"...Maklakov brothers. Their emergence late in the summer and early autumn of 1915 stemmed from several factors; the first, and perhaps most obvious, was Durnovo's resignation due to his advancing illness and his subsequent death on September 24 less than a month after relinquishing the post of Minister of the Interior. Nikolai Maklakov, appropriately reactionary in his attitudes towards revolutionaries but not a "bloodhound" like some predecessors in that office. Near simultaneously, Vasily, the elder brother, emerged victorious in an internal struggle within the liberal faction of the Duma against Pavel Milyukov thanks in part to his alignment with Alexander Guchkov over a grand debate over military expenses in which Maklakov swung behind the more conservative of the two grandees of the Duma and from then on had Milyukov as a fierce enemy - a position that endeared him to Stolypin.
Despite their very different politics - though a monarchist, Vasily's liberalism never wavered and he regarded his abandonment of the Milyukov line more a reflection on the man than his beliefs - the brothers Maklakov were personally fairly close and thus a useful tandem for the Tsarist government. In Nikolai, Stolypin had a reliable loyalist in the mold of Durnovo but also a man who could influence his brother; in turn, in Vasily there was a figure held in great esteem by the emerging liberal middle class of St. Petersburg, Moscow and Kiev who was nonetheless pragmatic and cautious in his reforms, unafraid to speak his mind but nonetheless deferential to the extant regime. Nikolai could pull his brother rightwards and, by that same token, pull Guchkov right too, and in turn Vasily could facilitate connections between the Council of Ministers and the Duma's leading lights. Vasily thus formed something of an informal "third leg" of the Duarchy of Stolypin and Sazonov, their eyes and ears in the Duma as a man who took the body seriously (unlike its most right-wing parliamentarians, who opposed its existence and thus were little use in dealing even with the most conservative of liberals), and whose ongoing game of back-and-forth with his younger and more hardline brother began to become one of the key features of the Duarchy era as the Duma and the Ministers played off one another for influence, to the extent that even Stolypin himself frequently mused that perhaps the brothers Maklakov were more cunning than their different beliefs suggested..." [1]
- A New Tsar in a New Century: The Life and Reign of Michael II of Russia
[1] We're rapidly approaching a point in time where I'm going to start running out of Tsarist figures prominent in history, since a lot of their Wikipedia entries end in, say, 1917/18 or thereabouts or with "and then they lived in Parisian exile." That being said, the continuing tension between the fairly toothless Duma and its various sclerotic factions and the Tsar's ministers will be a feature moving forward in all Russian action
