Pavel Milyukov

Pavel Nikolayevich Milyukov was the most eminent Russian liberal of his age: a historian, a political writer and for many years the leader of the Kadets, the Constitutional Democratic Party. During the Great War he called for fighting on to victory alongside the Allies and for Russian control of Constantinople and the Straits, which earned him the nickname “Milyukov of the Dardanelles”. In November 1916 he delivered in the Duma his “stupidity or treason?” speech, which became one of the harbingers of the fall of tsarism. After the February Revolution he was the chief architect of the Provisional Government and its Foreign Minister, but after two months he had to go, because he did not understand that the soldiers and workers wanted peace above all. For twenty years he published in Paris the most important newspaper of the Russian emigration, and faced with the threat from Hitler he sided, despite his hatred of Bolshevism, with the Soviet Union.

Historian

He was born on 27 January 1859 (15 January in the Julian calendar) in Moscow, into an architect’s family. He studied history and philology at Moscow University under Vasily Klyuchevsky and Pavel Vinogradov. His work on the state economy of Russia in the era of Peter the Great’s reforms and his Outlines of Russian Culture won him fame as one of Russia’s leading historians. He married Anna Smirnova, an activist of the women’s movement.

In 1895, for lectures deemed politically harmful, he was stripped of the right to teach and exiled to Ryazan. He then lectured at the University of Sofia and carried out research in Ottoman Macedonia, which made him one of Russia’s foremost experts on Balkan affairs. After returning to St Petersburg he was imprisoned several times. In 1903 he lectured at the University of Chicago and in Boston, and he worked with Pyotr Struve on the liberal journal Osvobozhdeniye (“Liberation”), published abroad.

Leader of the Kadets

During the Revolution of 1905, brought about largely by the defeats in the war with Japan, Milyukov was one of the founders of the Kadet party, and from 1907 he chaired its central committee. He also in effect ran the party daily, Rech. In the Third and Fourth State Dumas he sat as a deputy for St Petersburg and as chairman of the Kadet group, which called itself the opposition “of His Majesty”, not to His Majesty. In 1913 he served on the international commission of the Carnegie Endowment that investigated the crimes committed during the Balkan Wars. He was a penetrating analyst, but also a doctrinaire and conceited man. His associates admitted that no one in the party dared argue with him.

The war and “stupidity or treason?”

In July 1914 Milyukov warned against Russia committing itself to the defence of Serbia. Once war broke out, however, he announced on behalf of the Kadets that they were suspending their struggle with the government for its duration. He saw the war as an opportunity: Russia would win Constantinople and the Straits, and the Slav peoples of Austria-Hungary their liberation. His younger son Sergei was killed at the front in 1915.

The defeats of 1915 changed the mood. Milyukov put forward the slogan of a “government of public confidence” and was one of the chief architects of the Progressive Bloc, a coalition of liberals and moderate conservatives that commanded a majority in the Duma. The Tsar responded by taking supreme command of the army and adjourning the Duma. In 1916 Milyukov travelled with a Duma delegation to the Allied countries, where he picked up rumours of supposed efforts by the Russian court to conclude a separate peace.

On 14 November 1916 (1 November in the Julian calendar), at the opening of the new session, he listed from the rostrum the failures and abuses of Prime Minister Boris Stürmer’s government, and after each charge he asked: “What is this, stupidity or treason?” He also named Rasputin and the “court party”, and he quoted in German, from a Viennese newspaper, a sentence about the victory of the party gathered around the young Tsarina, so that the presiding officer would not cut him off. The censors banned the speech from being printed, but copies of it, often embellished with charges he had never made, circulated throughout the country and at the front. The Tsar soon dismissed Stürmer. Milyukov himself later admitted that his listeners answered “treason” even where he was not sure himself. It was the first time that the highest circles of power had been accused of treason from the rostrum of parliament, and no one suffered any consequences for it.

Foreign Minister

When the Petrograd garrison mutinied on 12 March 1917, Milyukov joined the Provisional Committee of the Duma, chaired by Mikhail Rodzianko, and negotiated with the Petrograd Soviet over the formation of a new government. He later wrote that the Duma’s involvement gave the street revolt a centre, a banner and a slogan. On 15 March, in the Tauride Palace, he announced the composition of the Provisional Government, headed by Prince Georgy Lvov. When someone in the crowd asked who had elected them, he replied that the revolution had. He himself took charge of foreign affairs. He wanted to preserve a constitutional monarchy, and when Nicholas II abdicated in favour of his brother, on 16 March he and Guchkov alone urged Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich to accept the crown. He argued that without a monarch the new government would be a frail boat on a stormy sea. He remained in the minority.

