RELIGIOUS LIBERTY did not flourish in tsarist Russia. The most well-known restrictions are the government’s array of anti-Semitic policies: limits on Jewish opportunities in education and the professions and on their place of residence—the Pale of Settlement confined them to specific areas in the western regions of the empire. But there were also restrictions on non-Orthodox Christians, principally the Old Believers, a group that had split off from Orthodoxy in the seventeenth century. As a Duma member, Maklakov advocated elimination of the Pale and a lightening of the restrictions on the Old Believers. As an advocate, he was one of the three defense attorneys instrumental in securing the acquittal of Menahem Mendel Beilis, a Jew charged with the “ritual murder” of a young boy (supposedly to secure Christian blood to use in baking matzos). He published (and voiced in the Duma) an explanation of why the regime had pursued the Beilis case despite a complete lack of evidence, a puzzle that still interests historians. For this offending publication, Maklakov was sentenced to—but never served—three months in prison.
In the Duma, Maklakov advocated religious liberty not only as desirable in itself but also as necessary to prevent government arbitrariness. His principal focus was a series of bills easing limits on Old Believers and repealing the Pale of Settlement.
The Old Believers had enjoyed a considerable degree of toleration since an April 17, 1905, decree of the tsar, which had been further implemented with an October 1906 decree under Article 87.1 The government itself introduced a bill in conformity with the 1906 law, and the Duma committee on Old Believers expanded its reach. With the committee’s amendments, the bill would allow Old Believers the right not merely to confess their faith but to proselytize, and would give Old Believer communities a right to automatic registration as such.2
Maklakov staunchly supported the committee’s amendments. He argued that they were not really amendments, but simply precautions against the destruction and perversion of the tsar’s April 17 manifesto through the arbitrariness of administrators and police. The purposes of the manifesto and the law would be “undercut by casuistry,” as Old Believers and the authorities fought over the line between confession of faith (perfectly permissible) and preaching or advocacy of faith (illegal in the absence of the committee amendments). He cited a specific case of an Old Believer who came to a factory in Kaluga and was drawn into a religious dispute and mocked by Orthodox believers. He had hotly defended his position, for which he was charged and condemned for preaching his non-Orthodox faith. Without the committee’s amendment allowing proselytizing, Maklakov argued, the bill would leave matters in the hands of the police, who would always be influenced by the Orthodox establishment’s ubiquitous representatives.3
Even with the amendment, the bill would not entirely eradicate the potential for official abuse. In supporting it, Maklakov sought to assuage Orthodox anxiety by reminding them that the laws against blasphemy would remain in place. An Old Believer who preached but failed to show respect for faith could still be punished.4 But “respect for faith” was itself a fuzzy distinction. Maklakov, if challenged on the point, could fairly have replied that a line drawn between blasphemy and preaching would engender far fewer cases than one between confession of faith and preaching, if only because blasphemy would presumably occur far less often than simple preaching. Also, the line between preaching and blasphemy might be drawn more easily than that between preaching and confession of faith.
Maklakov also invoked standard religious freedom arguments, for example, that Orthodoxy itself would benefit from having to win people’s allegiance in free debate.5
Alternative amendments were offered, such as one allowing preaching but only in the Old Believers’ own religious establishments. Just as hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue, the proffer of useless substitutes was a kind of backhanded acknowledgment of the difficulty in answering Maklakov’s case. The Duma saw through the ruse and voted the proposals down.6
Advocating an amendment that gave Old Believer congregations a clear entitlement to registration, Maklakov again stressed the risk of arbitrary enforcement. (Why should there have been registration at all? Presumably because of the regime’s deep suspicion of every association of citizens that might prove a site for seditious plotting—even when there was no reason to suspect the association’s members of such plotting.) Among other things, the amendment removed a qualification of the Old Believers’ rights, one that allowed registration only when their activities were “not dangerous for social peace.” Maklakov called these “sacred words”—sacred to the police because it allowed them infinite discretion in enforcement. The exile of the Old Believer bishop for refusing to register as a petty bourgeois, mentioned in the last chapter, also showed the great potential for police arbitrariness, given the slightest chance. Maklakov ended by again pressing the idea that the amendments were only “a logical conclusion from the manifesto [of April 17, 1905]; without them the manifesto may be destroyed. The law will be law only at the pleasure of the authorities. . . . (Prolonged applause from center and left.)”7
The Duma approved the amended bill, but the State Council declined to accept the language emerging from the Duma. A reconciliation committee was formed (with Maklakov among its members), but reached no agreement.8
