ALEXANDER III (1845-1894)
Sir Donald Mackenzie Wallace
Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th edition, 1910,
vol 1, pgs 561-563
Emperor of Russia, second son of Alexander II., was born on the 10th of
March 1845. In natural disposition he bore little resemblance to his
soft-hearted, liberal- minded father, and still less to his refined,
philosophic, sentimental, chivalrous, yet cunning grand-uncle Alexander I., who
coveted the title of "the first gentleman of Europe." With high
culture, exquisite refinement and studied elegance he had no sympathy and never
affected to have any. Indeed, he rather gloried in the idea of being of the
same rough texture as the great majority of his subjects. His straightforward,
abrupt manner savoured sometimes of gruffness, while his direct, unadorned
method of expressing himself harmonized well with his rough- hewn, immobile
features and somewhat sluggish movements. His education was not fitted to
soften these peculiarities. During the first twenty years of his life he had no
prospect of succeeding to the throne, because he had an elder brother,
Nicholas, who seemed of a fairly robust constitution. Even when this elder
brother showed symptoms of delicate health it was believed that his life might
be indefinitely prolonged by proper care and attention, and precautions had
been taken for the succession by his betrothal with Princess Dagmar of Denmark.
Under these circumstances the greatest solicitude was devoted to the education
of Nicholas as cesarevich, whereas Alexander received only the perfunctory and
inadequate training of an ordinary grand-duke of that period, which did not go
much beyond primary and secondary instruction, practical acquaintance with
French, English and German, and a certain amount of drill. When he became
heir-apparent by the death of his elder brother in 1865, he began to study the
principles of law and administration under Professor Pobedonostsef, who did not
succeed in awakening in his pupil a love of abstract studies or prolonged
intellectual exertion, but who influenced the character of his reign by
instilling into his mind the belief that zeal for Eastern Orthodoxy ought, as
an essential factor of Russian patriotism, to be specially cultivated by every
right-minded tsar. His elder brother when on his deathbed had expressed a wish
that his affianced bride, Princess Dagmar of Denmark, should marry his
successor, and this wish was realized on the 9th of November 1866. The union
proved a most happy one and remained unclouded to the end. During those years
when he was heir-apparent - 1865 to 1881 - he did not play a prominent part in
public affairs, but he allowed it to become known that he had certain ideas of
his own which did not coincide with the principles of the existing government.
He deprecated what he considered undue foreign influence in general, and German
influence in particular, and he longed to see the adoption of genuine national
principles in all spheres of official activity, with a view to realizing his
ideal of a homogeneous Russia-homogeneous in language, administration and
religion. With such ideas and aspirations he could hardly remain permanently in
cordial agreement with his father, who, though a good patriot according to his
lights, had strong German sympathies, often used the German language in his
private relations, occasionally ridiculed the exaggerations and eccentricities
of the Slavophils and based his foreign policy on the Prussian alliance. The
antagonism first appeared publicly during the Franco German War, when the tsar
supported the cabinet of Berlin and the cesarevich did not conceal his
sympathies with the French. It reappeared in an intermittent fashion during the
years 1875- 1879, when the Eastern question produced so much excitement in all
ranks of Russian society. At first the cesarevich was more Slavophil than the
government, but his phlegmatic nature preserved him from many of the
exaggerations indulged in by others, and any of the prevalent popular illusions
he may have imbibed were soon dispelled by personal observation in Bulgaria,
where he commanded the left wing of the invading army. The Bulgarians had been
represented in St Petersburg and Moscow not only as martyrs but also as saints,
and a very little personal experience sufficed to correct the error. Like most
of his brother officers he could not feel any very great affection for the
"little brothers," as the Bulgarians were then commonly called, and
he was constrained to admit that the Turks were by no means so black as they
had been painted. He did not, however, scandalize the believers by any public
expression of his opinions, and did not indeed make himself conspicuous in any
way during the campaign. Never consulted on political questions, he confined
himself to his military duties and fulfilled them in a conscientious and
unobtrusive manner. After many mistakes and disappointments, the army reached
Constantinople and the treaty of San Stefano was signed, but much that had been
obtained by that important document had to be sacrificed at the congress of
Berlin. Prince Bismarck failed to do what was confidently expected of him. In
return for the Russian support, which had enabled him to create the German
empire, it was thought that he would help Russia to solve the Eastern question
in accordance with her own interests, but to the surprise and indignation of
