Alexander III

Ivan Kramskoy painted Alexander III as a heavy, bearded emperor in a uniform that does not apologise. Later oil, not a sketch from 13 March. The last article left a bomb and an unsigned concession. This page is the son who inherited both on 14 March 1881, 2 March Old Style, the day after autocratic power passed to him. Aleksandr Aleksandrovich had been born in St Petersburg on 10 March 1845, 26 February Old Style, second son of Alexander II and Maria Aleksandrovna, Marie of Hesse-Darmstadt. He had no prospect of the throne for the first twenty years of his life. He received only the perfunctory training given to grand dukes of that period. When he became heir apparent on the death of his elder brother Nikolay in 1865, he began to study law and administration under K. P. Pobedonostsev, who instilled hatred for representative government and the belief that zeal for Orthodoxy ought to be cultivated by every tsar.

On the very day of Alexander II’s death the dying emperor had signed an ukaz creating a number of consultative commissions that might have been transformed eventually into a representative assembly. Alexander III cancelled the ukaz before it was published and in the manifesto announcing his accession stated that he had no intention of limiting the autocratic power he had inherited. All the internal reforms that he initiated were intended to correct what he considered the too liberal tendencies of the previous reign. In his opinion, Russia was to be saved from anarchical disorders and revolutionary agitation not by the parliamentary institutions and so-called liberalism of western Europe but by the three principles of Orthodoxy, autocracy, and narodnost. Nicholas I’s slogan returned as a son’s programme. This page may say so. It should not retell Uvarov’s 1832 as if it were new.

In 1882 he appointed Dmitry Tolstoy minister of the interior. Tolstoy and Pobedonostsev were the moving spirits of the deliberately reactionary policies that followed. Education was further restricted. The work of the zemstvos was hampered. The village communes were brought under closer control in 1889 by the institution of the land commandant, the zemsky nachalnik — an official appointed by the Ministry of the Interior, usually a former officer or a local landowner, who interfered in all aspects of peasant affairs. The office of elected justice of the peace was abolished. The government was authorized to assume emergency powers when public order was said to be in danger. By this time Russian public officials were better paid and educated, and less addicted to crude corruption, than they had been under Nicholas I, but they retained their arrogant contempt for the public and especially for the poorer classes.

A later photograph of Konstantin Pobedonostsev, procurator of the Holy Synod and the tutor who had formed the heir. Use it as the mind behind the cancelled ukaz, then return to 1881. A stiff collar is not a land commandant’s warrant.

Alexander’s political ideal was a nation containing only one nationality, one language, one religion, and one form of administration. He did his utmost to prepare for the realisation of this ideal by imposing the Russian language and Russian schools on his German, Polish, and Finnish subjects, by fostering Orthodoxy at the expense of other confessions, by persecuting the Jews, and by destroying the remnants of German, Polish, and Swedish institutions in the outlying provinces. In the other provinces he clipped the feeble wings of the zemstvo and placed the autonomous administration of the peasant communes under the supervision of landed proprietors appointed by the government. The discriminatory laws against Jews and members of dissenting Christian sects remained a source of widespread injustice, hardship, and resentment. His father’s thaw had mitigated disabilities. This reign put them back into the machine.

He gloried in the idea of being of the same rough texture as the great majority of his subjects. His straightforward manner savoured sometimes of gruffness. During his years as heir he had let it be known that certain of his ideas did not coincide with the existing government. He deprecated undue foreign influence, German influence in particular. He commanded the left wing of the invading army in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78 and was mortified when most of what Russia had obtained at San Stefano was taken away at Berlin. That mortification belongs here as the heir’s education, not as a second Balkan war. As emperor he was emphatically a man of peace but not a partisan of peace at any price. The termination of the Russo-German alliance in 1890 drove him reluctantly into an alliance with France, a country he strongly disliked as the breeding place of revolutions.

The revival of political activity may be dated from 1891, when crop failures led to widespread famine. Government obstruction of relief efforts was widely — though often unfairly — blamed for the peasantry’s sufferings. It was accelerated by the death of Alexander III in 1894, at Livadiya in Crimea on 1 November, 20 October Old Style, and the succession of his son Nicholas II, who commanded less fear or respect. The repressive policies of Dmitry Tolstoy had worked for a time. The economic development of the following decades would create new social tensions. Those tensions are the next titles. This title is the freeze after the bomb: a cancelled ukaz, a manifesto of unlimited autocracy, a tutor, a minister of the interior, Russification, land commandants, and a famine that made politics thinkable again.

