Did Alexander III strengthen or undermine the autocracy?

The short answer

• The assassination of 1881. The People’s Will pursued Alexander II for two years. Its Winter Palace bomb killed eleven guards in February 1880, and in March 1881 it killed the Tsar just after he approved Interior Minister Mikhail Loris-Melikov’s plan for elected advisers. To Alexander III and the new court, the sequence made concessions look like an invitation to terror. Opponents of reform gained the argument.
• Pobedonostsev’s creed. Pobedonostsev, Alexander III’s tutor and the government’s lay head of the Orthodox Church, believed parliaments, elections and a free press were a lie that divided nations. In his view Orthodoxy, autocracy and the Russian people held Russia together. His position at the center of power throughout the reign turned distrust of society into a governing principle.
• The needs of a great power. Crimea and disappointment at the Congress of Berlin in 1878 convinced rulers that Russia needed railways, industry and money to remain a great power able, like Britain, France and Germany, to shape Europe’s affairs. Grain exports helped pay for foreign loans; French banks lent heavily from 1888, and the Franco-Russian alliance of 1891–94 sealed the relationship. Strategic strength required economic change, but the rulers saw no need to share power with the classes it created.
• Fear of the borderlands. Officials saw the Polish rising of 1863 and national movements among Ukrainians, Baltic peoples and Finns as threats to unity. These movements sought language, schools and rights for their peoples. Russification aimed to make loyal Russians of subjects through a common language and faith; officials also suspected Jews as disloyal outsiders. More than half the population spoke a mother tongue other than Russian. Defining loyalty through sameness made much of the empire a problem for its own government.

What it changed

A state of permanent emergency. The 1881 emergency statute became an ordinary instrument of government, placing a large share of the empire under emergency rule for a generation. Political police answering to the interior minister put informers in revolutionary circles; arrest and exile without trial became routine. Peaceful opponents had no legal channel, and being pushed underground encouraged the belief that only force would move the regime.

Industry without a voice for workers. In the industrial boom of the 1890s output grew by around eight percent a year. Workers crowded into St Petersburg, Moscow, Ukraine’s Donbas coalfield and the oil city of Baku. Strikes and unions were illegal, so workers could not use them to bargain over wages and conditions. A strike brought workers into conflict with the state as well as employers, helping explain the rapid politicization of strikes in the 1890s and 1905.

Emigration and new Jewish politics. Estimates place Jewish emigration from the empire between 1881 and 1914 at two to three million, including about 1.6 million to the United States. Poverty drove migration as much as pogroms did. Those who stayed pursued new politics: early Zionist groups of the 1880s sought a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and the Bund, founded in 1897, organized Jewish socialist workers. Many young Jews joined revolutionary parties. Suspicion had helped create some of the opposition the regime feared.

A generation turned against the state. The People’s Will was crushed, but revolution drew a new generation. In 1887 police foiled a student plot against Alexander III and hanged its five leaders at Shlisselburg. One was Alexander Ulyanov; his younger brother Vladimir, later Lenin, turned to revolution. Marxist circles spread among students and workers, studying Karl Marx’s prediction that industrial workers would overthrow their employers. The defeat of the bombers did not end revolutionary ideas.