Russian Revolution · CHAPTER 2 ·
Counter-reforms of Alexander III
Chapter 2 of The Russian Revolution, 1855–1924: “Reaction and the Railway”
After the People’s Will assassinated Alexander II in St Petersburg in March 1881, Alexander III and Pobedonostsev concluded that reform had bred revolution. Emergency powers, curbs on universities, land captains over the peasants and the anti-Jewish May Laws of 1882 treated whole groups as suspect.
WW2 is free — every chapter. Try chapters 1–2 of any 2 other atlases (3 with a free account). Opening a new atlas uses one of them. Membership opens all 21 — Join.
Free printable Russian Revolution study guide, sent by email ↓
The map above is the world of The Russian Empire, May 1891 — The Trans-Siberian begun.
Part of IB History: The Russian Revolution →
BRIEF EXPLANATION — THE ESSENTIAL ARGUMENT
The assassination of Alexander II beside the Catherine Canal in St Petersburg in March 1881 decided how the autocracy would treat reform for a generation. Autocracy meant the Tsar’s unlimited personal rule, much as if a modern president governed with no parliament, no elections and no constitution to limit him, and after 1881 it turned to reaction, the attempt to roll political change back. The Tsar was killed by the People’s Will, a small party that used terror, the murder of officials to frighten a government into concessions, hours after he had approved a plan to let elected delegates advise on new laws. His son, Alexander III, and the new Tsar’s former tutor Konstantin Pobedonostsev, a layman who ran the Orthodox Church for the government, concluded that reform itself had bred revolution. The new reign therefore shelved the plan and gave governors emergency powers under a “temporary” statute that was still in force in 1917. It blamed the Jews themselves for the pogroms, anti-Jewish riots that began at Elisavetgrad in 1881, and confined them more tightly in the Pale of Settlement, a legal ghetto the size of a country that the map outlines with a dashed line. The new Tsar kept his father’s institutions and stripped out the trust that had made them work.
Repression came with a second policy that looked like its opposite, which was state-led industrialisation. Finance ministers Ivan Vyshnegradsky and then Sergei Witte raised tariffs, taxes on imported goods that shelter home industry from foreign competition, pushed grain exports to earn the gold that paid Russia’s foreign debts, and borrowed in Paris to build railways. In 1891 the heir, Nicholas, began the Trans-Siberian, the railway across Siberia to the Pacific, whose two arrows on the map start from Chelyabinsk and Vladivostok. When drought struck in 1891 the famine that followed killed several hundred thousand people, and critics blamed taxes that had forced peasants to sell grain they needed. By 1894 a modernising economy was run by a state that trusted nobody, and that was the brittle giant Nicholas II inherited.
The full story
Alexander III drew one lesson from his father’s death, that giving way to demands invites revolution, and it shaped every institution of his reign. His manifesto of April 1881, drafted by Pobedonostsev, the layman who ran the Orthodox Church for him, proclaimed unlimited autocracy, one-man rule, like a president with no parliament, and the reforming ministers resigned. The statute of August 1881 let governors ban meetings, close newspapers and exile suspects without trial, like wartime emergency laws, and it was renewed repeatedly until 1917. Because the government blamed educated youth for the assassinations, it ended university self-government in 1884 and in 1887 urged schools to turn away cooks’ children. Because it distrusted the village institutions of 1861, it put land captains over the peasants in 1889, appointed nobles who acted as both administrator and judge, like colonial district officers. Each measure treated a whole class as suspect for the acts of a few.
The same instinct, applied to the empire’s peoples, treated difference as a security threat. In 1881–82 anti-Jewish riots called pogroms spread through some two hundred places in Ukraine, beginning at Elisavetgrad, and around fifty people died on John Klier’s count, about half of them rioters. Historians find no evidence that the central government organised them, yet its May Laws of 1882 punished the victims, barring Jews from settling anew in villages even inside the Pale of Settlement, a legal ghetto of western provinces, outlined on the map, where most of the empire’s five million Jews lived. Limits on Jewish pupils in 1887 and expulsions from Moscow in 1891 followed, so hundreds of thousands emigrated, and the arrow follows them west through Brody into Austria. Russification, forcing Russian language and officials on other peoples much as some states impose one national language, reached Poland and the Baltic, where the German-speaking university of Dorpat was made Russian. Further east the arrows carry the conquest from Geok Tepe, stormed in Alexander II’s last weeks, to Merv in 1884, and hatching marks the disputed Pamir mountains. Policies meant to bind the borderlands taught many of their people to look beyond the empire.
