His father consulted Kapnist, who told him to go to the root of the problem—St. Petersburg—and gave him letters to I. D. Delianov, the minister of public education, and to Pyotr N. Durnovo, then director of the police department and formerly a colleague of Kapnist in the procurator’s office. Right after his father left for St. Petersburg, Vasily was called to the police station and told that as a political unreliable he would henceforth be under police observation.
In St. Petersburg, Delianov asked Vasily’s father what Maklakov’s offense might have been. His father replied that he was hoping to get the answer from him. But Delianov also said that if Kapnist would accept responsibility for Vasily, there would be no problem with the ministry of education. The minister then urged him to see Durnovo. The latter took the same position as Delianov on the effect of getting the tutor to assume responsibility. Kapnist agreed to do so, though telling Vasily he mustn’t join illegal organizations. Technically, this included organizations forbidden under generally unenforced rules, such as those barring the zemliachestvos, largely apolitical student associations that were built on the desire of homesick students to see others from their parts of the country.
Years later Count Sergei Witte (finance minister from 1892 to 1903, and till April 1906, prime minister, and the empire’s most influential minister throughout the period)30 introduced Durnovo to Maklakov while all three were vacationing in Vichy. By then Durnovo had served as minister of internal affairs. The conversation drifted to this episode, and Durnovo told him that such things were done for small faults, simply to show that the authorities were watching and not to fool around, and that the orders were often revoked. In short, a trivial matter could terrify a student, even if the orders were revoked, and blight the student’s higher education and likely his career if they were not.31 For Maklakov, the immediate cause of his escape from this fate was his father’s excellent connections—a point later harped on by Professor Bogoslovskii, the one so upset by Maklakov’s shouting “Marseillaise! Marseillaise!” from behind a pillar.32
These close calls with government arbitrariness, and his escape through the accident of paternal connections, must have added zest to Maklakov’s lifetime of efforts to expose and thwart exactly that arbitrariness. He saw them as a good summing up of the old regime and an explanation of why it had so few defenders later.33
It would be nice to be able to say that when we end discussion of these episodes we put paid to Maklakov’s difficulties with the authorities, but it would not be true. Spontaneous civic association is the bedrock of civil society, and on this issue Maklakov’s mind and nature put him at odds with the regime. Maklakov not only admired Tocqueville, civic associations’ greatest proponent (he later participated in a project for translating many of Tocqueville’s works into Russian),34 but he also seemed by disposition to have relished joining and creating and enlivening such associations. The regime, by contrast, was instinctively hostile to just about any independent association of citizens. Once two or more people were gathered together for any purpose, no matter how innocent superficially, their thoughts just might turn to politics. Maklakov’s behavior left him, at best, in subdued conflict with existing authority.
In his first two university years, the years of rather fruitless study of natural sciences, he appears to have joined two of the existing zemliachestvos, one for the Nizhny Novgorod region and one for Siberia, and he later participated in the formation of one for Moscow. The 1884 rules governing universities specifically named zemliachestvos as among the organizations students were forbidden to join.35 He also joined other students in taking an existing organizational model, an institute formed by students in the medical faculty, seeking to spread it among all faculties. He believed that such organizations, reaching beyond the purely social goals of the zemliachestvos, were likely to be more effective. Indeed, the organizing students felt themselves to be acting on the militant-sounding maxim “He who wields the stick is the corporal,” and, partly as a joke, they called the center a “fighting organization.” That this did not lead to disaster seems to have been the result of Bryzgalov’s successors’ pragmatic decision to lighten the yoke a bit.36
Maklakov also had a hand in turning the student orchestra and chorus, formerly governed by the university administration, into a self-governing student organization. He and others formed a kind of “Management Board,” half of the members of which were from the orchestra and chorus and the other half nonmembers, using broad student involvement to help justify student control. They secured student approval of the change by asking that the annual meeting be held in an auditorium, which they then packed with supporters; the effect was evidently strong enough to abort any official effort at rejection. Maklakov was elected president of the first board. To keep the elective principle fresh, the initial board members didn’t run for a second term.37
Maklakov’s involvement in the orchestra and chorus—specifically in advocating dedication of concert proceeds to relief of the famine of 1891—launched his reputation as a speaker. In the end, the choice of famine relief came at no cost to indigent students. Enthusiasm for the project (partly cultivated by getting popular professors to talk it up) led to not only a more than usually lucrative concert but also a successful subscription that raised double the usual amount for needy students.38
But the actual provision of famine relief gave rise to a typical imperial Russian minidispute. University authorities wanted the money distributed through a specific official organization created for the famine. The student board saw this as an invasion of students’ rights. But it worked out a compromise behind the scenes, with the university publicly asking only that the money be given through some official entity. The board agreed, taking the risk that the full student membership wouldn’t approve the official organization ultimately proposed (which proved to be the one originally named). The student membership voted its agreement, thus nipping a potential crisis in the bud.39
Though most events in Maklakov’s as yet brief life underscored the hyperactive character of the Russian state, his university years also provided him with a dramatic example of the state’s potential benefits. His older sister had often spoken of Mikhail Alexandrovich Novoselov, one of her gymnasium instructors, as a wonderful teacher and person. Maklakov, attending a lecture in the natural sciences faculty, found himself chatting with his neighbor, who proved to be Novoselov and who expounded his rather Tolstoyan ideas—that the state’s reliance on force made it in effect dishonorable and that revolutionaries were no better, as they just wanted to secure the power of the state for themselves. He also believed that if people saw how a community that was not founded on force worked, they would be drawn to it and would want to join, just as people who see someone actually cross a dangerous river are inspired to take the risk themselves. Novoselov proposed to found a colony based on this principle, and did so in Tver province.
Maklakov, along with some friends, went to share this experience and emerged with conflicting thoughts. He deeply admired the simplicity of the participants’ way of life; he mentions that that was the summer he gave up smoking. But he was equally clear that this was not for him. On his return to Moscow, he wrote Novoselov an enthusiastic letter, saying how the people there had found their true path, and that this was written in their faces. He soon realized that he’d overstated his position; Novoselov responded in terms clearly expecting Maklakov to return and join the colony.
In any event, the colony soon came to a tragic end. Neighboring peasants, learning that the colony believed one should never return evil for evil, tested it by stealing a couple of horses for no other reason than that they felt the need of them. The colony contemplated enlisting the aid of the local authorities, but decided against it, presumably on Tolstoyan grounds. The next day the whole neighboring village came, and the colony welcomed them, thinking they were acting out of conscience. But the peasants came to haul off everything they could—and did so. After that, no one wanted to remain in the colony. Novoselov himself became a priest.40
In the summer of 1889, when Maklakov was 20 years old and the French Revolution was 100, his father went to Paris for