In reality Alexander listened to Pobedonostsev and Meshcherskii, but in his decisions usually went along with the ministers, conservative to be sure but unwilling to tear down the structure so carefully built up by the previous reign. Those structures still left many areas where the ministers and local administrators could act on their own discretion – in relations with the zemstvos, cases of administrative exile of liberals and socialists, and others. Here the tsar and his officials almost always chose the harsher and more authoritarian line. The 1881 “Temporary Regulations” were directed against the revolutionaries and allowed provincial governors to declare states of “reinforced security,” which allowed them to imprison subversives without trial, transfer security cases to military courts, and shut down universities and businesses. The regulations lasted until 1917. At the same time, few “counter-reforms” were actually enacted. University autonomy was further restricted, and the tsar issued a decree establishing noblemen as appointed “land captains” to monitor law enforcement in the villages. The decree did, as intended, reinforce the power of the gentry in the countryside, and other regulations tinkering with local administration strengthened the bureaucracy against the zemstvo, but none of these measures was a major change. In the cities the government eventually raised the property qualification for elections to the city Dumas and prohibited Jews from sitting in the Dumas but left the basic structure intact. The reactionary character of the reign of Alexander III lay in the absence of response to ongoing social and economic change rather than any concerted attempt to return to a previous era.
Part of the new reign was also increasingly shrill official nationalism, including official anti-semitism. Again this was more a change in tone than substance, for little in the way of new measures or policies appeared, but a more rigorous enforcement of discriminatory legislation against Jews, such as the restrictions on settlement beyond the confines of the Pale did appear. In 1887 the government introduced the formal quota for Jews at universities in addition to the new laws on city government. There were other occasional forays into Russification. The latter was often more declaratory than real, for the Russian empire lacked the resources to form a firm policy in this area. Proposals to substitute Russian-language for German-language schools in the Baltic provinces, a particular campaign of Russian nationalists at the time, failed because the Ministry of Education pointed out that it lacked the resources for either teachers or school buildings. Thus the schools in the Baltic provinces remained in local, that is to say German, hands. The continued prominence of German and other non-Russian aristocrats at the court, in the army, and diplomatic corps also put a very sharp limit to the amount of “Russianness” the government could claim or try to enforce.
It was in foreign and economic policy that the years of Alexander III brought the most changes. In the years after Crimea Prince Gorchakov had kept the country firmly in the traditional camp of friendship with Prussia, at the same time trying to ease the tension with Britain and France. In the latter he was only partially successful, and the ambiguous position of Bismarck’s Germany at the end of the Russo-Turkish war in 1878 undermined the old alliance of Berlin and St. Petersburg. As Germany grew closer to Austria in the course of the 1880s, the relationship fell under even greater strain, for both Russia and Austria had designs on the Balkans. The competition between Russia and the two German powers led to the end of Russian influence in Bulgaria in 1886. The resultant cooling in Russo-German relations left Russia effectively isolated in Europe. The new Germany, however, had been built on victory in the Franco-Prussian War and the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, and thus had in France an implacable enemy. Both Russia and France quickly recognized a common interest, and in 1893 the great republic and the autocracy of the east signed a treaty that made them allies against Germany. The political constellation that had lasted on the European continent since 1815 came to an end, and the first seed was sown that would lead to war in 1914. To this day the Alexander III Bridge in the center of Paris serves as a reminder of that fatal alliance.
The alliance was not yet, however, a trigger of war, for none of the potential enemies wanted it as yet. The dynastic ties between Berlin and St. Petersburg remained, and allowed both sides to retain the illusion that things might eventually work out. The respective armies, however, thought differently, for the Russian army had begun to rethink its western defenses starting in the 1870s, when Germany and Russia were still allies, and the German army also moved quickly to plan for a two-front war. For the time being, however, the attention of governments and societies was more focused on the Far East. Here two quite separate issues came together, Sergei Witte’s economic plans and the rise of Japan.
Sergei Witte was perhaps the last really dynamic and thoughtful statesman in the Russian Empire, a man with great plans and abilities as well as a giant ego, who never easily worked with others on an equal basis. Contemptuous of the other ministers of state – in large part justifiably – he formulated his plans with his staff and worked directly with the tsar. How he came to this position is a story in itself. Witte always claimed that his ancestors were Dutch and came to Russia through the Baltic provinces. In fact his grandfather was simply a middle-class Baltic German (perhaps with Dutch ancestry) who served as a tutor in Russian noble families. The young Witte finished Odessa University in natural science, not administrative law like most future officials. He also seems to have participated in a shadowy right-wing society called the “Union of St. Michael the Archangel,” but then went to work for the South Western Railway, a private railroad running between Odessa and Kiev. This gave him a sense of the workings of capitalist enterprise that few high Russian officials could duplicate. Alexander III first appointed him to the government’s railroad department and his rise was swift: by 1892 he was Minster of Finance at the age of forty-three, a notable achievement in an increasingly elderly government. Like earlier favorites of the tsar, his power rested entirely on the trust of the monarch, for Witte was too arrogant, too uncouth, and too unused to the subtleties of Petersburg politics to find allies among the ministers. He regarded most of them as timid incompetents, but failed to realize that without them he had only the tsar on whom to rely. With Alexander III on the throne, this attitude seemed sensible.
Witte’s great project was the Transsiberian Railroad, begun already in 1891. This enormous line of track, stretching across the whole of northern Asia, was to become in many ways his monument. Against many skeptics he pushed the project through, first with the support of Alexander III and then with that of his son Nicholas II. Witte’s plans were not merely to improve communications with the farthest point of the empire. A radical change was needed to be sure, for the only ways to get from European Russia to the Pacific were to go by horse and riverboat over several months, or to take a steamer from Odessa through the Suez Canal around India and China. Witte intended to develop Siberia, both for its natural resources and its potential as a settlement area to relieve the peasants’ hunger for land. At the same time he was aware that the European powers were carving up China into spheres of influence and he did not want Russia to miss acquiring its share. Thus the last leg of the new railroad’s route was to run from Lake Baikal through Manchuria to Vladivostok, leaving a line inside Russian territory for later. The aim was to take Manchuria as Russia’s share of China and a space for a new, more modern style of colonialism. Witte’s aim had been “peaceful penetration” of China for economic reasons, but the Russian military wanted a naval base, and in 1896 managed to lease Port Arthur, on the south coast of Manchuria, from China. Russia seemed to have a firm position in the Far East.