The Reformer. Stephen F. Williams

      Maklakov’s efforts failed. But the failure is hardly shocking in view of the obstacles facing the rule of law in early twentieth-century Russia. The Romanov dynasty had ruled autocratically since 1613. It had occasionally assembled a zemski sobor, a gathering of politically weighty citizens loosely comparable to the Estates-General of pre-revolutionary France. These gatherings normally rubberstamped decisions already taken, but they occasionally expressed an independent viewpoint. The last summons of a zemski sobor had occurred in 1684, to ratify a treaty with Poland. So politically active figures in the Russia of 1905 had had little experience in the arts of compromise needed to carry out the October Manifesto’s experiment in self-government.

      Nicholas II himself was by personality and character unsuited to the task of presiding over a transition to the rule of law. Though delegating much responsibility to his ministers, he nonetheless took many key decisions himself. His loyalty to Russia and general decency are not—or should not—be in question. But what of his capacity? His tutor, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, wrote that Nicholas had a good brain and analytical skills, but that he “only grasps the significance of a fact in isolation without its relationship to other facts, events, currents and phenomena.”¹⁶ If that deficiency is consistent with a good brain and analytical skills, one shudders to contemplate a mediocre brain. In any event, Pobedonostsev’s comment seems wholly consistent with Nicholas’s almost complete incapacity to address institutional issues, his largely mistaken confidence in his personal relationship with the ordinary Russian, and his refusal to talk an issue through with advisers. To the end he remained blind to the necessities of prioritization, of using a bureaucracy to sift through issues, and of delegating real authority to a person capable—unlike himself—of wielding it systematically and coherently.¹⁷

      Despite his issuing the October Manifesto, Nicholas generally resisted genuine reform. In January 1895, while the public still entertained an initial glow of hope for his new reign, some rather conservative landowners active in local self-government had, very deferentially, suggested that he create a formal means for the public to communicate its views to the government. He dismissed their views as “senseless dreams.” He issued the October Manifesto ten years later not because he had recanted his senseless-dreams epithet, or because he believed that Russia and the monarchy would benefit from institutional reforms, but because he saw the manifesto as the only way to defeat the revolution then in progress. To be sure, the regime contained officials dedicated to reform—without them the October Manifesto could not have been issued at all. But the tsar himself and the conservative rural landowners who were his main base of support saw no affirmative good in the institutions launched by the manifesto.

      In recognizing Maklakov’s position at the center of the political center, we’ve already seen the wide divergence between Kadets and Octobrists. But the members of those parties were the relative moderates. On their left stood self-proclaimed revolutionaries who boycotted the first set of legislative elections, and some of whom favored or practiced terror. On the moderates’ right were fans of absolute monarchy, overlapping heavily with ardent anti-Semites, ready and often able to launch pogroms. Both extremes were unlikely to help develop the rule of law.

      Nor was the mindset of the population hospitable to rule of law values. The peasants, the vast majority of the population, held virtually no formal rights but were subject to an array of obligations, including a duty, like the old French corvée, to perform the scut work needed to provide local services, such as road maintenance. Instead of rights, they had a vaguely conceived expectation that the state would somehow provide enough land for them to scratch out a living. People with such an expectation could hardly look favorably on the legal property rights of “landowners”—those from whom additional land might be drawn. (Historians use the term landowners only for non-peasant landowners; though peasants held about three times as much land as did the “landowners,”¹⁸ their rights in most of that were too squishy to be called property rights.) With peasants’ rights so limited, it’s natural that their maxims relating to the law were generally negative, as, for example, “If only all laws disappeared, then people would live justly.”¹⁹

      Indeed, property rights themselves enjoyed little respect. In the West property rights could be seen as a source of independence and thus of a capacity to resist overbearing monarchs and the state itself. In Russia, by contrast, they were associated with the claims and interests of landowners, who had for centuries been dependent on the monarch to keep their serfs under control. There, property rights had no such luster as in the West.²⁰

      But the peasants had no monopoly on hostility to others’ rights. One of Maklakov’s sparring partners in the Duma, an arch-reactionary whom we’ll encounter quite often, Nikolai Evgenevich Markov (known as Markov II), told Maklakov that “the gentry were enthusiastic about the nationalization of factories while resisting compulsory alienation of lands for the peasants. The industrialists had no objection to taking the gentry’s land, and the peasants of course wanted it.” Markov went so far as to tell Maklakov in the spring of 1907 that he anticipated revolution with pleasure, because it, in his opinion, would destroy what was evil in Russia—the bourgeoisie and capital. Another conservative contemporary, General Alexander Kireev, regarded Russians as prone to lurching from one extreme to another. Only “culture,” which he thought Russians lacked, “enabled people to see two sides of an issue and respect alternative points of view.”²¹

      These attitudes seem intertwined with the weakness of Russia’s market economy. Markets rely on the rule of law: without some protection of contract and property rights from government and other possible predators, market relationships are riskier and more costly (and thus more rare). And markets nurture the rule of law: people operating in markets learn to compromise, to work out mutually beneficial transactions that recognize others’ rights.

      While not only industry but also markets had grown in Russia since the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, a good deal of this was hothouse development driven by government (most dramatically in the case of the railways). Russia seemed to want the brawn of Western development without accepting the brains—the West’s institutional infrastructure and mindset.²² Market-friendly behavior and attitudes seemed not to jibe with Russianness. Russia’s corporate founders and managers consisted disproportionately of tiny minorities, such as Jews and Russians of German ancestry. Even business leaders who were ethnically Russian and relatively independent of government, such as the Moscow merchants, were surprisingly devoted to the autocracy. And while Great Britain, France, and the states making up the United States had by the middle of the nineteenth century allowed individuals to enter business via corporations simply through filing routine papers, no such option ever existed in imperial Russia. There, corporations could be formed only at the discretion of officials, a rich opportunity for cronyism and bribery and a source of delay and expense.²³

      Government censorship, though disorganized and often ineffective,²⁴ posed a threat. In Maklakov’s opinion it drove many reformist thinkers to avoid wrestling with structure or policy in Russia and instead to pen rather abstract comments on political issues in Western Europe. Until the October Manifesto they had little to gain by sober consideration of practical constitutional variations in the Russian context, especially as there had been no legislative body to take action. Maklakov quoted Bismarck’s remark that nothing corrupts a party