the cabinet of St Petersburg he confined himself to acting the part of
"honest broker" at the congress, and shortly afterwards he
ostentatiously contracted an alliance with Austria for the express purpose of
counteracting Russian designs in Eastern Europe. The cesarevich could point to
these results as confirming the views he had expressed during the Franco-German
War, and he drew from them the practical conclusion that for Russia the best
thing to do was to recover as quickly as possible from her temporary exhaustion
and to prepare for future contingencies by a radical scheme of military and
naval reorganization. In accordance with this conviction, he suggested that
certain reforms should be introduced. During the campaign in Bulgaria he had
found by painful experience that grave disorders and gross corruption existed
in the military administration, and after his return to St Petersburg he had
discovered that similar abuses existed in the naval department. For these
abuses, several high-placed personages-among others two of the grand-dukes-
were believed to be responsible, and he called his father's attention to the
subject. His representations were not favourably received. Alexander II. had
lost. much of the reforming zeal which distinguished the first decade of his
reign, and had no longer the energy required to undertake the task suggested to
him. The consequence was that the relations between father and son became more
strained. The latter must have felt that there would be no important reforms
until he himself succeeded to the direction of affairs. That change was much
nearer at hand than was commonly supposed. On the 13th of March 1881 Alexander
II. was assassinated by a band of Nihilists, and the autocratic power passed to
the hands of his son.
In the last years of his reign, Alexander II. had been much exercised by
the spread of Nihilist doctrines and the increasing number of anarchist
conspiracies, and for some time he had hesitated between strengthening the
hands of the executive and making concessions to the widespread political
aspirations of the educated classes. Finally he decided in favour of the latter
course, and on the very day of his death he signed a ukaz, creating a number of
consultative commissions which might have been easily transformed into an
assembly of notables. Alexander III. determined to adopt the opposite policy.
He at once cancelled the ukaz before it was published, and in the manifesto
announcing his accession to the throne he let it be very clearly understood
that he had no intention of limiting or weakening the autocratic power which he
had inherited from his ancestors. Nor did he afterwards show any inclination to
change his mind. All the internal reforms which he initiated were intended to
correct what he considered as the too liberal tendencies of the previous reign,
so that he left behind him the reputation of a sovereign of the retrograde
type. 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 which the elder
generation of the Slavophils systematically recommended-nationality, Eastern
Orthodoxy and autocracy. His political ideal was a nation containing only one
nationality, one language, one religion and one form of administration; and he
did his utmost to prepare for the realization of this ideal by imposing the
Russian language and Russian schools on his German, Polish and Finnish
subjects, by fostering Eastern 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
sought to counteract what he considered the excessive liberalism of his
father's reign. For this purpose he clipped the feeble wings of the zemstvo, an
elective local administration resembling the county and parish councils in
England, and placed the autonomous administration of the peasant communes under
the supervision of landed proprietors appointed by the government. At the same
time he sought to strengthen and centralize the imperial administration, and to
bring it more under his personal control. In foreign affairs he was
emphatically a man of peace, but not at all a partisan of the doctrine of peace
at any price, and he followed the principle that the best means of averting war
is to be well prepared for it. Though indignant at the conduct of Prince
Bismarck towards Russia, he avoided an open rupture with Germany, and even
revived for a time the Three Emperors' Alliance. It was only in the last years
of his reign, when M. Katkov had acquired a certain influence over him, that he
adopted towards the cabinet of Berlin a more hostile attitude, and even then he
confined himself to keeping a large quantity of troops near the German
frontier, and establishing cordial relations with France. With regard to
Bulgaria he exercised similar self-control. The efforts of Prince Alexander and
afterwards of Stamboloff to destroy Russian influence in the principality
excited his indignation, but he persistently vetoed all proposals to intervene
by force of arms. In Central Asian affairs he followed the traditional policy
of gradually extending Russian domination without provoking a conflict with
Great Britain, and he never allowed the bellicose partisans of a forward policy
to get out of hand. As a whole his reign cannot be regarded as one of the
eventful periods of Russian history; but it must be admitted that under his
hard unsympathetic rule the country made considerable progress. He died at
Livadia on the 1st of November 1894, and was succeeded by his eldest son,
Nicholas II. (D. M. W.)