3. Alexander III and the Counter-Reforms

Alexander III became czar well prepared to carry out a program of reaction and repression. Steadfast and resolute, he had never approved of his father’s reforms. His staunchly conservative views had been honed to a sharp edge by his closest adviser and former tutor, the prominent jurist and chief procurator of the Holy Synod Konstantin Pobedonostsev.

Pobedonostsev used his formidable rhetorical and debating skills to denounce institutions such as parliamentary democracy (“the great falsehood of our time”), a free press (“one of the falsest institutions of our time”), and public education for the masses (a “vulgar conception of education”). His advice to the czar included the idea that a bloody revolution was preferable to a constitution. Alexander III himself was conscientious and hardworking, willing to take the time to see that his backward-looking policies were fully implemented.

Alexander III’s policy of reaction began in 1881 with a supposedly temporary law to strengthen police powers that in fact remained in force until the monarchy fell in 1917. The law subjected a large part of the country to the equivalent of martial law. It allowed the authorities to arrest, imprison, and exile citizens without trial or any other legal proceedings. The next year the police received even more power; they could now bar people who had been placed under “open surveillance” from certain jobs and deny them the right to move from place to place. Meanwhile the political police was reorganized; under the name Okhrana it became notorious for violations of political rights that most other European governments were bound by law to respect. These measures were followed by laws that together constituted the counter-reforms. During the 1880s a series of decrees tightened press censorship, virtually abolished the autonomy of universities, and weakened the independence of the judiciary. In 1889 the government created land captains, officials with extensive powers to supervise and control the peasantry. The next year a new law increased noble predominance in the zemstvos while strengthening the Ministry of Interior’s control over those bodies. A law in 1892 had a similar impact on town government: by raising the property qualifications for voting, the law cut the electorate in both Moscow and St. Petersburg by about two-thirds.

Alexander III also intensified the government’s Russification efforts directed at non-Russian minorities. While these policies affected nearly all non-Russian groups, they were directed most vigorously against Poles and Ukrainians. The most severe discrimination, however, was directed against the country’s Jews, who were treated as aliens unworthy of a place in Russian society. This policy reflected both widely held anti-Semitic beliefs and the particular anti-Semitic attitudes of both Alexander and Pobedonostsev. In 1881 the government played a major role in permitting or, in the case of some officials, even instigating a dreadful wave of pogroms. This outburst of often murderous anti-Jewish mob actions took place in more than 100 southwestern towns and villages. The pogroms were followed by a series of decrees that limited Jewish access to secondary and higher education, barred them from government service, denied them the right to vote in zemstvo or city duma elections, and discriminated against them in a wide variety of other ways. Tightened restrictions on where they were allowed to live forced thousands of Jews from their homes [1, 315].

The reign of Alexander III did see a few positive developments. Russia stayed out of war and in 1894 concluded an agreement with France designed to protect both parties against an attack by Germany, whose growing power was a concern in both Paris and St. Petersburg. To help the peasantry, in 1881 the government reduced redemption payments and two years later established a special bank to provide peasants with credit. Most important, in 1892, in an effort to deal with Russia’s chronic inability to balance its budget, the czar appointed Sergei Witte as minister of finance.

Competent and strategically minded, Witte viewed Russia’s budgetary problems as symptomatic of a broader and more dangerous problem: its economic backwardness relative to Europe’s other great powers. Like Peter the Great before him, Witte believed that Russia’s economic backwardness was a threat to its national survival. Having won the czar’s confidence, Witte began a comprehensive effort to promote modernization, economic growth, and industrial development. Its centerpiece and foundation was a massive program of railroad construction (including the Trans-Siberian Railroad, still the world’s longest) that would both tie the vast empire together and encourage the growth of heavy industries such as iron and machine building, which in turn would stimulate other industries.

To further promote local industrial development, Witte relied on a protective tariff, government subsidies and credits, and a variety of other sophisticated policies. His program yielded impressive results. During the next decade Russia’s industrial production doubled, entire new industries developed, and railroad mileage jumped by almost three quarters. Witte neglected the peasantry, however, and his policies helped to expand another dissatisfied lower class, the industrial proletariat, whose discontent became a major new destabilizing factor during the reign of the next, and last, czar, Nicholas II [3, 250].