Another religious issue, a chance to repeal the Pale of Settlement, drew Maklakov’s ardent advocacy. Putting aside a patchwork of exceptions, the Pale confined Jews to a large western strip of the empire. It dated from a decree of 1791, reflecting the great increase in Russia’s Jewish population as a result of the successive partitions of Poland between Russia, Austria, and Prussia, together with a mélange of anti-Semitic and protectionist arguments.9 In calling for repeal of the Pale, Maklakov laid the groundwork by pointing to the proliferating self-contradictions in Russian policy. While the state purported to protect the Russian people from Jewish “oppression,” it retreated, he said, before the most powerful of the potential oppressors—presumably an allusion to the organizers of pogroms—and instead set out to oppress the most defenseless. It faulted Jews for not working the land but excluded them from the countryside. It gathered them into one place where there was not enough demand for their skills. It forced them into the lowest work and reproached them for being in that work. It drove them into conditions of poverty so extreme that official reports declared them worse off than peasants, and then reproached them for the filth of their conditions. Its injustice drove Jews to hate Russian authorities, and the state then found in that hatred a justification for its own anti-Semitism.10
Maklakov also suggested that recent economic changes had exacerbated the policy’s inherent cruelty and made it more costly for everyone. In the twentieth century, he observed, when state authority collects everything it can from its subjects in money and services, where people seek their livelihood under unbridled competition, using all the advances that modern civilization has to offer (railroads, mail, telephone), the government artificially locked Russian Jewry away in a defined territory.11 Further, to the extent the policy was driven by fear of Jewish competition, it had backfired: in the Pale, non-Jews were subject to exceptionally intense competition from Jews, stirring up hatred against them.12 And on the other side, its anti-competitive features injured non-Jews: “When the question comes up of uprooting the Jews, you have requests from the rest of the Russian population about leaving Jews in place, about how their industry and economic strength are so useful. The Jews and the traits that distinguish them—energy, enterprise, willingness to put up with little—are a boon in economic life, especially necessary for us, in vast but sleepy Russia. . . . In short the state has contrived to make these traits a source of unhappiness for the western part of the country and their absence a source of great deprivation for the rest.”13
Maklakov then catalogued some of the absurdities produced by the policy itself. The English minister of post and telephone had been unable to get a visa for Russia and so had been excluded. Even as the debate on repeal unfolded, there was a dispute pending in the Senate over evicting one-year-olds to the Pale, even though their parents had permission to live outside it. What is more strange, he asked, than for Russian soldiers who fought in the war with Japan and were taken to Moscow for an operation to be then sent out of Moscow immediately after the operation? What is more strange than that Jewish children, born of artisan parents living lawfully outside the Pale, should be sent off to the Pale when they reached their twenty-first birthday? Holidays also caused a problem. The law said that Jewish artisans could live outside the Pale only so long as they were working in their craft: so if the police came on Saturday, when they weren’t working, they would be subject to eviction. And trade definitions could be treacherous. A Jewish watchmaker who made and sold watch chains had thereby gone beyond the precise definition of his trade (watchmaker), and was subject to eviction if the police took a narrow view of the permissible trade.14
By colliding with both economic reality and elementary fairness, the Pale’s rules sparked government arbitrariness. “One might even say that the essence of the law is to increase police rewards,” that is, bribes. Jews outside the Pale under a legal dispensation had to buy from the police the right that they had by law, because they knew that otherwise the lawless authorities would evict them. If a Jew violated the law by giving the bribes, Maklakov argued, he could not justly be blamed; the blame lay with the authorities who pressured him to pay, who corrupted him, but even more with the law that created the authorities’ opportunity.15
Maklakov concluded:
The Pale has been with us more than 100 years . . . , but again and again new questions arise, and again and again the questions appear unforeseen. . . . Time after time imperial decrees have issued that gave someone who has been living illegally the right to stay. There have appeared new interpretations, new permissions making new breaches in the law. Why? Because never, not once, not in any matter, has a state combined such an extraordinarily cavalier attitude toward feelings of humanity or of lawfulness with simultaneous reluctance to make decisions [presumably ones dispensing with the Pale itself]. . . . Those same authorities that have recognized that equal rights are the ideal toward which we should move and are moving, those same authorities about which the premier [Stolypin] said that if you don’t believe in the strength of a rule-of-law state16 you must not legislate, those authorities have not believed in their own strength and have retreated before anti-Semitic prejudice. . . . As was said 100 years ago [by the Abbé Sieyès], ‘Those who don’t know how to be just cannot be free.’17 . . . The Jewish question is really the broader question of whether law and right can triumph in Russia.18
The debate ended with a 208 to 137 majority sending the matter to the committee on inviolability of the person (encompassing roughly what today we might call civil rights and civil liberties) under a one-month deadline.19 But when the time was up, the committee chair reported to the Duma that it couldn’t meet the deadline because of the volume of materials;20 zeal for the matter seems then to have petered out without a vote.
