, then the
fifth Gymnasium Vasily, or Basil, was the son of
Alexey Nikolaevich Maklakov (1837 – May 1895), a Moscow
ophthalmology professor, the inventor of
ocular tonometry, a member of the
zemstvo and the
Moscow City Duma. His mother came from a noble and wealthy family, spoke three foreign languages, and played the piano. She had seven children and died when he was 11 years old. Vasily had a full-time governess, and he and his siblings learned to speak French fluently. He was interested in
organic chemistry and bought a
Bunsen burner. He studied mathematics and physics after he left the 5th Moscow Gymnasium in 1887. He was impressed by French political life and influenced by
Count Mirabeau. During a visit to the famous
World's fair in Paris with his father, French students took him to election meetings and introduced him to candidates. Back home, Maklakov published an account of the "Paris Student Association" in
Russkiye Vedomosti. Like Lenin and
Ayn Rand, he was influenced by the death of
Nikolay Chernyshevsky, a victim of injustice. In 1890, he raised money for the poor with concerts; he was arrested for his participation in the student movement and expelled from the university "for political unreliability". He spent five days in the
Butyrka prison. Then, he went back to Paris with his stepmother, the author of children books, and he met with the anarchists and geographers
Léon Metchnikoff and
Reclus. Back home, Vasily organized a student economic commission and held his first political speech. He met with
Leo Tolstoy and began to appear in newspapers, mainly because of the
Russian famine of 1891–1892. In 1894, he joined the army in
Rostow as a volunteer. After his father had a talk about his son with the Director of Police
Pyotr Durnovo, the
trustee P.A. Kapnist suggested for Vasily to change faculties and to study history. Maklakov was seen as "a man of outstanding intelligence". After the ban was lifted, he graduated under
Paul Vinogradoff, an eminent scholar and researcher of classical antiquity at
Imperial Moscow University. Maklakov was offered to stay to prepare for the professorship but this was opposed. He then decided to choose for
advocacy and graduated from the law faculty. His thesis was dedicated to "The impact of dependent land ownership on civil legal capacity at the end of the
Carolingian period". After the death of their father, the brothers inherited Dergaykovo-estate near
New Jerusalem Monastery.
Lawyer In 1896, he entered the
bar and became a member of the Moscow Law Society. It seems that he became the assistant of the Polish lawyer Alexander Robertovich Lednicki and collaborated with Fedor Nikiforovich Plevako (1842–1909), a distinguished
attorney at law and judicial speaker. Maklakov and his brother and sister Maria moved to Zubovsky Boulevard, not far from
Leo Tolstoy in
Khamovniki District. Together, they walked or went to the baths on which Maklakov had an interesting account. At
Yasnaya Polyana, outside Moscow, they discussed the fate of the
Doukhobors. At the novelist's urging, he defended a "
Bespopovtsy" in the
Kaluga Governorate accused of blasphemy; later he defended a "
Tolstoyan", who was accused of storing prohibited works of Tolstoy; that case ended with an extremely lenient sentence. Plevako, a real state adviser, owned a
Jugendstil apartment building at
Novinskiy Boulevard. Maklakov, divorced, lived there too; Then, he participated in the
Union of Liberation, a moderate reform group of around 23 men. It saw as its task to fight the autocracy and to introduce a constitutional system in Russia. It imagined the future of Russia only in the development of the existing system, an organic evolution, not in coups. The members had a
zemstvo background, representing the landowning class and
intelligentsia.
The October Manifesto During the
First Russian Revolution, the Tsar asked his cousin
Grand Duke Nicholas to assume the role of dictator, but the Grand Duke threatened to shoot himself if the Tsar refused to endorse
Sergei Witte's memorandum. After a ten-day general strike in October, Nicholas II had no choice but to take a number of steps in the constitutional liberal direction. In the
October Manifesto, Witte advocated the creation of an elected
parliament, which took the form of establishing the State Duma and the
multi-party system. On 20 October 1905, Witte was appointed as the first Chairman of the
Russian Council of Ministers (effectively
Prime Minister), but the Kadets refused to join
his cabinet. The Kadets doubted that Witte could deliver on the promises made by the Tsar in the October Manifesto since they knew the Tsar's staunch opposition to reform. On 9 November 1906, the cabinet issued a decree enabling Russia's 90 million peasants to start a complex process of transforming their
property rights. On 24 November, by Imperial decree, provisional regulations on the censorship of magazines and newspaper was released. After an armed uprising in December 1905, the reactionary
Pyotr Durnovo was appointed as Minister of Interior on 1 January 1906, a decision that was heavily criticized. The real ruler of the country was
Dmitri Trepov. In the
Russian Constitution of 1906, the Tsar gave up
autocracy. In July, regretting his "moment of weakness", he dissolved the
First Duma. The ministers remained responsible solely to Nicholas II, not to the Duma.
