The lawyer Plevako "invaded the matter as if into struggle, putting in it the aspirations of his rebellious soul"

“Anyone knows that Plevako was an excellent lawyer and a subtle theologian, but not anyone knows that he was incomparable orator. He managed to make this reputation popular”, - this is how his pupil V. Maklakov describes a lawyer in a book “F. N. Plevako” of 1910.  

April 25, 2019, Fyodor Nikiforovich Plevako, an outstanding Russian lawyer, whose name has become a common noun and a synonym for justice, is 177 years old.

The Presidential Library’s electronic collection “Fyodor Plevako (1842–1909)” features a variety of materials about Fyodor Nikiforovich, his speeches, materials of individual court cases, correspondence with colleagues.

Until the middle of the XIX century in Russia there is no chance of the legal profession as a public and legal institution - the defendants' advocates were considered almost indulging them. The formation of the bar in Russia is a rather young phenomenon, leading from the great judicial reform of 1864. 

There were even fears that there would be no specialists for this new profession. They were expressed, in particular, by B. Podgorny in the Plevako publication. However, A. Koni in his research “Two judicial orators (Plevako and Urusov)”, writes that “four prominent judicial orators came to the fore: Spasovich and Arsenyev in Petersburg, Plevako and Urusov in Moscow. Despite the lack of preliminary technical training, they showed by their own example all the talent of Slavic nature and immediately became on a level with the best representatives of Western European legal profession”. 

In the same edition, the brilliant lawyer and stylist Anatoly Koni left to his descendants a relief portrait of his colleague; it reveals all the uniqueness of Plevako’s nature.

All social strata of Russia “went before” a lawyer Plevako, in court proceedings. Workers and peasants, industrialists and financiers, local nobility and princes, confessors and soldiers, students and revolutionaries - and everyone believed in the power of his powerful word, admired the extraordinary appeal and morality of Fyodor Nikiforovich. Judicial statutes that entered into legal practice, according to Koni, were “sacred gates through which awakened Russian thought and popular sense of justice entered public life, one of the most prominent conductors of which was Plevako’s lawyer”.

The collections of the Presidential Library present Plevako's public speeches “Speech. Vol. 2. [Speech in cases of property crimes]” edited by N. Muravyov in 1910. A case in point was the case of an old woman who stole a tin kettle for 50 kopecks. The prosecutor, knowing who would confront him as a lawyer, decided to paralyze the influence of the word of defense in advance, "having regretted that the need for bitter, theft is insignificant, the defendant causes only pity…"

Fyodor Nikiforovich, of course, had envious people who accused the lawyer of the lack of immersion and, accordingly, of the analysis of the cases considered by him. But the same Vasily Alekseevich Maklakov could always find arguments in favor of his teacher that is detailed in his book “Fyodor Plevako”.

Plevako had a curious library. Of course, it included many books on jurisprudence, but it had even more books on theology and religious history.

The Plevako’s library is also interesting from the point of view of what it did not have; and the most curious space of it was modern fiction. He knew it, loved much, but he had no need and habit to re-read it. I happened to travel with him. Usually we take easy reading on the road. Plevako took with him Kuno-Fisher, Kant, Menger, Jellynek. And to my question about the strange choice of books for the car, he casually replied: "True, but I don’t like another reading".

The philosophical depth worked out in a similar way and singled out Fyodor Nikiforovich among many colleagues, although he had never been perfect in his work and never tried.

Thus, for example, according to Maklakov, he “was an excellent lawyer, deeply feeling and understanding what a healthy right requires. Deeply assimilated by them the sense of law, the spirit of laws, sometimes replaced him with the very knowledge of them. No one could better than him resolve issue not provided for in law, nor find support for his view in the dictates of reason, and not a banal example of existing practice”.