Russian Revolution · MAY 1891
Did Alexander III strengthen or undermine the autocracy?
The seminar question: “Did Alexander III’s policies strengthen the autocracy or prepare its collapse?”
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.
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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 short answer
- 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.
The full answer, argued
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.
This is the study layer of Counter-reforms of Alexander III, chapter 2 of The Russian Revolution, 1855–1924; the full index of the atlas is here.
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