As deputy in the State Duma At the end of 1905, Maklakov joined the
Freemasons when the right to form unions and private meetings was established under Nicholas II of Russia and thus the limitations on Freemasonry were lifted. Maklakov played an active part in the organization of the
Constitutional Democratic Party (KD or Kadets), the first open political party serving on its central committee in October 1905. He promoted a
coalition cabinet unlike
Stolypin, Milyukov and
Dmitri Trepov. Maklakov was elected by the Muscovites in the
Arbat District to the
Second Duma in February 1907, but he was more a lawyer than a deputy. He argued that as a political party the KD must prepare itself for government participation and so must be prepared to defend the rights of whatever sort of government if it wanted to be regarded as a serious political force and to concentrate on defending not only the rights of the people but also those of the state. After the
Coup of June 1907, which was considered by Maklakov as a day that would go down in infamy, Stolypin and the Tsar changed the electoral law and gave greater electoral value to the votes of
landowners and owners of city properties and less value to the votes of the peasantry. In summer 1908, Maklakov travelled to
Siberia because of the construction of the
Amur Railway. In early 1909, he inherited Plevako's law practice. In 1912, the influence of the Kadets in the Duma had shrunk. A high point of his legal career was the defence of
Menahem Mendel Beilis, a Russian Jew wrongly accused of
ritual murder of a 13-year-old Ukrainian child. Beilis was tried twice; the evidence against him was very weak. Alexander Tager wrote that "the whole country was against the process, except for the extreme right and that the ritual murder of which he was accused was a fiction of the
Black Hundreds". Maklakov "hit the nail on the head," and in October 1913, Beilis was acquitted and immediately released. His acquittal was "a clear defeat for the authorities and a victory for liberal and radical public opinion" and greatly calmed public opinion, for no innocent man was convicted. The actual killers of the child were professional criminals. Maklakov had published articles claiming that the jury's verdict had saved the court's good name. Later it turned out that five of the
jurors, including the foreman, had been members of the
Union of the Russian People.
First World War (1916) In 1914, Maklakov joined the
All-Russian Zemstvo Union, which supported sick and wounded soldiers. Maklakov grew hostile to the government under
Ivan Goremykin as the
Eastern Front (World War I) went on. Russia hoped that the war would last until Christmas, but after a year, the situation had become disastrous. In the large cities, there were a shortage of food and high prices, and the Russian people blamed all on "dark forces" or spies for and collaborators with Germany. His younger brother,
Nikolay Maklakov, a staunch monarchist who served as Russia's Interior Minister, was forced to resign. In September Maklakov published a sensational article, "A Tragic Situation," describing Russia as a vehicle with no brakes, driven along a narrow mountain path by a "mad chauffeur, who can't drive," an
allegory with a reference to the Tsar. At the end of 1915, he actively supported the
Progressive Bloc, a coalition of liberal parties that called for sweeping reforms, with the aim of inducing the Tsar to co-operate with the
Fourth Duma. The most conservative of its leaders, Maklakov was anxious to preserve the party's unity, which appeared fragile in the face of his many ideological clashes with Milyukov, who was reputed for his intransigent liberal individualism. Milyukov suggested for Maklakov to join the
Octobrists. In early November 1916,
Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovich of Russia,
Prince Lvov and general
Mikhail Alekseyev attempted to persuade the Tsar to send away Empress
Alexandra Feodorovna, Rasputin's steadfast patron, to the
Livadia Palace, in Yalta, or to Britain. On 3 November, Maklakov held a powerful speech the government of
Boris Shturmer. He was visited soon by Yusupov but refused to get involved in a conspiracy although later that month, he decided to give him legal advice. Maklakov approved the murder of
Grigory Rasputin and even served as a sort of "legal adviser" to one of its perpetrators,
Felix Yusupov, but he categorically refused to participate in the plot. One of the five participants in the assassination,
Vladimir Purishkevich, claimed that it was Maklakov who had supplied Prince Felix Yusupov with a
dumbbell or
truncheon and poison to murder Grigori Rasputin. On the day of the murder (30 December 1916), Maklakov left for Moscow, but went back the next day. In 1923, Maklakov wrote that he had supplied Yusupov with harmless
aspirin. Also, Lazovert stated later he had used not poison but a harmless powder. Maklakov was
elected in the
Constituent Assembly but in October was sent to Paris. Panina was arrested when she refused to transfer the funds of the Ministry of Education to the Bolsheviks. In the first
political trial she was accused of embezzling 93,000 rubles from the Ministry, which she denied. ==France==