Maklakov also confronted the state’s anti-Semitism as defense counsel in the Beilis case. In a sense the prosecution was just a case of outrageous prosecutorial overreaching. But since it was driven forward by support at the highest levels (the tsar, Minister of Justice Shcheglovitov, and two ministers of internal affairs, Alexander Makarov and his successor, Vasily Maklakov’s brother Nikolai), it was also a scandal of statecraft. (Stolypin, though minister of internal affairs as well as premier at the outset, appears not to have been involved in the shady work of skewing the investigation and was assassinated soon after the affair’s start.)
In March 1911, a group of children found the body of 13-year-old Andrei Yushchinskii in a cave in Kiev. Almost from the outset there was evidence suggesting that a criminal gang, led by one Vera Cheberiak, had killed him because of suspicion that Andrei, a friend of Cheberiak’s son Zhenia, knew too much about the gang’s operations. But the local investigators initially fastened on the mistaken idea that Andrei’s mother and stepfather were the culprits. Recognition that this was questionable created a kind of vacuum, into which right-wing anti-Semites plunged. They concocted the idea that the case was one of ritual murder, and specifically suggested Beilis as the murderer. His closest link seems to have been that he been a clerk at a brick factory near where Andrei’s body was found; the factory was owned by a Jew, Jacob Zaitsev, who had used his brick factory profits to found a hospital open free of charge to indigent patients of all faiths.21
It seems to have been an accepted notion of such a murder (presumably propagated by those who invented the idea) that the blood should be drawn while the victim was still alive; but an autopsy found nothing to show that that had been true for Andrei.22 Soon after Andrei’s death, two of Vera Cheberiak’s children died: first, Andrei’s friend Zhenia Cheberiak, and a few days later a sister. Given that the two were quite likely to have had evidence about the real murderer of Andrei, there were suspicions that Vera might have killed them to forestall their possible testimony. In fact a pathologist’s report showed that they died of dysentery, and the Beilis defense, though generally eager to point to Vera and her gang, explicitly declined to pin the deaths on her.23
Under the influence and pressure of local anti-Semites, of the nationwide Union of the Russian People, and of a high St. Petersburg police official, Alexander Liadov, who was sent to Kiev by Shcheglovitov, the Kiev prosecutor cast aside the primary initial investigator, Nikolai Krasovskii, and worked to develop the ritual murder theory. Beilis was arrested and imprisoned in July 1911 and indicted in January 1912 (he remained in prison till his acquittal in the fall of 1913). Both imprisonment and indictment preceded the day in December 1912 on which Nikolai Maklakov took charge of the ministry of internal affairs, so he cannot be blamed for those two milestones. But he was obviously aware of a privately organized and widely credited report published in May 1912 exonerating Beilis, and he acknowledged in private before the trial that a conviction of Beilis was out of the question. By the time he became minister, the government’s focus had turned almost entirely to proving the general idea that Jews engaged in ritual murder, with the trial of Beilis serving mainly as a vehicle for that demonstration. Apart from helping to run the prosecution of a man whose innocence he pretty much accepted, Nikolai ordered surveillance of the jury through government agents in the guise of court officers. The results cannot have been heartening for the prosecution: one report said the jurors were wondering, “How can we convict Beilis if nothing is said about him at trial.”24
Vasily Maklakov was one of the three primary defense counsel, the others also being nationally famous defense lawyers—Nikolai Karabchevskii and Oscar Gruzenberg. Involved on the government’s side, though nominally appearing on behalf of the victim’s family as “civil plaintiffs,” was Georgii Zamyslovskii, one of Vasily Maklakov’s fellow deputies in the Duma and a rabid anti-Semite. Zamyslovskii was being surreptitiously paid a generous 2,500-ruble stipend by the government, but his speeches suggest that he found ample compensation in the sheer joy of ranting against Jews. (After the trial, Zamyslovskii suggested that the government pay him 25,000 rubles for publishing an account of the trial, a payment that Minister of Internal Affairs Maklakov arranged out of secret funds under the tsar’s control.)25
Vasily Maklakov’s main role was in summation. He addressed the jurors in a conversational tone, speaking throughout in simple words and starting: “They say, gentlemen of the jury, that the whole world is watching this trial, but I would like to forget about that, and would like it if no one was watching, and to talk only with you, gentlemen of the jury.” He then proceeded to review the evidence, or its absence, in the same matter-of-fact manner, with an eloquent closing that urged the jurors to focus on Beilis and not on the irrelevant and dubious attacks on Jews.26