Keep Witte’s gold standard out of this page except as a hinge. He became minister of finance in 1892, in this reign, and remained until 1903, in the next but one. Name the appointment if you must. Do not write Krivoy Rog here. Keep Bloody Sunday out of it. Keep 1861’s redemption tables out of it. Alexander III here is 1881 to 1894: cancellation, Orthodoxy-autocracy-narodnost, Tolstoy, Pobedonostsev, zemsky nachalnik, Jews and sectarians, a reluctant French alliance, famine, death at Livadiya. Readers who want furnaces will find them under Industrialization. Readers who want the son’s senseless dreams will find them under Nicholas II.

He cancelled the modest commissions on the day he took the crown. Russia was to be saved by autocracy, not by a hall of debate.

As a whole, Britannica’s life says, his reign cannot be regarded as one of the eventful periods of Russian history, but it is arguable that under his hard, unsympathetic rule the country made some progress. That verdict is allowed. It is not a licence to invent factories as his personal gift. Progress in this decade is still, for this page, order, rail already laid by the father, and a state that paid its officials better. The driving industrial policy is Witte’s, named in 1892. Leave the furnaces to him. Leave the working day of 11.5 hours to 1897. This emperor’s job was to say no to representative government in every register he had been taught.

Do not invent last words at Livadiya. Do not invent a pogrom count. Do not invent the text of the accession manifesto beyond no intention of limiting autocratic power. Do not invent Pobedonostsev’s dinner conversation. The three principles, the land commandant’s date, the famine year, and the cancelled ukaz are the skeleton. The rough texture and the French alliance are the flesh the life already gives. The marriage to Dagmar of Denmark, Maria Fyodorovna, was happy. Name it as the life names it. Do not write a family novel.

The previous title’s five hangings were supposed to end a hunt. This title’s answer was to reaffirm the hunted man’s power without his last paper. Nicholas I had frozen after 1848. This grandson froze after 1881 with better-paid clerks and a tighter village. The zemstvo, created to spend on schools, was clipped. The justice of the peace, created to hear minor offences, was abolished in the countryside. Emergency powers waited on the word public order. That is reaction as the sources date it. The next chapter of the economy would not ask this emperor’s permission to need workers. It would only need his finance minister.

A later photograph of Alexander III among his family. Use it as the household that produced Nicholas II, then put it aside. A group on a step is not 1889 in the village and not Pobedonostsev’s collar already used above. It is the private texture the life allows: a happy marriage to Dagmar of Denmark, children, a man who liked to think himself of the same rough cloth as most of his subjects — and who still appointed land commandants over their communes.

Stop this page before the gold rouble and before an 11.5-hour day. The next title is industrialization. Alexander III here is a second son trained late, a cancelled ukaz, a slogan reused, Russification, land commandants, famine, and a death in Crimea that frightened people less than the father had. Kramskoy’s beard is the face. Pobedonostsev’s collar is the doctrine. The family photograph is the next emperor already in the picture. The bombs of 1881 had killed a reformer who would not share power. The son would not even share the appearance of sharing it. Dmitry Tolstoy at the Interior Ministry from 1882, emergency powers, clipped zemstvos, and the discriminatory laws against Jews and sectarians are the machinery of that refusal.

Paul had wanted a male line. This male line now ran through a man who hated representative government as a lesson. The line would continue to a grandson who called liberal hopes senseless dreams. That sentence is the hinge into Nicholas, not a theft of 1894’s first speech. This page stops at Livadiya on 1 November 1894, 20 October Old Style. The country that had changed in 1861 was being told, for thirteen years, not to change again. It changed anyway, in rails and oil and cities, under a minister this emperor appointed in 1892 and a son this emperor left. Those changes have their own titles. Britannica’s verdict that the hard rule was not eventful, yet that some progress occurred, is allowed as a close, not as a licence to invent furnaces as his gift.