much he and his fellow students failed to understand.28
Maklakov’s third and last major run-in with university authorities occurred in March 1890. Students had assembled in a university courtyard with a view to organizing some kind of protest in support of a student disorder at Petrovskii Academy. Maklakov saw this from where he was working in the chemistry lab, and, because he was then hoping to advance student enterprise and independence through more-or-less legal means, he tried to persuade them to do nothing that would set that goal back. His argument encountered resistance, but before the students agreed on a course, Cossacks entered the space and surrounded them, and a group of nearly 400 people was herded first to the Manezh (a vast building in central Moscow suitable for exhibitions) and then to the Butyrskaia Prison. At the Manezh a number of students expressed satisfaction at his joining them despite his having opposed the demonstration; they chalked it up to solidarity, though he was there only because he’d been swept up with the others.
Life at the Butyrskaia appears to have been quite different in 1890 from what later generations experienced under Stalin and his successors. The students started two in-prison newspapers: one liberal, with the slogan “Involuntary Leisure,” the other conservative, edited by Maklakov, with the slogan “Render unto Caesar the Things That Are Caesar’s—and Also unto Caesar the Things That Are God’s.” A satirical column spoke of how a wise government in its work on popular education had in just two days opened a new institution, “Butyrskaia Academy.” Reality intruded on these intellectual hijinks when two new groups of students were brought in (first a batch of seventy-seven, and then one of sixty). The earlier arrivals asked eagerly how the event was perceived outside. The answer was that the whole episode was being completely ignored. The discovery totally chilled the students’ discussions of what “demands” to make upon the government.
In the end, students were called into the office in groups and told their punishments: for one group, nothing; for another, a trifle. Maklakov fell into a third group, which was punished with suspension for the rest of the term, but with the right to return to the university. This had a short-run consequence—it prevented him from going as a student delegate to an international student conference in Montpelier.29
But the suspension wasn’t the end of the story. While he was pondering his possible shift to history, a friend of his father, N. A. Zverev, then an assistant to the university rector, brought word that the university had received papers from the public education and internal affairs ministries saying that because of his political unreliability, Maklakov was to be excluded from the university without right of return, a classification called a “wolf’s passport.” The family speculated on the possible cause—suspicious books he had been reading? people he had met on a trip to Paris in 1889?
His father consulted Kapnist, who told him to go to the root of the problem—St. Petersburg—and gave him letters to I. D. Delianov, the minister of public education, and to Pyotr N. Durnovo, then director of the police department and formerly a colleague of Kapnist in the procurator’s office. Right after his father left for St. Petersburg, Vasily was called to the police station and told that as a political unreliable he would henceforth be under police observation.
In St. Petersburg, Delianov asked Vasily’s father what Maklakov’s offense might have been. His father replied that he was hoping to get the answer from him. But Delianov also said that if Kapnist would accept responsibility for Vasily, there would be no problem with the ministry of education. The minister then urged him to see Durnovo. The latter took the same position as Delianov on the effect of getting the tutor to assume responsibility. Kapnist agreed to do so, though telling Vasily he mustn’t join illegal organizations. Technically, this included organizations forbidden under generally unenforced rules, such as those barring the zemliachestvos, largely apolitical student associations that were built on the desire of homesick students to see others from their parts of the country.
Years later Count Sergei Witte (finance minister from 1892 to 1903, and till April 1906, prime minister, and the empire’s most influential minister throughout the period)30 introduced Durnovo to Maklakov while all three were vacationing in Vichy. By then Durnovo had served as minister of internal affairs. The conversation drifted to this episode, and Durnovo told him that such things were done for small faults, simply to show that the authorities were watching and not to fool around, and that the orders were often revoked. In short, a trivial matter could terrify a student, even if the orders were revoked, and blight the student’s higher education and likely his career if they were not.31 For Maklakov, the immediate cause of his escape from this fate was his father’s excellent connections—a point later harped on by Professor Bogoslovskii, the one so upset by Maklakov’s shouting “Marseillaise! Marseillaise!” from behind a pillar.32
These close calls with government arbitrariness, and his escape through the accident of paternal connections, must have added zest to Maklakov’s lifetime of efforts to expose and thwart exactly that arbitrariness. He saw them as a good summing up of the old regime and an explanation of why it had so few defenders later.33
It would be nice to be able to say that when we end discussion of these episodes we put paid to Maklakov’s difficulties with the authorities, but it would not be true. Spontaneous civic association is the bedrock of civil society, and on this issue Maklakov’s mind and nature put him at odds with the regime. Maklakov not only admired Tocqueville, civic associations’ greatest proponent (he later participated in a project for translating many of Tocqueville’s works into Russian),34 but he also seemed by disposition to have relished joining and creating and enlivening such associations. The regime, by contrast, was instinctively hostile to just about any independent association of citizens. Once two or more people were gathered together for any purpose, no matter how innocent superficially, their thoughts just might turn to politics. Maklakov’s behavior left him, at best, in subdued conflict with existing authority.
In his first two university years, the years of rather fruitless study of natural sciences, he appears to have joined two of the existing zemliachestvos, one for the Nizhny Novgorod region and one for Siberia, and he later participated in the formation of one for Moscow. The 1884 rules governing universities specifically named zemliachestvos as among the organizations students were forbidden to join.35 He also joined other students in taking an existing organizational model, an institute formed by students in the medical faculty, seeking to spread it among all faculties. He believed that such organizations, reaching beyond the purely social goals of the zemliachestvos, were likely to be more effective. Indeed, the organizing students felt themselves to be acting on the militant-sounding maxim “He who wields the stick is the corporal,” and, partly as a joke, they called the center a “fighting organization.” That this did not lead to disaster seems to have been the result of Bryzgalov’s successors’ pragmatic decision to lighten the yoke a bit.36
Maklakov also had a hand in turning the student orchestra and chorus, formerly governed by the university administration, into a self-governing student organization. He and others formed a kind of “Management Board,” half of the members of which were from the orchestra and chorus and the other half nonmembers, using broad student involvement to help justify student control. They secured student approval of the change by asking that the annual meeting be held in an auditorium, which they then packed with supporters; the effect was evidently strong enough to abort any official effort at rejection. Maklakov was elected president of the first board. To keep the elective principle fresh, the initial board members didn’t run for a second term.37
Maklakov’s involvement in the orchestra and chorus—specifically in advocating dedication of concert proceeds to relief of the famine of 1891—launched his reputation as a speaker. In the end, the choice of famine relief came at no cost to indigent students. Enthusiasm for the project (partly cultivated by getting popular professors to talk it up) led to not only a more than usually lucrative concert but also a successful subscription that raised double the usual amount for needy students.38
But
