of the crisis of the regime.”13 At least at this stage—before the October Manifesto of that year and the Fundamental Laws of 1906—Maklakov’s language, though aimed at nudging the regime to curb its arbitrariness, seems fairly indifferent to the risks of revolution.
Indeed, Maklakov had earlier been instrumental in promoting cooperation between Moscow adherents of the Union of Liberation (the center-left precursor of the Kadets) and local Social Democrats and Socialist Revolutionaries. The group failed to form any real bloc because of the Social Democrats’ refusal to collaborate with “bourgeois elements,” but the Moscow Socialist Revolutionaries and members of the Union of Liberation did cooperate for a while.14 So at least before the October Manifesto, Maklakov saw benefits to acting in concert with the revolutionary left.
As part of the accelerating political action of late 1905, the Kadets held their founding congress at the Moscow home of Prince Paul Dolgorukov, between October 12 and 18. Maklakov spoke up twice. The first occasion was in response to a policeman who had entered uninvited. Nikolai Teslenko, who was presiding, tried to persuade the intruder to go. Maklakov asked for the floor and started to speak of the sanctions, including imprisonment, that a policeman risked by entering a house unlawfully. The policeman decided it was best to leave; Teslenko and Maklakov shared plaudits for this happy outcome. Maklakov credited his selection for the Kadets’ central committee in part to this effective action and in part to agitation on his behalf by his colleague in political trials, N. K. Muravyov.15 From then on he was continuously reelected to the committee until long after the Bolshevik revolution.
Maklakov’s second intervention was substantive. In a discussion of the party’s possible platform, he suggested that they bear in mind that one day the Kadets might become the government. An ideal polity, he thought, should obviously identify and protect its citizens’ rights, but a polity whose government lacked the capacity to enforce the law could hardly do so—it could not provide the order of “ordered liberty.” Thus Kadet ideals, he argued, called for the party to support allowing the government reasonable authority. This remark, he later reported, produced a storm of righteous indignation; one colleague told him that that the party must never think as the government, but always as a champion of the rights of man. The criticism was renewed years later, after most or all of the surviving participants had emigrated. It seemed to him that this position showed how ill-prepared the party was for the practical work of governing in a constitutional structure.16
Maklakov’s two brief interventions capture his relation to the party. His legal and rhetorical skills made him useful, and his memoirs make clear that he found a deep satisfaction in political work on the party’s behalf. At the same time, he seems never to have been really content with the party’s overall direction. Paul Miliukov, in one of his works in exile, described Maklakov as always having been a Kadet “with special opinions,” a judgment Maklakov reports without dissent.17 Later, as a Kadet deputy in the Second, Third, and Fourth Dumas, Maklakov relished the independence that its Duma delegation gradually acquired vis-à-vis the party leaders; he seems never to have been content with the party’s general drift. Maklakov’s aversion to tight party allegiance seems to have been a bond with his friend Fyodor Plevako. The latter, elected to the Duma as an Octobrist, showed no devotion to (or really much interest in) the abstractions of the party program. At political meetings in the elections to the Third Duma, Plevako and Maklakov appeared as champions of their parties, but Plevako’s “tolerance and respect for opposing views disarmed opponents and angered friends and associates.”18 So, too, as we’ll see, for Maklakov.
On October 17, in the midst of the Kadets’ congress and rising unrest, Nicholas II confronted a choice between repression and retreat. He chose the latter, issuing the October Manifesto.
We impose upon the Government the obligation to carry out Our inflexible will:
(1) To grant the population the unshakable foundations of civic freedom based on the principles of real personal inviolability, freedom of conscience, speech, assembly, and union.
(2) Without halting the scheduled elections to the State Duma, to admit to participation in the Duma, as far as is possible in the short time remaining before its call, those classes of the population which at present are altogether deprived of the franchise, leaving the further development of the principle of universal suffrage to the new legislative order, and
(3) To establish it as an unbreakable rule that no law can become effective without the approval of the State Duma and that the elected representatives of the people should be guaranteed an opportunity for actual participation in the supervision of the legality of the actions of authorities appointed by Us.19
From the perspective of what became standard Kadet doctrine, the manifesto had serious weaknesses. First, the tsar expressed his “will . . . [t]o grant” the civil liberties named, but that was not the same as granting them. Second, the principle of “universal suffrage” didn’t live up to the egalitarian “four-tailed” suffrage (universal, direct, equal, and secret) that the Kadets demanded. (As the electoral law of December 11, 1905, would show, it was easy to combine nearly universal male suffrage [giving the vote to males over 24 years old, excepting students and military in active service] with a strong tilt toward the propertied classes. As a result of the mathematics of the indirect structure, in which curiae of landowners, peasants, town dwellers, and workers chose electors who then directly or indirectly chose Duma members, the vote of one landowner was worth the same as those of two town dwellers, of fifteen peasants, or of forty-five workers.)20 Third, the manifesto obviously did not call for a constituent assembly and thus kept the tsar very much in the picture for the ultimate crafting of any possible constitution.
But the manifesto stated a commitment to core principles of the rule of law. In the hands of a reasonable and independent interpreter, paragraph 1 had the potential of developing into a full-fledged bill of rights. Paragraph 2 meant that even if the votes of many citizens might be diluted, all or nearly all men would participate in the governmental process, thereby acquiring a say in legislation and experience in thinking about government and politics. Most important, paragraph 3 barred the tsar from changing any law without the consent of the (as yet uncreated) Duma, a wholly independent institution, and promised the “people’s representatives” a role in ensuring the legality of the laws’ administration. The manifesto thus would bar the executive, the tsar, from acting on the basis of his will alone, either by ignoring the law or by changing it unilaterally. At least as a promise, then, it brought the government under the law—the most vital but the most elusive component of the rule of law.
The Kadets who had gathered at the founding congress generally recognized the manifesto’s historic significance. As described by Alexander Kizevetter, a Kadet leader and historian, a man named Petrovskii rushed in from the editorial offices of Russkie Vedomosti (Russian news) and made his way to the podium. The presiding Kadet, Maxim Vinaver, interrupted the speaker and read out the manifesto. Writes Kizevetter, “The autocracy was over. Russia had become a constitutional monarchy. Citizen freedoms were proclaimed. Mitrofan Pavlovich Shchepkin, gray with age, trembling with emotion, said, ‘Now at last we are free.’” Kizevetter reported in his memoirs that no one could stay at home, but instead poured into the streets of Moscow, congratulating each other as if it were Easter.21
Maklakov seems to have shared the general delight among liberals. Certainly in his speeches in the Duma over the years from 1907 to 1917, he invoked the manifesto constantly, not merely as a legal standard by which to measure the government’s acts, but as an inspiration, as the founding of a new order, as a sacred text.
Miliukov, the party leader, shared none of this. He publicly responded, “Nothing has changed. The war continues.”22 When the Kadet party’s founding congress ended the next day, the party issued a statement (postanovlenie) that conveyed the same spirit without using Miliukov’s exact metaphor. Looking at the October Manifesto, the statement almost completely ignored the doughnut and focused relentlessly on the hole. Imagine if King John had preemptively issued rather than negotiated the Magna Carta, and the barons had responded by pointing out the gaps between it and a detailed constitution meeting all of their political dreams. The Kadet statement started by saying that the manifesto