The jury found Beilis not guilty. The vote was not recorded, but tsarist rules treated a verdict as an acquittal if there was either a majority for acquittal or a six-six split. It’s widely stated that the vote was six-six, an idea that appears to have originated with the right-wing paper Novoe Vremia (New times); its editors perhaps chose the six-six split because that was a vote consistent with the outcome but having the least tendency to show jury rejection of the state’s case.27 After more than two years in prison, Beilis at last won his release.
But in an unusual procedure, the court submitted another question to the jury. Though not specifically asking about ritual or religious purposes, the question was laden with religious/racial detail roughly tracking the evidence: had Andrei, in the brick factory associated with the Jewish hospital, had wounds inflicted on him “resulting in the almost complete loss of blood and in his death”? A yes answer would suggest a killing with intent to extract blood and thus probably a ritual murder. The jurors answered with a yes.28
A reporter who later talked with the jurors about the trial quoted one as saying: “Karabchevskii—we didn’t understand; Gruzenberg—we didn’t trust; Maklakov—he hit the nail on the head.”29 In fairness to Maklakov’s co-counsel, we should remember that at trial and in the media frenzy, the prosecution’s focus was on the canard of Jewish ritual murder, not poor Beilis himself, the main subject of Maklakov’s summation. If the jury verdict on ritual murder reflects a degree of anti-Semitism, that may also account in part for the jurors’ apparent distrust of Gruzenberg, who was Jewish.
Because the fiction of Jewish ritual murder seems so nonsensical, observers have wondered what might have possessed those at the political apex of the Russian Empire to pursue a case founded on that fiction, and to pursue it at such a cost—inflicting injury on an innocent citizen and exposing the regime to mockery and contempt among its Entente allies in Europe. Maklakov was among those weighing in on the subject, publishing articles in the newspaper Russkie Vedomosti and the journal Russkaia Mysl (Russian thought) in 1913. He explained the government’s behavior as a response to political pressure from its allies on the right, sacrificing justice to politics.30
The most interesting effort to refute Maklakov comes from the scholar Hans Rogger. He rejects the idea of political pressure, in large part on the ground that the right at that stage was not all that powerful. And the government, before it was embarrassed by the Lena Goldfields massacre in April 1912 (a shooting of several hundred workers who were peacefully protesting their living conditions), had no special need to shore up its right flank. In fact the dependence ran the other way. While the government doled out massive secret subsidies to the Union of the Russian People and others on the far right from 1905 to 1917, mainly to subsidize their presses, its officials recognized that the subsidized papers had very low circulation; the regime got very little bang for its ruble. Those favoring continued subsidies were reduced to the argument that without the government aid the papers would collapse, and that, even though small, they were an answer to the “leftwing and Jewish” press.31 Makarov, the minister of internal affairs immediately preceding Nikolai Maklakov, was planning, just before his replacement, to cut the subsidies off, but whatever chance of success that plan might have had, it came to an end with Nikolai Maklakov’s ascension.
Given the lack of government dependence on the right, Rogger suggests that the pursuit of Beilis and ritual murder represented “a search for a principle, for a common belief that would rally and bind together the disheartened forces of unthinking monarchism,” or “a conscious effort to supply ingredients for a missing faith.”32 In reaching this conclusion, Rogger offers some thoughts on Nikolai Maklakov: He notes Nikolai’s full awareness of the hard right’s weakness as a political force, characterizes him as “unstable and shallow,” and endorses a suggestion that his activity was in significant part due to the “hypnotic sway” held over him by Shcheglovitov.33
Rogger’s theory is enticing, but it doesn’t really answer the question why high officials would embrace as a rallying principle a completely spurious claim—that Jews indulge in ritual murder. To be sure, one could take Rogger a step further and argue that it was precisely the lunacy of the thesis that gave it value: as in submission to fraternity hazing and thousands of other social practices, the more absurd and costly the behavior (and the cost can be intellectual or social embarrassment), the more a person’s participation demonstrates his devotion to the cause or institution.
