the autocracy and drawing on French sympathies for representative government, liberty, and ethnic fairness, the memo targets concrete French interests: France’s desire for military advantage; firming up its entente with Russia; and its hopes of ever being repaid.
The memo also claims that a decree had “annihilated” the authority of the Duma by creating a higher legislative body, the State Council, in which half the seats were to be held by appointees of the government,50 and whose agreement would be necessary for most legislative action.
Although the memo might seem to track the most intransigent voices among the Kadets, it does acknowledge that the ministry had contained at least two liberals, M. M. Kutler and Vasily Timiriazev. But it nullifies whatever sympathy that might have won for the regime with the observation that they had been removed, which the memo ascribes to the influence of “a court camarilla” of grand dukes and others.51
The memo never had the slightest chance of affecting the loan. Although it was formally executed on April 22 (n.s.), the loan contract had been signed April 16,52 and the memo bears a legend at the top saying that it had been conveyed to the French foreign ministry on April 18. When Maklakov and two other Russians (Kalmanovich and Count Anatolii Nesselrode) met with Georges Clemenceau (then minister of the interior, but soon to start his first period as prime minister, from late 1906 to mid-1909), the minister made clear that the loan had been a done deal for some time.
In State and Society Maklakov gives quite a full account of the interview with Clemenceau.53 The meeting was rather secret, conducted in a little office apart from Clemenceau’s main office, evidently because his holding the meeting poached on the territory of the minister of foreign affairs, Léon Bourgeois, behind whose back they were meeting. Clemenceau explained right off the bat that the loan had been agreed on, so there was really no occasion to discuss its merits.54 The conversation instead turned to the Russian liberals’ general strategy. Clemenceau was astonished at their quest for universal suffrage: “Didn’t we understand,” he asked Maklakov, “that any people needs a long time to be weaned away from their prejudices and crudeness, before they can be allowed to take charge?” As an example of such crudeness, he recalled how the French, much more experienced in these matters than the Russians, had reacted like “lunatics” to a mere proposal to inventory the contents of churches (after the Separation of 1905). “You don’t know what the strength of the authorities will be under an inexperienced population.” Though Clemenceau was famous for saying that the Revolution must be accepted “en bloc,” he was aware of its weaknesses and recommended caution and moderation: “Anything can happen except what you expect.”
Maklakov raised the issue of resisting the oath to the autocracy, which was to be demanded of incoming deputies (and which his memorandum had complained about). Clemenceau “grabbed me by the arm: ‘Don’t do it. What does a vain word cost you? For the devil’s sake, don’t fight over a word. Leave them their words and titles, and take the substance yourself.’”
In a brief exchange on the loan itself, Maklakov explained how the loan would be a powerful weapon for the old regime in its struggle with the liberals. Clemenceau: “Ah, I understand you. You’d like to seize the government by the throat. You ought to have thought of it sooner.”
Maklakov closed his account of the conversation by explaining why he had made it so complete: It was “so characteristic—in it spoke the real Clemenceau.”
After the Clemenceau interview, word reached Maklakov that Raymond Poincaré, then finance minister, would like to meet the Russians.55 Nesselrode refused to go, and Kalmanovich had left town. Maklakov met with others in a café, where their conversation was overheard by an official in the Russian embassy. (While Maklakov noticed this sign of Russian intelligence operations, doubtless there were many he didn’t detect.) He was not eager to go, but Dolgorukov had arrived in Paris from the Riviera, and Maklakov proposed that they go together, which they did. Poincaré spoke of a condition that the French were proposing—that no money could be expended without consent of the Duma. Maklakov said it was completely useless, because a French condition could not amend the Russian constitution. (Presumably the French could not, after the execution of the loan, add a new, binding condition to the delivery of the loan’s tranches.)
Just before Maklakov and Dolgorukov returned to Russia, the French foes of the loan asked them whether they would join a public campaign against it, and specifically whether they would do so as representatives of their party. This proposal obviously called for consultation with the party’s central committee; in view of their imminent return they did so by telegram, which they sent “in clear.” The central committee didn’t answer, thus implicitly rejecting the idea. Maklakov chides himself for the carelessness and irresponsibility of sending an open telegram, thus giving “arms against ourselves.” The self-reproof is surely right, though one wonders if the telegram added much to the secret police’s dossier on the Kadets’ activities in Paris.56
Concluding his account, Maklakov addresses an issue he had raised at the beginning—the principle that Russia should be united in relation to foreigners.57 In justification of his conduct, he says that if he had acted in accordance with that principle, he would have brought on himself “the indignation of the whole of Russian society.” Such an idea was no part of the liberation movement as it then existed. As an example of prevailing standards, he cites Miliukov’s refusal, on the occasion of the parliamentary delegation’s visit to London, to take part in a possible collective Russian response to an article, apparently attributed to Ramsay MacDonald, that ranted not only against the Russian government but against the tsar himself. Because of Miliukov’s resistance to any rebuke by the delegation as a whole, the only Russian answer was from its chairman, Khomiakov. The refusal to defend the country, he says, wasn’t personal to Miliukov. “In 1906 I sinned not individually, but from our general sin.”
Even if we assume that the MacDonald episode was parallel, the exculpation seems dubious—at least by the standards that Maklakov developed later. First, his post-1917 account of Russian politics is replete with broad criticisms of “society” and its militancy; so how could the assumptions and predilections of society justify his conduct? Second, he could have just kept quiet in Paris, or at any rate not ventured beyond conversations with his Russian and French friends.
Though Maklakov’s writings and Duma speeches are filled with criticism of the regime, none appears as vehement as that of the anti-loan memo. In State and Society, as we’ll see, Maklakov gives a reasoned defense of the new Fundamental Laws—which had not been issued at the time of his memo. To be sure, I’ve found no Maklakov defense of the Fundamental Laws contemporaneous with their issuance. Despite that gap, it seems quite possible that the newly revised Fundamental Laws may have led him to appraise the regime more generously than he did at the time of his memo to the French and to believe that the powers granted the Duma gave it a decent chance at fulfilling the promise of the October Manifesto.
ON APRIL 23, 1906, shortly after the failure of Maklakov’s efforts to defeat the French loan and four days before the opening of the First Duma, the regime issued a revised set of “Fundamental Laws.” These were the product of a committee, chaired by the tsar, in which officials of varying predilections pressed their views on Nicholas.
Once the Fundamental Laws were issued, the tsar and his supporters, on the one hand, and the liberals, on the other, had motives to deny that the new laws and the October Manifesto amounted to a “constitution.” The tsar resisted the thought that his commitments deserved that label (which would imply a real shift of authority), clinging to the notion that the autocracy had been a good thing for Russia and that he must pass it on to his son intact—or at least as intact as possible. Many of the liberals, who fervently sought a constitution, tended to deny that one had been granted; to acknowledge that this had happened would weaken their claim to more limitations on the tsar’s power. They called