effects, the consequences for Russia’s reputation in Europe, etc.), he tells a story: Characterizing the procedure as “a legal rite of death,” he invites the listener to observe the scene when the death penalty is applied:
They lead a person, captured, disarmed and tied up, and tell him that in a few hours he will be killed. They allow his relatives to bid farewell to him—near and dear to them, young and healthy—who by the will of other humans will die. They lead him to the scaffold, like cattle to the slaughter, tie him to the spot where the coffin is ready, and in the presence of the doctor, procurator and priest, who have been blasphemously called to watch the business, they quietly and solemnly kill him. The horror of this legal assassination exceeds all the excesses of revolutionary terror.30
Of course Maklakov might have come to such a viewpoint, and to such a rhetoric, on his own. But the reliance entirely on description and the complete avoidance of policy arguments and consequences, smacks of Tolstoy.
Yet Tolstoy’s influence on Maklakov seems most powerful at a broader level—in Maklakov’s capacity to see alternative viewpoints, his practice of fairly discussing contrary claims even while advocating whatever approach he had come to regard as best. Earlier we saw his recognition of the contradictions between Tolstoy’s theories and his life. What could give a man more readiness to see the other side of an issue than to enjoy the friendship of a man whose life was a world of contradictions; to admire—indeed to worship and even love—a man whose mental processes and convictions were virtually the opposite of his own; and to recognize this man, whose political judgments must have seemed almost crazy, as a beacon for Russia and the world?
Of course the child who responded to his classmate’s proposition about the origin of the universe by asking where the red-hot sphere had come from was not likely to buy simplistic positions, to disregard the vulnerabilities of any contention. But Maklakov’s long relationship with Tolstoy seems likely to have fostered his sense of truth’s complexity.
Maklakov’s extensive memoirs never discuss his romantic life. The Moscow archives of his papers contain a record of his divorce from Evgenia Pavlovna Maklakova in 1899,31 but so far as I can tell have nothing else about the marriage. The archives also contain a good deal of correspondence of an “intimate character,”32 but I’ll address just two relationships of special interest (overlapping in time): with Lucy Bresser (whose stage name was Vera Tchaikovsky), a voluminous correspondent,33 and Alexandra Kollontai, a major political figure in her own right.34 Despite the silence of his memoirs on the subject, Maklakov seems to have been not at all secretive about his loves. Rosa Vinaver, wife of his Kadet colleague Maxim Vinaver, tells of a train trip from St. Petersburg to Paris, during which she conversed with him all the way until they were approaching Berlin. Maklakov said, “Here I must get out. I’m about to meet a very interesting lady.” On the platform appeared Kollontai, “as always graceful and elegant,” says Vinaver.35 Recall that Maklakov named a happy family life as “the crown” of Tolstoy’s enjoyment of worldly blessings; yet we really have no clue why he didn’t seriously seek out that blessing for himself.
The relationship with Lucy Bresser involved at least a momentary brush with marriage. It began with Maklakov’s providing legal representation in some dispute in which Bresser seems to have been involved as a relative of a party. Her first (preserved) letter to him starts as follows:
I am writing this not to the dear companion of a night’s journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow but rather to the unknown lawyer who sat with me in the Buffet of the Palais de Justice—whom I had the honor & intense satisfaction of thanking—of thanking for his efforts & success by a kiss.36
The breathless style continues for about four hundred pages over nearly a decade, with punctuation rarely taking any form other than a dash. Lucy was married to a Cyril Bresser, so any marriage to Maklakov would have required a divorce. Evidently Cyril wasn’t ready to agree to one, so “apparently we shall have to find someone to swear that we were together—the difficulty is to make Cyril sue me for divorce.”37 The social stigma involved is suggested by Lucy’s mother’s reaction: “My mother calls me a prostitute & that I ought to be shot—if only someone would do it.”38 Maklakov (as quoted back to him in her letters, our only source) responded rather captiously to the need to show guilt under English law: Lucy quotes his rhetorical question: “Qu’est ce qui empêche de devenir coupable?” and in English, “What’s easier than to become guilty?”39
More troubling, Maklakov seems to have reversed his position on marriage over the brief interval between June 8 and June 14, 1910. Bresser lays it out: “[O]n the 8th of June you reply to my question of divorce ‘Ai-je l’intention de t’épouser.’ Ah, il ne m’est plus difficile de le dire. Je le désire, je le veux de tout mon âme.” [“Do I intend to marry you. It’s no longer difficult to say. I want to, I want to with all my soul.”] Then “on the 14th your first letter of doubt arrived—what has happened between 8th & 14th?”40 If Maklakov ever offered a real answer, her letters don’t reflect it back. In a sense, the question is why he ever proclaimed his wish to marry her. He seems not to have been the marrying kind (or, more precisely, the remarrying kind), and her letters suggest a flightiness, even to the point of incoherence, that boded ill for the long term.
The relationship, though featuring many a rendezvous that filled Lucy with delight, was persistently troubled by her dependency. Her letters are filled with requests for money. He met many such requests, but not all—or not completely. We don’t know the exact words Maklakov used to resist the claims, but she clearly read them as suggesting that she was a kept woman. She saw the financial aid differently: his desire to be able to be with her at times that fitted his schedule necessarily impeded her freedom to pursue her stage career. She regarded his financial help as no more than compensation for that impediment.
Alexandra Kollontai, a Menshevik who evolved into a Bolshevik, could hardly have been more different. Like Maklakov, she was an impressive orator, stirring audiences with revolutionary fervor. Like Maklakov, she was named to diplomatic posts (in Norway, Mexico, and Sweden), holding the rank of ambassador after 1943; she had the advantage over Maklakov in that, unlike the Provisional Government, the government that appointed her remained in office. She was an articulate advocate of “free love,” or at least “comradely love,” and she lived in accord with her precepts. Her novel, Red Love, is a lightly concealed tract in favor of free love (or perhaps more precisely, against any feelings of sexual jealousy) and against what she saw as the triumph in the early Soviet state of commercial and managerial greed over pure communist ideals. The heroine’s husband is generally seen as modeled on the lover with whom she had the most intense and extended relationship, a worker named Pavel Dybenko; Red Love’s heroine is named Vasilisa—in homage to Vasily Maklakov?
The two seem to have gotten on very well politically. One letter reflects Kollontai’s reading of a series of Maklakov’s speeches in the Duma: “The first speech on the peasant question was very powerful, exact and successful. The later ones less satisfying.”41 Curiously, at the height of the Stalinist bloodletting in 1937, she wrote to a friend expressing a positively Maklakovian skepticism about Russia’s readiness for popular rule: “Historically, Russia, with her numberless uncultured, undisciplined masses, is not mature enough for democracy.”42
Like Maklakov, Kollontai wasn’t fully at home in her political party, though perhaps she was more vocal in her dissent. After the October Revolution she helped found a “Workers’ Opposition,” aimed at fighting bureaucratic encroachment on worker control in industry. Her (and others’) ardor in the project helped precipitate a Communist clampdown on intra-party expressions of dis-agreement: in 1921 the party adopted resolutions condemning the Workers’ Opposition and claiming the right to expel members for “factionalism.”43 As was true of Maklakov, she had a deep skepticism about her party’s leadership. In 1922 she told Ignazio Silone, an Italian Communist who later left the party, “If you should read in the papers that Lenin has had me arrested for stealing the Kremlin’s silverware, it will mean simply that I have not