Soon afterward, Witte launched a set of negotiations aimed at forming a cabinet relatively acceptable to the nation. First he asked Dmitri Shipov, the leader of liberal Slavism, to call on him, and asked him to join the cabinet as state controller. Shipov declined the job offer, but proffered some advice. As Witte had clearly invited Shipov in order to learn a zemstvo viewpoint, Shipov advised him to turn to the zemstvo leadership, in the form of the Bureau of Zemstvo Congresses, and ask it to send him a delegation. Shipov expected that at the Bureau’s scheduled meeting on October 22 he would have a say in naming the delegates. But the process moved too swiftly. Witte sent the invitation to the Bureau by telegram, which (in Maklakov’s words) “whipped up” the Bureau’s self-confidence. Seeing the request as a sign of the government’s weakness and a capitulation, the Bureau began to act with great self-confidence.25
Before Shipov could meet with the Bureau, it formed a small committee that included, either as a member or at least an attendee, someone who wasn’t involved in zemstvo matters at all, Miliukov himself.26 Miliukov managed to arrange the selection of F. F. Kokoshkin as leader of the delegation, a choice that Miliukov himself recognized as signaling to Witte that the zemstvo bureau was not ready to compromise.27 The committee charged the delegation to tell Witte that the only solution to the present situation was to call a constituent assembly, to be chosen by a “four-tailed” franchise; and that a constitution “granted” by the tsar would be completely unsatisfactory. (This insistence on immediate democracy at the outset, including a democratic method of generating a constitution, seems based on Miliukov’s belief that a developed and organized democratic society “can be created only by an active political life,”28 that is, that the onset of democracy would itself be enough to generate the skills needed to make democracy functional, to enable it to survive amid countervailing forces such as reaction, populist demagoguery, and interest-group machinations.) Obviously Witte could not accept such terms.29 Witte soon thereafter invited Miliukov himself in for consultation, and, curiously, Miliukov’s direct advice to Witte was quite different from the standard Kadet notion that the only way forward was through a constituent assembly. Writing of it later, he explained that with Witte he conceived of himself as acting in a non-party capacity:
I came [Miliukov reported] not as representative of anyone but in my capacity as a private person, whose advice was sought by the highest representative of the authorities of the moment, when it was being decided what direction Russian history should take. And on the question then put to me by Witte, what should be done, I decided to answer according to my conscience and personal conviction, not binding myself to the generally approved political formulae of my intellectual fellow travelers. I wanted to take the discussion down from academic heights to the sphere of real life.30
Miliukov’s explanation of his answer does not really bridge the gap between his public position and his advice to Witte. If important decisions “for Russian history” were at stake (as they were), it would be startling to think that Witte would want anything other than Miliukov’s real views, or that he would prefer notions from the “academic heights” rather than ones from the real world. It seems a sad commentary on the politics of the Kadet party that there was such a gulf between its leader’s “conscience and personal conviction” and the “generally approved political formulae” that he and his “intellectual fellow travelers” had enthusiastically adopted.
The substance of Miliukov’s advice was no less otherworldly. He told Witte that, although he still thought that a constituent assembly was the ideal way to get to a constitution, it was unsuitable in the circumstances and that the tsar should just grant one. Yes, he acknowledged, society would complain (in part because Miliukov himself had been constantly insisting that only a constituent assembly would do), but in the end it would work.
Specifically, he proposed that Witte arrange translation of either the Belgian or the Bulgarian constitution (presumably chosen as reasonably liberal written constitutions, and, in the Bulgarian case, one that had survived since 1879 in a country with scant liberal tradition), get the tsar to sign it the next day (whichever constitution it happened to be), and publish it the following day. Miliukov’s constitutionalism seemed to be wrapped in a passion for labels, for form regardless of substance: when Witte refused to use the word “constitution” and explained that the tsar was against it, Miliukov, by his own account, broke off the discussion, telling Witte, “It is useless for us to continue our conversation.”31
Maklakov says, with some justice, that Witte must have taken the constitutional proposals as a joke. At stake was a new order for a huge country of different ethnicities, different “estates” (a historical legacy that Maklakov was determined to eradicate),32 and different levels of education. Its political relations were encrusted with complications that had accumulated over centuries. And Miliukov was saying that for this transition, it was enough to adopt the constitution of one of two very small countries, with apparent indifference as to which it should be.33 All told, he took a “flick-a-switch” view of how to transition to liberal democracy.
Maklakov’s critique of the Belgian/Bulgarian solution operates on two practical levels. The first is the matter of political power. The tsar had not been defeated. To be sure, his issuance of the October Manifesto had not delivered the hoped-for calm. Indeed, a major insurrection had arisen in Moscow right after its promulgation. But as suppression of the uprising in December was to show, the regime could protect itself. It was naïve and even arrogant to think that under those circumstances the tsar would accept the role of a figurehead in a purely parliamentary regime.
The other element of absurdity in the Belgian/Bulgarian option lay simply in the broader issues of social and political evolution. If a new regime in Russia was to live as a rule-of-law state, it could not instantly transform all the actors’ accustomed roles by fiat. Change to an alternative system of arbitrary rule would be simple enough. But in Maklakov’s view transformation to the rule of law was a different story: people’s old practices, expectations, and habits of mind inevitably shape their behavior to some degree, and Russia’s historic ones would not match the kind of full-blown democracy that Miliukov contemplated.
After the failure of negotiations between the Kadets and Witte, revolutionaries launched a general political strike in Moscow with the hope—which proved well-founded—that it would develop into an armed uprising.34 (Some school students were accused of having started the uprising. Maklakov defended them, and a fellow lawyer and observer wrote later that “never did Maklakov’s talent sparkle so brightly” as in the defense, laying bare the weak spots of the prosecution and leading to acquittal.35) In Maklakov’s view, any constitutional regime would have felt obliged to suppress it. Witte’s choices were whether to do so in alliance with liberal society or with the right. Even in an autocracy, a prime minister needs allies. Finding himself unequivocally rejected on the liberal side, Witte predictably turned to the right, unleashing Minister of the Interior Durnovo to repress the revolution.
Maklakov makes no bones about the savagery of this repression. He describes the use of artillery against neighborhoods,