nurture the rule of law: people operating in markets learn to compromise, to work out mutually beneficial transactions that recognize others’ rights.
While not only industry but also markets had grown in Russia since the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, a good deal of this was hothouse development driven by government (most dramatically in the case of the railways). Russia seemed to want the brawn of Western development without accepting the brains—the West’s institutional infrastructure and mindset.22 Market-friendly behavior and attitudes seemed not to jibe with Russianness. Russia’s corporate founders and managers consisted disproportionately of tiny minorities, such as Jews and Russians of German ancestry. Even business leaders who were ethnically Russian and relatively independent of government, such as the Moscow merchants, were surprisingly devoted to the autocracy. And while Great Britain, France, and the states making up the United States had by the middle of the nineteenth century allowed individuals to enter business via corporations simply through filing routine papers, no such option ever existed in imperial Russia. There, corporations could be formed only at the discretion of officials, a rich opportunity for cronyism and bribery and a source of delay and expense.23
Government censorship, though disorganized and often ineffective,24 posed a threat. In Maklakov’s opinion it drove many reformist thinkers to avoid wrestling with structure or policy in Russia and instead to pen rather abstract comments on political issues in Western Europe. Until the October Manifesto they had little to gain by sober consideration of practical constitutional variations in the Russian context, especially as there had been no legislative body to take action. Maklakov quoted Bismarck’s remark that nothing corrupts a party so much as a long time out of power. Having little prospect of acquiring power, such a party is little inhibited from making extreme criticisms or frivolous promises. So, too, he argued, for Russian intellectuals.25
Even Russia’s literary elite had little regard for the rule of law. The most obvious example is Leo Tolstoy, a friend of Maklakov since the latter’s college days, who at least purported to condemn all state coercion equally and to regard qualitative distinctions between governments as pointless or even dangerous. To characterize one government as “better” than another would be to offer an implicit justification of the unjustifiable.26 Other Russian writers and intellectuals joined Tolstoy in measuring courts, lawyers, and the law itself against their ideas of perfect morality and perfect truth, rather than seeing them as a set of human institutions with some prospect of making the human institution of which they were a part—the state—less dangerous to morality and truth and more helpful to human flourishing. Thus Alexander II’s judicial reform of 1864, a radical step toward creation of an independent judiciary and private bar, earned him no credit among Russia’s foremost literary figures. Their disdain for the reform may account for some of the inroads into judicial independence that occurred after 1864.27
The weakness of civil society had implications for an aspect of the rule of law distinct from constraints on the executive, an aspect that Maklakov consistently pressed—achievement of the “order” in ordered liberty. Protection from executive arbitrariness is of limited value if, where government is inactive or ineffective, people lack the skills to work out their conflicts peaceably, through private negotiation or local political institutions, and have no ingrained resistance to rule by violence. The market’s embryonic character meant that capacity for private negotiation was underdeveloped; and the central government’s limits on the representativeness and authority of local government bodies (notably, the zemstvos), and its discretionary interference with their decisions, stunted their capacity. The fall of the tsarist regime in February 1917 and its replacement by a relatively inexperienced provisional government of contested legitimacy left a gap—to be filled, in many cases, with polemics, violence, and the threat of violence.
That said, the early years of the twentieth century saw rapid change in both the economy and attitudes. Elements of civil society—voluntary associations of every kind; a harassed but largely independent press; independent businesses and unions; groups who, though in competition, were able to negotiate their differences so long as the state kept its hands off—were beginning to thrive.28 Bit by bit Russians were acquiring the experience essential to liberal democracy.
In an environment so uninviting for the rule of law, the question is less why Maklakov failed to achieve his ultimate goals than how he was able to make any progress at all—and I’ll show that he did. The question on which he focused, how a liberal democracy can grow out of an autocracy, and the related question of nurturing the wellsprings of a productive economy where producers are motivated to create goods or services for voluntary purchase have been the subject of many recent books, such as North, Wallis, and Weingast’s Violence and Social Orders; Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order and Political Order and Political Decay; Acemoğlu and Robinson’s Why Nations Fail; Mokyr’s The Enlightened Economy; and McCloskey’s trilogy, The Bourgeois Virtues, Bourgeois Dignity, and Bourgeois Equality.29 This book is informed by their insights, but follows Tip O’Neill’s maxim that all politics is local. Russia before the revolution had much in common with all autocracies, but with a Russian flavor. My hope is that a look at one individual’s efforts—themselves informed by ideas at least overlapping with many current notions of evolution toward liberal democracy—can enrich our understanding of such evolution.
Although I read Maklakov’s story as shedding light on the process of reform toward the rule of law and constitutionalism more broadly, this book is not a handbook—it’s not a how-to-do-it guide nor even a tidy list of steps not to take. My far more modest aim is to tell the story for its own sake and with a view to helping us understand what reformers around the world face today—living under regimes that deny their citizens basic liberties. In the past decade we have seen so-called color revolutions in the post-Soviet space and the Arab Spring stretching from Tunisia to the Middle East removing old authoritarians but failing to replace them with liberal democracy. While Maklakov’s story may make much of that shortfall seem natural, it may also provide grounds for hope that comparable figures will arise and have greater luck finding allies and forcing authoritarian retreat.
* By the Western, or Gregorian, calendar, the revolution took place on November 7, 1917, which by the Julian calendar (Old Style, or O.S.) was October 25; hence, the “October Revolution.” I will use Old Style indications for events that occurred before January 1918, in part because many of them became known by their dates under the Julian calendar.
VASILY MAKLAKOV’S CHARACTER and thinking resist easy pigeonholing and perhaps stem from his family’s social and intellectual diversity. His mother, born Elizaveta Cheredeeva, was from a fairly wealthy and aristocratic family and was devoutly religious. His father, Alexei Maklakov, a “self-made man”—in his memoirs Maklakov uses the English expression1—was a professor of ophthalmology at Moscow University and a doctor at the Moscow Eye Clinic (and for some purposes, at least, its de facto director).
The parents’ ancestors and relatives combined distinction with a touch of eccentricity. Vasily’s maternal great-grandfather, an official with the civilian rank equivalent to a general, had three daughters, one of them Vasily’s grandmother. Vasily knew her far less well than her sisters, as she died relatively young. One of the sisters, Vasily’s great-aunt
