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 Raisa, was married to a soldier, who in the era when Maklakov knew him was a retired colonel spending all his evenings playing cards at the English Club. They had eighteen children, half of them with one patronymic, half with another—a phenomenon that Maklakov found unintelligible at the time (and evidently still did in his 80s, when describing it in his memoirs).2 The other great-aunt, Mariia, never married. She lived on land that would have been very valuable if she had not given part of it to a church and if a railroad track had not prevented her from getting from her house to the rest of the property except by a roundabout route. This was no problem for her, as she never left her house. She rose at five in the afternoon and mainly enjoyed the company of other old ladies who played cards and read religious books to her. Maklakov, as her godson, had to go there for supper weekly until her death.
Some historians have suggested that Maklakov’s opinions were a product of his class origins; one, for example, says that he was one of a number of “great landowners” among the Kadets.3 That was indeed the background of many Kadet leaders, but not of Maklakov. In his memoirs he took some pains to explain that on his mother’s side (the one with money), the original wealth came from salaries. Though her forebears owned small estates in the vicinity of Moscow, that ownership entitled them to very little peasant labor in the days before the serfs’ emancipation, so emancipation itself inflicted no loss on them. Although Maklakov was technically a landowner because of land in Zvenigorod that his father had acquired for weekend and summer relaxation, the land occasioned expense and of course pleasure—but no income.4
Of his father’s ancestors, Maklakov knew only his grandfather, a man who pursued several careers fitfully—doctor, entrepreneur, playwright, and translator. The entrepreneurship seemed never to pan out. His development of a special breed of cocks for fighting went nowhere; so, too, did his efforts to design a perpetual motion machine. He unsuccessfully urged Maklakov’s father to join him at Monte Carlo to exploit a surefire gambling scheme. His efforts at dairy farming were effective at least