it at the margins. But a persistent undercurrent of all issues relating to peasants was their widespread demand for the land of non-peasant landowners. In an effort to make the landowners see the benefits of admitting peasants to others’ ordinary civic rights, Maklakov argued that so long as peasants were not admitted to full legal rights, they were likely to persist in demanding others’ land.14
Similarly, arguing for repeal of the Pale of Settlement that kept Jews almost entirely excluded from much of Russia, he noted that the government had put itself in a preposterous bind, using incoherent and exception-filled rules to balance the anti-Semitic purpose with some opportunity for the rest of the country to benefit from the Jewish community’s skills. He argued that because no civilized state could enforce the rules as written, they were an open invitation to bribery and corruption.15 Maklakov’s struggles for legislation were always grounded in a sense of how laws might fit—and reflect and nurture—citizens’ consciousness.
Though Maklakov was a vocal and persistent avatar of the rule of law, his record was not unblemished. At the invitation of Prince Felix Yusupov, he played a role in the December 1916 plot to assassinate the shadowy religious figure Grigorii Rasputin. Though Maklakov’s role started with advising the conspirators against the project altogether and then against particularly risky approaches, he allowed himself to be sucked in to the point where, as he later acknowledged, he could have been found guilty as an accessory. Why would he do such a thing? Perhaps the sort of civic zeal that moved the most honorable of Caesar’s assassins? Perhaps a love of adventure, a raffish streak? After discussion of the issue in chapter 16, the reader will be able to speculate with more nuance.
Maklakov’s efforts failed. But the failure is hardly shocking in view of the obstacles facing the rule of law in early twentieth-century Russia. The Romanov dynasty had ruled autocratically since 1613. It had occasionally assembled a zemski sobor, a gathering of politically weighty citizens loosely comparable to the Estates-General of pre-revolutionary France. These gatherings normally rubberstamped decisions already taken, but they occasionally expressed an independent viewpoint. The last summons of a zemski sobor had occurred in 1684, to ratify a treaty with Poland. So politically active figures in the Russia of 1905 had had little experience in the arts of compromise needed to carry out the October Manifesto’s experiment in self-government.
Nicholas II himself was by personality and character unsuited to the task of presiding over a transition to the rule of law. Though delegating much responsibility to his ministers, he nonetheless took many key decisions himself. His loyalty to Russia and general decency are not—or should not—be in question. But what of his capacity? His tutor, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, wrote that Nicholas had a good brain and analytical skills, but that he “only grasps the significance of a fact in isolation without its relationship to other facts, events, currents and phenomena.”16 If that deficiency is consistent with a good brain and analytical skills, one shudders to contemplate a mediocre brain. In any event, Pobedonostsev’s comment seems wholly consistent with Nicholas’s almost complete incapacity to address institutional issues, his largely mistaken confidence in his personal relationship with the ordinary Russian, and his refusal to talk an issue through with advisers. To the end he remained blind to the necessities of prioritization, of using a bureaucracy to sift through issues, and of delegating real authority to a person capable—unlike himself—of wielding it systematically and coherently.17
Despite his issuing the October Manifesto, Nicholas generally resisted genuine reform. In January 1895, while the public still entertained an initial glow of hope for his new reign, some rather conservative landowners active in local self-government had, very deferentially, suggested that he create a formal means for the public to communicate its views to the government. He dismissed their views as “senseless dreams.” He issued the October Manifesto ten years later not because he had recanted his senseless-dreams epithet, or because he believed that Russia and the monarchy would benefit from institutional reforms, but because he saw the manifesto as the only way to defeat the revolution then in progress. To be sure, the regime contained officials dedicated to reform—without them the October Manifesto could not have been issued at all. But the tsar himself and the conservative rural landowners who were his main base of support saw no affirmative good in the institutions launched by the manifesto.
In recognizing Maklakov’s position at the center of the political center, we’ve already seen the wide divergence between Kadets and Octobrists. But the members of those parties were the relative moderates. On their left stood self-proclaimed revolutionaries who boycotted the first set of legislative elections, and some of whom favored or practiced terror. On the moderates’ right were fans of absolute monarchy, overlapping heavily with ardent anti-Semites, ready and often able to launch pogroms. Both extremes were unlikely to help develop the rule of law.
Nor was the mindset of the population hospitable to rule of law values. The peasants, the vast majority of the population, held virtually no formal rights but were subject to an array of obligations, including a duty, like the old French corvée, to perform the scut work needed to provide local services, such as road maintenance. Instead of rights, they had a vaguely conceived expectation that the state would somehow provide enough land for them to scratch out a living. People with such an expectation could hardly look favorably on the legal property rights of “landowners”—those from whom additional land might be drawn. (Historians use the term landowners only for non-peasant landowners; though peasants held about three times as much land as did the “landowners,”18 their rights in most of that were too squishy to be called property rights.) With peasants’ rights so limited, it’s natural that their maxims relating to the law were generally negative, as, for example, “If only all laws disappeared, then people would live justly.”19
Indeed, property rights themselves enjoyed little respect. In the West property rights could be seen as a source of independence and thus of a capacity to resist overbearing monarchs and the state itself. In Russia, by contrast, they were associated with the claims and interests of landowners, who had for centuries been dependent on the monarch to keep their serfs under control. There, property rights had no such luster as in the West.20
But the peasants had no monopoly on hostility to others’ rights. One of Maklakov’s sparring partners in the Duma, an arch-reactionary whom we’ll encounter quite often, Nikolai Evgenevich Markov (known as Markov II), told Maklakov that “the gentry were enthusiastic about the nationalization of factories while resisting compulsory alienation of lands for the peasants. The industrialists had no objection to taking the gentry’s land, and the peasants of course wanted it.” Markov went so far as to tell Maklakov in the spring of 1907 that he anticipated revolution with pleasure, because it, in his opinion, would destroy what was evil in Russia—the bourgeoisie and capital. Another conservative contemporary, General Alexander Kireev, regarded Russians as prone to lurching from one extreme to another. Only “culture,” which he thought Russians lacked, “enabled people to see two sides of an issue and respect alternative points of view.”21
These attitudes seem intertwined with the weakness of Russia’s market economy. Markets rely on the rule of law: without some protection of contract and property rights from government and other
