The censorship of the press was continued with unexampled vigor in 1884, until independent opinion ceased to be represented, and the Liberal Party was without an organ. Whether the opinions expressed conflicted with the imperial views mattered little, but if they clashed with those of the Executive, the paper was doomed. The power of the minister was absolute, and anyone appealing to the Emperor would be marked for future and inevitable discipline. The muzzle worked like a charm. Literary men were arrested and fined, the printing presses of the Empire were practically silent, and under the instructions of the Minister of the Interior, the works of such men as Lyell, Huxley, Lubbock, Mill, and Herbert Spencer were interdicted. Anti-semitic outrages, resulting in bloodshed, occurred in Southern Russia, necessitating is commission of enquiry. The Holy League which had been organized to combat the spread of Nihilism proved valueless, though sixteen Revolutionists were convicted of criminal offenses, and six sentenced to death. Among these were members of the nobility, and officials of high rank, including seventy-five army officers, and arrests and trials were made in all parts of the Empire and without publicity.
In December alone, one batch of fifty prisoners was condemned to the fortress of Schasselburg. "All offenses against absolutism," writes Noble, "were now met by most disproportionate punishments." For the thirty years ending 1885, thirteen hundred and fifty-six persons had been punished for political crimes. Of these, forty-five were executed; five in the reign of Nicholas, thirty-one under the reign of Alexander II., and nine since the accession of Alexander III., while fifty met their death by violence either in prison or while enduring exile. Up to this time, and during the past twenty-five years, over two hundred prisoners had succeeded in escaping from banishment or prison, and had found shelter in Western Europe.
Count Dmitry Tolstoy, the Minister of the Interior, once suggested to the Czar that he should be authorized to open his correspondence in order to economize time. "You forget that I am Emperor," said his majesty, his face growing dark, "how dare you propose to stand between me and my subjects." As over one hundred of such petitions and appeals arrived at the Czar's chamber daily, the probability that all would have received the consideration they were entitled to—notwithstanding the Emperor's reputation for justice—seems in the nature of things a practical impossibility. Personal audience of the Czar was not permitted by the police. "Nihilist plots," says Stead, "rendered it impossible for the Emperor to stand at the door of the Anitchkoff Palace to receive petitions, but the post office was open and any mail would bear the petition to the Czar's council chamber." Of the hundred of appeals, however, addressed to the Monarch in loyal good faith, but which never reached their destination, history offers no record.
In September the Czar paid a long contemplated visit to the city of Warsaw, where he met in conference the Emperors of Germany and Austria, which resulted in a solemn confirmation of friendly relations, the establishment of steps for the suppression of nihilistic propaganda, and an invocation to the neutral powers to curtail the right of asylum. His entry into the capital of the "fair land of Poland," was the most gloomy festivity ever recorded. The royal line of march was guarded by rows of naked bayonets, and the police were in possession of the flanking houses.
The imperial decree, which had declared that Russia's territorial vastness made further conquest undesirable, was now proved to have been but a flimsy fiction. Under the pretext of the development of Central Asia, Count Ignatieff elaborated a plan for the reorganization of Turkistan. Through the representations—or perhaps, strictly speaking, instructions—of the Khan of Khiva, who was present at and duly impressed with the coronation ceremonials, and backed by Russian troops, the Oasis of Merv, the famous stronghold of the Turcomans, on the Afghan frontier, surrendered with its garrison of Merv Tekkes to the dominion of the White Czar. "This gave to Russia the undisputed trade of the whole country as far as Tejend, offered security of the projected route to the Oxus, made commercial access to Persia and Afghanistan feasible, and removed a hitherto conceded barrier against a possible advance on India." At Askabad—which though three hundred and eighty miles from Herat was one hundred and thirty-four miles nearer than Quetta, the terminal point of the English strategic railroad—the Sarik Turcomans also announced allegiance to the Russian scepter.
Meanwhile the British viewed the advance of Russia in the East with suspicion, and determined that the old boundary lines of Afghanistan, as designated on the maps, must be kept intact. An international commission was agreed to, and while Sir Peter Lumsden, the English representative who had hastened to the scene, was awaiting the arrival of the Czar's tardy commissioner, the occupation of Penjdeh on the Murgab, by the Ameer of Cabal, with a military force, and at the instigation of the English, precipitated a crisis. But Penjdeh was, in reality, a Turcoman town, and being of immense strategic value to England, as it commanded the approach to Herat—the key to India—the Russian government interfered, and as a preliminary advanced the outposts of its army of thirty-five thousand men to Pul-i-Khista, within what was colored on the maps as Afghan territory. England then addressed an ultimatum, insisting upon an immediate withdrawal of the Russian troops. This Russia refused to accede to, demanding on her part the evacuation of Penjdeh—and both countries prepared for war.
Owing to the joint opposition of Russia and Germany, at the Constantinople Conference, to the union of the two Bulgarias, the popular revolution in Roumelia led to the interdiction of "freedom of expression." Prince Cantacuzene, the Russian Minister of War at Sophia was instructed to resign, and Prince Alexander's name was, by order of the Czar, struck from the Russian Army list. At the monster trial of Nihilists held at Warsaw, several army officers, landowners, lawyers, journalists and workmen were charged with belonging to a society called the Proletariat. The proceedings were conducted with the utmost secrecy, six were condemned to be hanged, and twenty-two sentenced to long terms of penal servitude. An encounter between Russian troops under Komaroff and those of the Ameer of Afghanistan, who, countenanced by the British, were occupying Penjdeh, and which terminated in the defeat of the latter, for a time, seriously imperiled the peaceful relations existing between the two governments.
Arbitration was suggested by Earl Granville as a step that would permit no loss of national dignity to either government. The impracticability of the submitting of the case to the Emperor Wilhelm, owing to the moral support of Russia's position by the Austro-German Alliance, having become apparent, the King of Denmark was mutually agreed upon as a referee, but as time advanced, arbitration was postponed, and the joint commission resumed its labors, though a period of extreme tension followed, succeeded by the mobilization of troops.