As minister he assured the Allies that Russia would honour its commitments and fight on to victory. The United States was the first to recognise Russian democracy, followed by Britain, France and Italy. Milyukov also put before the government the draft of a proclamation to the Poles, issued on 30 March, in which Russia for the first time recognised the right of the Polish nation to an independent state, linked to Russia by a free military alliance. At the same time he made no secret of wanting the agreements concluded by the tsarist regime to be carried out, including the promise of Constantinople. The Petrograd Soviet demanded peace without annexations or indemnities. When on 1 May Milyukov attached to the government’s declaration, as passed on to the Allies, a note of his own assuring them that the Russian people wished to carry the war to a decisive victory, a crisis erupted. Soldiers took to the streets under the slogan “Down with Milyukov”, and shots were fired on Nevsky Prospect. His colleagues in the government did not defend him. On 15 May he left the government, and a few days later a coalition government including socialists was formed.

From Kornilov to Kiev

Milyukov remained leader of the Kadets and a spokesman for restoring discipline in the army. In the summer of 1917 he supported the programme of General Lavr Kornilov. After the Bolshevik seizure of power in November 1917 he was elected to the Constituent Assembly, but the Kadet party was outlawed as a “party of enemies of the people”. He went to the Don, where he helped build the political base of the White Volunteer Army. In May 1918, in German-occupied Kiev, he opened talks with the German command about a joint struggle against the Bolsheviks. For most Kadets this was a denial of everything he had stood for during the war. Milyukov resigned the party leadership, and later acknowledged the step as a mistake.

Paris

At the end of 1918 he went to the West to seek help for the Whites, and from 1921 he lived in Paris. After the defeat of the Whites he proclaimed a “new tactic”: the emigration should count not on intervention from outside but on change within Russia, and its allies were to be the peasants and the peoples of the borderlands, not the generals. This led to a split among the Kadets and to the formation around him of the Republican Democratic Union. From 1921 to 1940 he published the daily Poslednie Novosti (“The Latest News”), the most widely read newspaper of the Russian emigration, in which the most eminent émigré writers, among them Ivan Bunin, were published. On 28 March 1922 in Berlin, during a speech he was giving, two Russian monarchists tried to shoot him. His friend Vladimir Nabokov, the writer’s father, who shielded him, was killed. One of the assassins, Pyotr Shabelsky-Bork, later collaborated with the Nazis.

In emigration Milyukov wrote a History of the Second Russian Revolution and his memoirs, and continued his historical work. In the 1930s, with Hitler ruling Germany and Japan having occupied Manchuria, he placed the interests of the Russian state above all else ever more clearly. In 1933 he argued in Prague that in the event of a war with Germany the emigration should side with the Soviet Union. He supported the imperial aims of Stalin’s foreign policy, while still rejecting communism. During the Winter War with Finland in 1939–1940 he said that he was sorry for the Finns but was “for the Vyborg province”. In June 1940, as the Germans approached Paris, Poslednie Novosti ceased publication and Milyukov left for the south of France. He rejected the occupiers’ overtures to collaborate. He saw the German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941 as an assault on Russia, and the last great joy of his life was the Red Army’s victory at Stalingrad. He died on 31 March 1943 at Aix-les-Bains. After the war his ashes were moved to the Batignolles Cemetery in Paris.

Assessment

To his supporters Milyukov was the embodiment of Russian liberalism and parliamentarism, a man of great learning and courage who in 1916 said aloud what most of the country was thinking. His critics, including some from his own camp, accused him of doctrinairism and detachment from reality. The speech of November 1916, based partly on unverified rumours, undermined the authority of the monarchy, but it also stirred up feelings that the liberals were later unable to control. As minister he clung stubbornly to the war aims, including Constantinople, at a moment when the country wanted peace above all. Many historians, such as Richard Pipes and Orlando Figes, believe that this lack of judgement weakened the Provisional Government from its first weeks and smoothed the way to power for Vladimir Lenin. The American scholar Melissa Stockdale, the author of his biography, stresses on the other hand that he consistently defended the principle that Russia must keep its word to its allies. His path from defending a democratic Russia to supporting Stalin in the war against Hitler illustrates well the dilemma that confronted the whole Russian emigration in the 1930s.