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
13 March 1881 Alexander II was assassinated by a band of
Nihilists, Narodnaya Volya (People's Will), 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 an ukaz, creating a number of consultative commissions which might have been easily transformed into an assembly of notables.
Following advice of his political mentor
Konstantin Pobedonostsev, Alexander III determined to adopt the opposite policy. He at once canceled 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 other non-Russian subjects (with the exception of the Finns), 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. These policies were implemented by "
May Laws" that banned
Jews from rural areas and
shtetls even within
Pale of Settlement.
In the other provinces he sought to counteract what he considered the excessive liberalism of his father's reign. For this purpose he removed what little power had by
zemstvo, an elective local administration resembling the county and
parish councils in
England, had and placed the autonomous administration of the peasant communes under the supervision of landed proprietors appointed by the government. These came to be known as
land captains, who were much feared and resented amongst the peasant communities throughout Russia. 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 doctrine 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
Mikhail 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 1887, once again the Peoples Will planned the murder of Tsar Alexander III. Among the conspirators captured were one
Aleksandr Ulyanov. Ulyanov was sentenced to death and hanged on
May 5 1887. Alexander Ulyanov was the brother of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, who would later take the pseudonym
V.I. Lenin.
In
Central Asian affairs he followed the traditional policy of gradually extending Russian domination without provoking a conflict with the
United Kingdom, 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 in
Livadia Palace on the
1st of November 1894 and was buried at the
Peter and Paul Fortress in
St. Petersburg. Alexander III was succeeded by his eldest son
Nicholas II of Russia.
Emperor Alexander and his Danish-born wife regularly spent their summers in their
Langinkoski manor near
Kotka on the
Finnish coast, where their children were immersed in a Scandinavian lifestyle of relative modesty.
Tsar Alexander's memorial is located in the city of
Irkutsk at the embankment of the
Angara river.