Both Maklakov and Rogger seem to me to overlook a simpler explanation—that people living in a milieu where a strong ideological proposition holds sway (here, the presumptive evil of Jews) are likely to accept without much independent evaluation claims that sustain the basic faith. On that view, the impulses of Nicholas II seem to be just a matter of doing what comes naturally, and the activities of Shcheglovitov and Nikolai Maklakov likely a combination of the same ideological inclination (perhaps chilled in Shcheglovitov’s case by his undoubted intelligence) and an effort to please their imperial master.
Whatever the merits of Maklakov’s analysis, he did not express it without cost. He and the editors of the paper and journal with his article were accused of distribution in print of “deceitful and shameful” information about officials. At about the same time, the government brought a similar charge against Vasily Shulgin, editor of a Kiev newspaper, the Kievlianin (Kiev citizen), for publishing an article exonerating Beilis. Shulgin’s article had been especially startling, as he was persistently and openly anti-Semitic. But in this instance, at least, he looked at the facts. Maklakov testified in the Shulgin trial, but Shulgin was convicted and sentenced to three months’ imprisonment. His term didn’t start immediately, however, and when World War I began he was allowed instead to join the military service; after he was wounded, the government was ashamed to put him in prison and pardoned him. The trial of Maklakov and the editors was delayed, but in due course he and the editors were found guilty. They appealed, but the appeal was for some reason never heard. Maklakov encountered the sentencing judge during the February Revolution, when their power relationship was reversed (Maklakov now on top, the other powerless), but Maklakov refrained from reacting at all.34
Given the bloodshed of the civil war and the Bolshevik regime, many of the figures in this book necessarily came to untimely, dramatic ends. Among these were Shcheglovitov and Nikolai Maklakov, both executed by the Bolsheviks on December 5, 1918, the first day of the Red Terror, without, of course, the government’s incurring the inconvenience of a trial. Menahem Mendel Beilis’s life after the trial was financially harsh, as he was dependent at the end on selling his account of the trial from door to door in New York. But throughout he preserved his honor (rejecting offers to exploit his fame), and he died peacefully in 1934.35 One is tempted to see a little poetic justice in this. But one should resist the temptation: however reprehensible the actions of Shcheglovitov and Nikolai Maklakov, their deaths in a massive Bolshevik bloodletting cannot be thought of as justice of any kind.
In light of Maklakov’s advocacy against the Pale and for Beilis, it seems odd to find suggestions that Maklakov was anti-Semitic. There is a more nuanced and compelling suggestion that he was not philo-Semitic.36 In any event, he himself observed in correspondence with Shulgin that he had a kind of “zoological” anti-Semitism—he claimed he had never seen a Jewish face that he found attractive. But he went on in the same paragraph to say that many people having this aesthetic impulse let it corrupt their thinking. Such a person “stubbornly stands on his convictions, insists on any rubbish, and an argument with such a person is obviously useless.”37 However Maklakov may have arrived at his negative aesthetic judgment, it seems not to have spilled over into his life as an advocate or, indeed, as a citizen and political figure.
An item of evidence that has been used against Maklakov is a January 27, 1916, entry in the diary of his good friend and fellow Kadet moderate, Ariadne Tyrkova-Williams: “Maklakov, always playful and joking, said, ‘It’s a big secret. I’m a good Kadet. Only I don’t favor compulsory alienation of land, equal rights for Jews, and universal suffrage.’”38 In a sense it’s clear that Maklakov was joking, for his rejection of the party line on the first and third items, which were regular Kadet themes and which he did in fact reject, surely rendered him a dubious Kadet rather than a “good” one. But why would he have added the reference to “equal rights for Jews”? A conceivable explanation is that Tyrkova-Williams misunderstood his position on the bill expanding peasant rights, which he guided through the Duma in June 1916. In that context (as we’ll see in chapter 12) he did reject an attempted expansion of the pending bill to embrace equal rights for Jews—the proposed change would have doomed the bill, injuring peasants and not helping Jews in the slightest. (His draft, by clarifying a provision that had been mistakenly read to the disadvantage of Jews, rendered the provision harmless.) But the Duma activity on peasant rights took place in June 1916, and he became reporter for the committee producing the bill only in March 1916, not in time for Tyrkova’s January 1916 diary entry. Conceivably he foresaw the peasant rights issue as the next occasion for Duma action on equal rights, and his thoughts may have jumped ahead to that context. Whether it was a silly joke or an anticipation of the peasant-rights controversy, the remark (if correctly recorded) seems not to have reflected any genuine impulse to deny Jews equal rights.
