Alexander III of Russia

I

Introduction

Alexander III of Russia (1845-1894), Emperor (tsar) of Russia (1881-1894), who reversed many of the liberal reforms implemented by his father, Alexander II.

Alexander was born on November 1 (October 20 according to the Old Style, or Julian, calendar then in use in Russia), the second son of Alexander II and Mariya Aleksandrovna. He became heir to the throne in 1865, on the death of his elder brother Nikolay, whose fiancée, Princess Dagmar of Denmark, Alexander married the same year (on which event Dagmar took the name Maria Fyodorovna).

II

Domestic Policies

Alexander’s father was assassinated by Nihilist terrorists, who hoped to precipitate a revolution, on March 13 (March 1, Old Style), 1881. Ironically, at the time of his death the murdered tsar had been considering plans to inaugurate a national legislature and constitutional reform. Assuming the throne, Alexander III rebuffed any constitutional concessions and pledged to restore the unfettered autocratic rule of the reign of his grandfather, Nicholas I. He sternly repressed all revolutionary agitation, and for a time illegal political activity was much curbed, only to emerge with greater intensity in the 1890s. Perhaps the most famous victim of emperor Alexander’s repression was Alexander Ulyanov, the older brother of Vladimir Lenin. Hanged in 1887 for his part in another plot to kill the emperor, his staunch courtroom defence of his comrades and steadfast refusal to plead for clemency deeply affected the young Lenin.

Emperor Alexander attacked his father’s reforms in local government, the justice system, and education under the influence of extreme conservatives, especially the church official Konstantin Petrovich Pobedonostsev. Local government was suspended and emergency rule proclaimed for large parts of the empire, and police control was expanded at the local level. While he did not seek to re-impose serfdom on the peasantry, Alexander attempted to restore the impoverished gentry’s fortunes with a new Land Bank (1885). The peasants continued to suffer from population pressure and land hunger. Their precarious position was exposed in 1891-1892 after four bad harvests, when famine and a cholera epidemic killed hundreds of thousands and aroused the compassion of educated Russians against the regime. Alexander tried to impose the Russian language on his multinational empire, persecuted the Jews, and forced the conversion of Muslim subjects to Russian Orthodoxy.

These reactionary policies were however accompanied by military and industrial progress, founded on a protectionist economic policy. Industrialization led to the expansion of urban Russia and the rise of a settled working class in manufacturing centres like Moscow and St Petersburg. It was from this working class that a new generation of converts to socialism were won through trade union activism and educational initiatives launched by Marxist and other agitators. Pogroms against the Jews forced many to emigrate, but others fought back by organizing socialist or nationalist movements in opposition to the regime.

III

Foreign Policy

Another paradox of the reign of Alexander III was his gradual shift in foreign policy away from the authoritarian Central European powers to an alliance with republican and democratic France. Russia joined a revived form of the League of Three Emperors (Dreikaiserbund) with Germany and Austria-Hungary in 1881 but the mutual suspicion of Russia and Germany persisted. The decision of the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck to refuse loans to Russia in 1887 and the accession of William II as kaiser (emperor) the subsequent year helped to push Russia into the Franco-Russian Alliance, signed in 1894, despite Alexander’s hostile perception of France as a centre of revolutionary ideas.

IV

Assessment

Alexander III died from nephritis at an unexpectedly early age on November 1 (October 20, Old Style) 1894, leaving his son, Nicholas, a contradictory inheritance. Russia had undeniably prospered under his brief rule but Alexander’s repressive and anti-democratic impulses discouraged supporters of moderation and fostered the rise of extremists of both right and left. At the age of 26, Nicholas II was ill suited and poorly prepared for the demands of ruling a dangerously divided empire, and he was to be the last of the Russian tsars.