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.

After the ban was lifted, he graduated under Paul Vinogradoff, an eminent scholar and researcher of classical antiquity at Imperial Moscow University.

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.

[15] 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.

[16] 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.

[18] 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.

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.

[8] He attracted attention with a brilliant speech about military field courts, dealt with Sergei Konstantinovich Gershelman, advocated the abolition of the death penalty and insisted on the inviolability of the individual.

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.

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".

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.

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.

[26][27] 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.

[28] 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.

[30] 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.

[34] 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 26 February 1917, Nikolai Pokrovsky reported on his negotiations with the Bloc, led by Maklakov, at the session of the Council of Ministers in the Mariinsky Palace.

After the February Revolution, Vasily Maklakov supported Lavr Kornilov against Kerensky and aspired to take the office of Minister of Justice in the Provisional Government.

When he arrived in Paris, Maklakov learned of the Bolshevik takeover (October Revolution) and he represented a no longer existent government.

[46] In Paris, he met with Nikolay Sokolov, who had investigated the cases of the execution of the Romanov family but held no longer legal authority.

There was an official delegation of Bolsheviks in Paris, diplomatic relations between the Soviets and the United Kingdom and France were established on 2 February and 28 October 1924.

It was through Maklakov that the widow of Count Sergei Witte was able to obtain the memoirs of her late husband, which were of a destructive nature, stored in the safe of a bank in Bayonne.

Maklakov supported Stolypin who had tried to form a "coalition cabinet", but Milyukov did not trust the Tsar and his Manifesto and refused to co-operate.

In February 1945, Maklakov and several surviving members of the Provisional Government visited the Soviet embassy to express their pride and gratitude for the war effort of the Russian people.

Despite encroaching deafness, Maklakov remained at the helm of the Russian Emigration Office (eventually subsumed into the structure of Charles de Gaulle's government) until his death at the age of 88.

His front-rank reputation and talent for mediation allowed Maklakov (rather than better-known but controversial men like Kerensky and Milyukov) to manoeuvre between the many warring factions that made up the Russian émigré community and to represent their interests in dealing with the French government.

For years, Maklakov was assisted by his sister Maria who was able to decipher his handwriting and did the typing in Rue Peguy (5th arrondissement of Paris).

[7] He was not entirely satisfied with Western democracies: they could not prevent world wars, nor the emergence of totalitarian regimes, nor ensure equal rights for all.

"If our planet does not perish sooner from cosmic causes, then a peaceful community of people on it can only be built on the principles of equal for all, that is, fair rights.