ALEXANDER III. (1845-1894), 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 csarevich,
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 docrrine 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, Russian Tsar Nicholas II. (D. M. W.)
Initial text from 1911 encyclopedia -- Please update as needed