A Soviet historian has hinted that one argument by Maklakov in the debate on the Pale reflects anti-Semitism. Maklakov drew a distinction between individual anti-Semitism, both in business and even in culture (referring as an example to people who refuse to listen to pianist Arthur Rubinstein). He suggested that private anti-Semitism was each person’s right, whereas state discrimination was inconsistent with the state’s duty to its subjects. Then he went on to link the two as a way of supporting repeal of the Pale: “I would say to the anti-Semites that they ought first to insist on recognition of equal treatment of Jews by the state so as to have a better moral right to their personal anti-Semitism.”39 His purpose, plainly, was to turn what was likely a personal attitude of many Duma members, perhaps a majority, into an affirmative reason for ending the Pale. By opposing a grievous, large-scale wrong inflicted by Russia on its Jewish subjects, they would acknowledge a line that even their anti-Semitism would not cross. Whatever the abstract merits of a state ban on private discrimination might be, the argument made complete sense in context and may well have pulled some deputies into the repeal column.
In view of the Tyrkova-Williams diary entry, it seems worthwhile to recount briefly some of Maklakov’s other advocacy for the fair treatment of Jews. During the war the government had the gall—at a time when it was engaged in an ethnic cleansing of Jews from a broad zone near the front—to issue circulars accusing Jews of, first, being part of a German-inspired plot to burn crops, exacerbate the food crisis, and generally foment revolution; and, second, of hoarding goods and money, and thereby promoting dissatisfaction and insurrection. Maklakov joined with Miliukov and other Kadet and non-Kadet leaders in seeking an interpellation in the Duma. The move was defeated, with Kadet agreement, out of fear that it would be voted down under Octobrist pressure.40
In the course of a Duma speech generally indicting the government’s conduct of the war, Maklakov singled out the way in which a government circular had scapegoated the Jews for inflation (fictive explanations of inflation, disregarding increases in the money supply, are legion around the world!). He had some fun with the passage, saying that it went so far as to explain inflation as a Jewish scheme to end the Pale of Settlement. He noted instead the more obvious (and economically coherent) attribution of inflation to the government’s issuance of paper money.41
In a Kadet party congress during the war, Maklakov opposed a resolution relating to government treatment of the Jews in Galicia, but only because he doubted it would have the slightest effect. He observed that anti-Semitism was “colossal” in the army there. Although no one thought that all Jews were spies, they generally thought all spies were Jews. Given the way Jews were being treated, they would have been morally justified in becoming spies, he thought, but he had no reason to think that many of them were. In any event, no facts about Jewish espionage would justify the way they were treated. What the party had to fight was the mistaken set of notions about the supposed link between Jews and espionage. “And there is only one means of doing so—with facts.”42
A couple of other points in this vein: First, as we’ll see in the next chapter’s discussion of Maklakov’s hostility to the tsarist regime’s stumble-footed Russification programs, he drew a careful distinction between a healthy nationalism and a bullying nationalism. The principle accords with his work opposing restrictions on Jews. Second, during the Russian civil war, he exercised what influence he had, as the defunct Provisional Government’s chosen representative to France, to lean on the White forces to behave better toward Jews in areas under their control. Strategic considerations, to be sure, called for such a policy to attract support from Russia’s former allies, but his work there also tracks his record in the pre-Revolutionary years.
In short, Maklakov’s eloquent efforts from 1905 to 1917 to curb the regime’s religious discrimination show no sign of being infected by his aesthetic views, however puzzling we may find them. If the regime had followed his advice, the Jews and Old Believers at the receiving end of discrimination would have had far less reason to abandon it in 1917. So in all likelihood would other Russians who valued a state that respected its people.