Alexander III’s finance ministers pursued a different kind of change, aimed at making Russia strong enough to need no political reform. Nikolai Bunge founded a Peasant Land Bank to lend peasants money for land. Vyshnegradsky collected taxes after the harvest, which pushed peasants to sell grain for export, and Witte, minister from 1892, used import taxes, French loans and state railways to drive industry, much as governments today build infrastructure to draw private investment. The Trans-Siberian, the railway across Siberia, was the emblem of the policy, and the famine of 1891–92 exposed its cost. Hunger and cholera killed several hundred thousand, and because the government was slow to act, much early relief came from zemstvos, the elected county councils, and volunteers such as the writers Leo Tolstoy and Vladimir Korolenko, who reported from Lukoyanov district. By 1894 the regime had chosen a modern economy and refused modern politics, and the famine had shown educated Russians that it could fail even at protecting its people.
DEEP EXPLANATION — EVIDENCE & INTERPRETATION
Counter-reform or continuity?
Historians still argue over whether Alexander III reversed his father’s reforms or continued them by other means. Pyotr Zaionchkovsky, working from the ministries’ own papers, made the classic case for reversal and cemented the label Soviet scholarship gave the reign, the era of counter-reforms, tracing it to Pobedonostsev, the newspaper editor Mikhail Katkov and the interior minister Count Dmitry Tolstoy, not the novelist. Later historians have shown that the label fits only part of the story. Thomas Pearson’s work on local government showed that the land captains and the zemstvo law of 1890, which gave nobles more seats and governors more control, grew partly out of a long bureaucratic effort to bring order to rural administration, and Francis Wcislo argued that officials of both reigns shared the aim of extending the state’s reach into the village. The reformed courts survived, the zemstvos kept expanding their schools and clinics, and the army and the railways kept modernising. What changed decisively was the direction of political trust. Under Alexander II reform had been justified as a way to win society’s loyalty, while under Alexander III society itself became the suspect, and that shift mattered more than the repeal of any single statute.
The pogroms and the state
For decades the pogroms of 1881–84 were explained as a plot, because Jewish organisations, foreign observers and many later historians held that the government, or men close to it, had organised them to divert anger from the regime. Research in the Russian archives has largely overturned that view. I. Michael Aronson and John Klier found no evidence of central planning, since the violence spread along railway lines and river routes with migrant workers at Easter, and the local authorities who failed to stop it were usually slow or confused and only sometimes complicit. The same research is damning in another way, because the state’s real role lay in its answer to the violence. The May Laws were issued as “temporary rules” and stayed in force until 1917, and when a high commission under Count Konstantin Pahlen recommended in 1888 that Jewish rights be widened step by step, the government set its report aside. Many Russian Jews concluded that the state would neither protect nor accept them, and that conviction fed emigration, socialism and Zionism, the movement for a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
The famine and the birth of a public
The famine of 1891–92 is remembered as the moment educated Russians lost faith in the state, although the standard study of it finds the government’s record better than its reputation. Richard Robbins showed that once the government acted it spent heavily, some 150 million roubles, much of it lent as grain through the zemstvos, and that in many districts relief prevented starvation. Robbins counted about 406,000 excess deaths, deaths above the normal rate, at least 100,000 of them from cholera, Orlando Figes gives about half a million, and some Russian historians argue that few died of starvation itself, which shows how hard it is to separate hunger from disease. The politics ran the other way. The government’s appeal for private help in November 1891 drew doctors, students and writers into relief work on a scale Russia had never seen, and in places such as Lukoyanov district, where Korolenko found officials insisting that all was well while peasants went hungry, volunteers watched the state fail at first hand. The liberal movement, which wanted a constitution and an elected parliament, and the socialist movement, which wanted land and factories held in common, both grew from what they saw.
Key places on the map
On this day
Why it happened
The assassination of 1881. Alexander II’s murder persuaded his son that concessions only encourage terror. The People’s Will had tried for two years to kill him, and its bomb in the Winter Palace in February 1880 killed eleven soldiers of the guard. It finally succeeded in March 1881, just after he had approved a plan by his interior minister, Mikhail Loris-Melikov, for elected advisers. The murder of the reforming Tsar discredited reform itself in the eyes of the new court, and it handed the argument to those who had always opposed it.
Pobedonostsev’s creed. Konstantin Pobedonostsev, Alexander III’s tutor and the layman who ran the Orthodox Church for the government, taught that parliaments, a free press and elections were a lie that divided a nation, and that Russia could be held together only by Orthodoxy, autocracy and the Russian people. His ideas gave repression a principle as well as a purpose. Because he sat at the centre of power for the whole reign, his distrust of society became the working assumption of the government.
The needs of a great power. The Crimean defeat and the disappointment of the Congress of Berlin in 1878 convinced Russia’s rulers that they needed industry, railways and money to remain a great power, one of the few states, like Britain, France and Germany, strong enough to shape the affairs of Europe. Grain exports paid for foreign loans, and from 1888 French banks lent heavily, a relationship sealed by the Franco-Russian alliance of 1891 to 1894. The state drove modernisation for strategic reasons, and it saw no need to share power with the classes that modernisation created.
