On March 13 (March 1, O.S.), 1881, Alexander II was assassinated, and the following day autocratic power passed to his son. In the last years of his reign, Alexander II had been much disturbed by the spread of nihilist conspiracies. On the very day of his death he signed an ukaz creating a number of consultative commissions that might have been transformed eventually into a representative assembly. Alexander III cancelled the ukaz before it was published and in the manifesto announcing his accession stated that he had no intention of limiting the autocratic power he had inherited. All the internal reforms that he initiated were intended to correct what he considered the too liberal tendencies of the previous reign. 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 of Orthodoxy, autocracy, and narodnost.
Alexander's 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 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 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 a partisan of the doctrine of peace at any price. Though indignant at the conduct of Bismarck toward Russia, he avoided an open rupture with Germany and even revived for a time the Alliance of the Three Emperors between the rulers of Germany, Russia, and Austria. It was only in the last years of his reign, especially after the accession of William II as German emperor in 1888, that Alexander adopted a more hostile attitude toward Germany. The termination of the Russo-German alliance in 1890 drove Alexander reluctantly into an alliance with France, a country that he strongly disliked as the breeding place of revolutions. 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 bellicose partisans to get out of hand.
As a whole, Alexander's reign cannot be regarded as one of the eventful periods of Russian history; but it is arguable that under his hard, unsympathetic rule the country made some progress.
Michael T. Florinsky
Additional Reading
Hugh Seton-Watson, The Russian Empire, 1801–1917 (1967), massive information clearly organized and objectively presented; The Decline of Imperial Russia, 1855–1914 (1952), good factual record with little attention to personalities; M.T. Florinsky, Russia: A History and an Interpretation, vol. 2 (1955), a compact, detailed account, factual and analytical.
Pobedonostsev, Konstantin Petrovich
▪ Russian statesman
born May 21, 1827, Moscow, Russia
died March 23, 1907, St. Petersburg
Russian civil servant and conservative political philosopher, who served as tutor and adviser to the emperors Alexander III and Nicholas II. Nicknamed the “Grand Inquisitor,” he came to be the symbol of Russian monarchal absolutism.
The youngest son of a Russian Orthodox priest who was also professor of Russian literature at Moscow University, Pobedonostsev was educated at home and at the Oldenburg School of Law in St. Petersburg, from 1841 to 1846. His adult life was devoted to service at the centre of the Russian state bureaucracy, beginning in the Moscow office of the senate. The publications he produced in his spare time there on the history of Russian civil law and institutions led to his being invited in 1859 also to lecture on civil law in Moscow University. His courses were so distinguished in organization, learning, and clarity that in 1861 Alexander II asked him to serve also as a tutor to his sons during the time they spent in Moscow each year. At the same time, he was an important contributor to the 1864 reform of the Russian judicial system. In 1865 he accepted the tsar's invitation to leave Moscow University and the senate to serve as a tutor to the tsar's sons and their families in St. Petersburg. Gradually he turned against all the reforms of Alexander II, particularly that of the courts. His service as one of the tutors and closest advisers of Alexander III helped make the latter a most reactionary ruler. Pobedonostsev was appointed to the senate in 1868, to the council of state (a high advisory body) in 1872, and in 1880 to the director generalship, or chief administrative position, of the Most Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox church, a position he held until the fall of 1905. This post gave him immense power over domestic policy, particularly in matters affecting religion, education, and censorship.
Pobedonostsev considered man to be by nature “weak, vicious, worthless, and rebellious.” He denounced the 18th-century Enlightenment view of the perfectibility of man and of society and therefore strongly supported paternalistic and authoritarian government. He looked upon each nation as being based on the land, the family, and the national church, and he regarded the maintenance of stability as the principal purpose of government. He sought, therefore, to defend Russia and the Russian Orthodox church against all rival religious groups, such as the Old Believers, Baptists, Catholics, and Jews. He also defended Russian rule over the various minority groups and supported their Russification. As lay head of the church, he promoted the rapid expansion of primary education in parish schools because he saw it, with its emphasis upon religion, as a strong bulwark of the autocracy. He sought to keep each person in that station in life into which he had been born and to restrict higher education to the upper classes and exceptionally talented. He tried also to prohibit and to banish all foreign influences, especially western European ideas concerning constitutional and democratic government. He was thus largely responsible for the government's repressive policies toward religious and ethnic minorities and toward Western-oriented liberal intellectuals.
Pobedonostsev had great influence in 1881, immediately after the assassination of Alexander II, when he persuaded Alexander III to reject the so-called Loris-Melikov constitution that was designed to bridge the gap between the government and the leading elements of society. He influenced the government's reactionary domestic policies throughout the rest of the 1880s but exercised little authority during the last 15 years of his life. His role, however, was exaggerated during his lifetime by critics of the regime and since then by historians, largely because his personality, appearance, and known views superbly qualified him as the symbol of a system of government deeply unpopular among many educated Russians and among all liberals and radicals.