The Reformer

Vasily Maklakov was a lawyer and Duma deputy who spent the last decades of imperial Russia fighting for something the country never achieved, a liberal order built on law rather than force. Stephen F. Williams, himself a federal judge, follows Maklakov’s battles for judicial independence, religious tolerance, and peasant rights against both a stubborn autocracy and revolutionaries who preferred destruction to reform. It is a portrait of the moderate’s dilemma, and a study of how Russia’s chance at gradual change slipped away into 1917.