Fear of the borderlands. The Polish rising of 1863 and the growth of national movements among Ukrainians, Baltic peoples and Finns, campaigns by a people for its own language, schools and rights, persuaded officials that the empire’s unity required a common language and faith. Russification was meant to turn subjects into loyal Russians, and suspicion of Jews as disloyal outsiders ran through the same thinking. A state that defined loyalty as sameness was bound to treat more than half of its population, everyone whose mother tongue was not Russian, as a problem to be managed.
THE TURNING POINT
The Catherine Canal, 1/13 March 1881. The assassination is the hinge because it came at the one moment when the autocracy had agreed to listen to elected voices. That morning Alexander II approved Loris-Melikov’s plan to bring zemstvo and city delegates into the drafting of laws, a small step that might have led to a consultative assembly, an elected body that advises the ruler on laws but cannot pass them. The bombs on the Catherine Canal ended that path, and Alexander III spent his reign proving that the state could modernise without consulting anyone. The killing hardened both sides, so that for the next twenty-four years reformers and revolutionaries faced a regime that treated every demand for a voice as the first step toward another bomb.
What it changed
A state of permanent emergency. The emergency statute of 1881 became a normal tool of government, so a large share of the empire’s people lived under emergency rule for a generation. The political police, a secret police answering to the interior minister, placed informers inside the revolutionary circles, and arrest and exile without trial became routine. Peaceful opposition had no legal channel, which pushed opponents underground and taught them that only force would move the regime.
Industry without a voice for workers. The industrial boom of the 1890s, with output growing by around eight per cent a year, packed new workers into St Petersburg, Moscow, the Donbas coalfield of Ukraine and the oil city of Baku. Strikes and unions were illegal, so wages and conditions could not be bargained over with employers. Every strike therefore became a quarrel with the state itself, which is why the strikes of the 1890s and of 1905 turned political so fast.
Emigration and new Jewish politics. Between two and three million Jews left the empire from 1881 to 1914, depending on the estimate, some 1.6 million of them for the United States, driven by poverty as much as by the pogroms. Those who stayed answered with new politics, including the early Zionist groups of the 1880s, which aimed at a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and the Bund, a Jewish socialist workers’ party founded in 1897. Many young Jews joined the revolutionary parties, so the regime’s suspicion of its Jewish subjects helped create the very opposition it feared.
A generation turned against the state. The reign that crushed the People’s Will raised the next generation of revolutionaries, and the Ulyanov family shows how. In 1887 the police foiled a student plot to kill Alexander III, and its five leaders, among them Alexander Ulyanov, were hanged at Shlisselburg. His younger brother Vladimir, later known as Lenin, turned to revolution, and Marxist circles, study groups built on Karl Marx’s prediction that industrial workers would overthrow their employers, spread among students and workers, so the defeat of the People’s Will moved revolution from bombs to ideas that proved harder to arrest.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — Did Alexander III’s policies strengthen the autocracy or prepare its collapse?
In the short run the autocracy was stronger in 1894 than in 1881. The People’s Will was destroyed, Russia fought no major war for thirteen years, industry grew fast, and the French alliance ended the country’s isolation. The case for collapse rests on timing. Alexander froze political life at the moment society was changing fastest, so the workers and professionals his economic policy created, and the national movements his Russification provoked, found no legal place in the state. The famine of 1891 also discredited the government in the eyes of the educated. Zaionchkovsky saw the reign as plain reaction, while other historians stress its continuity with earlier reforms and its economic achievement, and each reading fits part of the evidence, since the reign strengthened the state’s machinery while weakening its hold on the people it governed. Much of the answer lies with the successor, because the system needed a strong and capable autocrat and passed to one who was neither. Repression bought stability only for as long as the society underneath it stood still, and under Alexander III that society was changing faster than ever.
An interesting fact
The heir who opened the Trans-Siberian did so with a fresh scar on his forehead. Three weeks before he laid the first stone at Vladivostok on 19/31 May 1891, Nicholas was attacked at Ōtsu in Japan by Tsuda Sanzō, one of the Japanese policemen assigned to guard him, whose sabre left a nine-centimetre wound on the right side of his forehead. Nicholas had reached the Pacific by sea at the end of a grand tour of Asia, and he opened the railway meant to make Russia a Pacific power while still recovering. Thirteen years later the same railway carried his armies to war with Japan.
Related
THE FREE PRINTABLE STUDY GUIDE
Join the Dispatch — a short welcome series, then a letter when a new atlas opens — and the printable study guide for The Russian Revolution is yours now, free.
NO TRACKING · YOUR ADDRESS IS USED FOR THE DISPATCH AND NOTHING ELSE · UNSUBSCRIBE ANYTIME