The Reformer. Stephen F. Williams
on the one hand, and a relatively laissez-faire attitude on the other. In late November 1887, at a university orchestra concert, a student named Siniavskii slapped a high university official, A. A. Bryzgalov, in the face. The slap was not Siniavskii’s spontaneous individual act of protest against Bryzgalov’s perceived hostility to students; he had been chosen to strike the blow by the members of a kind of “primitive conspiracy.” Siniavskii was arrested, and student buzz designated the next day at noon as the time for a protest meeting in a university courtyard. An angry crowd of students gathered and then began to move onto the streets of Moscow. After a while Maklakov and other students drifted back to the vicinity of the university. The police chief, N. I. Ogarev, who unlike Bryzgalov was popular in Moscow, sought to calm things down by telling the students in the most peaceable tone that everything was over for the day and that they should disperse. Maklakov, though he claimed in his memoirs not to have been really involved in the disturbance, happened to be close by. He rather loudly answered Ogarev, “We won’t disperse till you clear out the police.” Ogarev shouted to the police, “Grab him.” All this was in the sight of the students and, according to Maklakov, created a mild sensation.22
Somehow Ogarev and Maklakov ended up outside the cordoned-off area. Maklakov asked to be allowed to go back to the university, but Ogarev told him not to hope for that—they would not let him return. He then asked Maklakov where he lived. Maklakov said it was at the corner of Tverkaia Street, and Ogarev said, “I’ll let you off at the corner.” At the corner Ogarev asked his name. When Maklakov gave it, Ogarev asked, “You’re the son of Aleksei Nikolaevich?” “Yes.” “Then go home and tell your father from me not to let you out of the house.” In fact he tried to go back to the university, but, failing in that, went home. The upshot was that he gratuitously got the reputation of a troublemaker. Or perhaps not so gratuitously: after all, he had directly challenged Ogarev with belligerent words and for a couple of days afterward was in the thick of disturbances on Strastnoi Boulevard. Mounted police broke these up, and the episode led to nearly two months without classes at Moscow University and five other Russian universities.23
The reputation of being a troublemaker stuck. Speaking years later as a deputy in the Third Duma on the issue of government policy on disciplinary exclusions from the university, he said that the precedents for such exclusions “are well known to me, though no worse to me than to many others, as I was once excluded from the university.” Right-wing deputy Markov II shouted from the floor, “You behaved badly.”24
Siniavskii was sentenced to three years in a disciplinary battalion. Maklakov recalled later that this was the first time he had seen someone sacrifice his life for something. It brought to mind his mother’s stories of saints who were tortured because they refused to deny their faith. After serving his three years, Siniavskii returned to Moscow. Maklakov: “I got to know him; historic heroes lose something with close acquaintance.”25
A second episode occurred two years later, on the death of the writer Chernyshevskii, author of the famous revolutionary tract What Is to Be Done? According to Maklakov, the younger generation didn’t actually read him, but they knew his name, mainly from a student drinking song that included the words “Let’s drink to the one who wrote, ‘What is to be done?,’ to his heroes, to his ideals.” (Would the students have found this ditty very stirring without a great deal of vodka?) Students managed to organize a memorial at a church, and though they were not allowed to place announcements in the newspapers, the call to attend the event, launched by a so-called fighting organization, spread widely. After the service, the crowd poured out into Tverskoi Boulevard and made its way to the university. The police didn’t intervene, and after some struggle among the students over whether there should be speeches, the crowd dispersed.26
But the episode didn’t pass without regime reaction. Acting for himself and other students, Maklakov had asked a professor to postpone a lecture scheduled for the day of the memorial service so that they could go to the service. The professor agreed. When he entered the room for his next lecture, he was accompanied by the deacon, and the deacon and the professor jointly told the students that the professor’s accommodation was regarded as a conspiracy and was the subject of a reprimand. When the professor finished his lecture, the students applauded at length.27
The university tutor at the time, Count P. A. Kapnist, followed up on the episode. Happily, he was far more tolerant than his successor, Bogolepov, the official who was later to drive Maklakov out of a scholarly career in history. Having assembled a group of students, he asked them what works of Chernyshevskii they had read; the answer—none. Maklakov volunteered that the students honored him not as a student of natural sciences or as an economist: they knew him through the drinking song. Kapnist cut him off, saying: “You can’t cancel lectures because of a song.” He went on to say that he wasn’t going to give them a punishment or reprimand, but that his ability to defend them against state authorities was limited. He had selected them because they would know the ones who started the Chernyshevskii gambit; they should pass on to them what he had said. He also had special reasons for assembling this group of students. He had chosen some because they were on a stipend that could be cut off, some because they were recidivists, and specifically Maklakov, to whom he turned and said, “You, I asked specially because of your temperament. You need to think first, and then act. Learn to rule yourself before you may have to rule others.”
While the students’ memories were fresh, they wrote down Kapnist’s talk, underscoring what they saw as “funny” parts. At home, Maklakov read the account to professors who were guests of his father and was surprised that they didn’t laugh at the humor. They understood that Kapnist’s action reflected a humane approach to the students and one that disappeared with the appointment of Bogolepov. Recounting the episode in later life, Maklakov concluded that it showed how much he and his fellow students failed to understand.28
Maklakov’s third and last major run-in with university authorities occurred in March 1890. Students had assembled in a university courtyard with a view to organizing some kind of protest in support of a student disorder at Petrovskii Academy. Maklakov saw this from where he was working in the chemistry lab, and, because he was then hoping to advance student enterprise and independence through more-or-less legal means, he tried to persuade them to do nothing that would set that goal back. His argument encountered resistance, but before the students agreed on a course, Cossacks entered the space and surrounded them, and a group of nearly 400 people was herded first to the Manezh (a vast building in central Moscow suitable for exhibitions) and then to the Butyrskaia Prison. At the Manezh a number of students expressed satisfaction at his joining them despite his having opposed the demonstration; they chalked it up to solidarity, though he was there only because he’d been swept up with the others.
Life at the Butyrskaia appears to have been quite different in 1890 from what later generations experienced under Stalin and his successors. The students started two in-prison newspapers: one liberal, with the slogan “Involuntary Leisure,” the other conservative, edited by Maklakov, with the slogan “Render unto Caesar the Things That Are Caesar’s—and Also unto Caesar the Things That Are God’s.” A satirical column spoke of how a wise government in its work on popular education had in just two days opened a new institution, “Butyrskaia Academy.” Reality intruded on these intellectual hijinks when two new groups of students were brought in (first a batch of seventy-seven, and then one of sixty). The earlier arrivals asked eagerly how the event was perceived outside. The answer was that the whole episode was being completely ignored. The discovery totally chilled the students’ discussions of what “demands” to make upon the government.
In the end, students were called into the office in groups and told their punishments: for one group, nothing; for another, a trifle. Maklakov fell into a third group, which was punished with suspension for the rest of the term, but with the right to return to the university. This had a short-run consequence—it prevented him from going as a student delegate to an international student conference in Montpelier.29
But the suspension wasn’t the end of the story. While he was pondering his possible shift to history, a friend of his father, N. A. Zverev, then an assistant to the university rector, brought word that the university had received papers from the public education and internal affairs