Alexander III of Russia

• 1. Introduction

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  Alexander III of Russia was born on the 10th of March 1845 at the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg, the second son of the future Alexander II. He grew up as a spare, not an heir. His elder brother Nicholas was the one schooled for empire, the one betrothed to the Danish princess, the one the dynasty was built around. When Nicholas died suddenly in 1865, the throne fell to a young man trained only as an ordinary Grand Duke: taught French, English, and German, drilled in military manners, and schooled in almost nothing else.

  What happened next was one of the stranger reinventions in Russian imperial history. The man who never expected to rule would become one of the most personally powerful tsars since Peter the Great. He would turn back his father's liberal reforms, build an alliance that pulled Russia away from Germany and toward France, and keep his country out of major warfare for the entirety of his reign. He would earn the title The Peacemaker. And yet the alliance he forged would eventually pull Russia into the catastrophe of World War I.

  How does a man who was never prepared for power shape an empire? And what does it cost?

• 2. The Unlikely Heir

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  Nicholas, the elder brother, died in 1865, and Alexander later said that no one had such an impact on his life. He described Nicholas as "my dear brother and friend Nixa" and called the responsibility that followed "terrible."

  The transition was emotional in a more private way too. Nicholas had been engaged to Princess Dagmar of Denmark, daughter of King Christian IX. On his deathbed, Nicholas allegedly asked that Dagmar marry Alexander instead. The families encouraged the match. On the 2nd of June 1866, Alexander traveled to Copenhagen, and while the two were looking at photographs of the deceased Nicholas together, he proposed. She accepted. They married in the Grand Church of the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg, and Dagmar converted to Orthodox Christianity, taking the name Maria Feodorovna.

  But the path to that wedding had been complicated. In the 1860s, Alexander had fallen in love with Princess Maria Elimovna Meshcherskaya, his mother's lady-in-waiting. When he learned that Prince zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Sayn had proposed to her, Alexander told his parents he was prepared to give up his rights of succession to marry her. His father, now informed that Russia had a marriage agreement with Dagmar's family, ordered him to go to Denmark and propose. Alexander wrote in his diary, "Farewell, dear Dusenka."

  The marriage that began under such constraint became one of the warmest in Russian imperial history. Unlike many of his predecessors since Peter I, Alexander remained faithful throughout the marriage. A few weeks after the wedding, he wrote in his diary that he hoped to love his "darling wife more and more" and that he sometimes felt unworthy of her. In 1885, he commissioned the jeweler Peter Carl Fabergé to produce the first jeweled Easter egg for her, and she was so delighted that the tradition continued every Easter.

• 3. The Mentor Behind the Throne

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  Konstantin Pobedonostsev was a professor of civil law at Moscow State University when Alexander began studying under him as the new tsesarevich. The relationship would shape Russian domestic policy for a generation. Pobedonostsev drilled into his student a conviction that Orthodox faith was inseparable from Russian patriotism, and that a right-minded emperor must cultivate it.

  From 1880 to 1905, Pobedonostsev held the office of chief procurator of the Most Holy Synod of the Orthodox Church, making him the state's chief overseer of the Russian church for the entirety of Alexander's reign and beyond. He would later become tutor to Alexander's son and heir, Nicholas. His influence was durable enough that the novelist Leo Tolstoy used him as the model for the character "Toporov" in the novel Resurrection.

  When Alexander II was assassinated on the 13th of March 1881, Pobedonostsev moved immediately. Alexander II had signed a decree that very day establishing consultative commissions to advise the monarch. Pobedonostsev counseled the new tsar to cancel the decree before it could be published. Alexander did so without hesitation. His autocracy would not be diluted.

  With Count Dmitry Tolstoy serving as minister of education and later of internal affairs, and Ivan Durnovo succeeding Tolstoy in the latter post, Alexander assembled a cabinet of conservatives who shared his vision. The journalist Mikhail Katkov provided ideological support in the press for the tsar's autocracy policies.

• 4. Reversals at Home

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  Alexander III believed in three principles that his grandfather Nicholas I had introduced: Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality. He used them as the organizing logic of his domestic program, convinced they would suppress revolutionary agitation.

  He weakened the zemstvos, the elective local administrative bodies that had been a modest vehicle of grassroots governance. He placed peasant communes under appointed overseers called "land captains" (zemskiye nachalniki), proprietors selected by his government rather than elected by communities. This transferred power upward toward the emperor and away from both the nobility and the peasantry.

  His Russification campaign imposed the Russian language in schools in Germany, Poland, and Finland. German, Polish, and Swedish cultural and religious institutions were dissolved. Only Eastern Orthodoxy received official patronage.

  For Russia's Jewish population, the reign brought sharp deterioration. The May Laws of 1882 banned Jews from inhabiting rural areas and shtetls, even within the Pale of Settlement, and restricted the occupations open to them. Dozens of pogroms followed across the western part of the empire. Many Jews emigrated to Western Europe and the United States.

  The Russian famine of 1891-92 and a cholera epidemic that killed between 375,000 and 500,000 people overwhelmed the government and forced a grudging tolerance of liberal relief activity. The zemstvos were recruited to help coordinate aid. Leo Tolstoy assisted with relief on his estate and through the British press. The writer Anton Chekhov directed anti-cholera precautions in several villages.

• 5. The Diplomat in the Shadows

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  Nikolay Girs served as Alexander's Foreign Minister from 1882 to 1895. A scion of a rich and powerful family, Girs was the real architect of the peaceful reputation Alexander would carry into history. He built a diplomacy of negotiated settlements, treaties, and conventions that defined Russian boundaries and defused dangerous tensions.

  In 1885, Girs achieved what his contemporaries considered the most dramatic result: settling long-standing friction with Great Britain, which had grown alarmed that Russian expansion southward threatened India. This was the Panjdeh incident, resolved without war. Girs understood Alexander's moods well enough to outmaneuver hostile journalists, ministers, the Tsarina, and even Russian ambassadors when necessary, steering the tsar away from confrontation.

  Alexander was personally furious at the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who had failed to support Russian interests at the Congress of Berlin after Russian military sacrifice in the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-78. Yet Alexander avoided an open rupture. He even revived the League of Three Emperors for a period and signed the Reinsurance Treaty with Germany in 1887. When Kaiser Wilhelm II dismissed Bismarck in 1890 and refused to renew the treaty, Alexander turned toward France. The Franco-Russian Alliance was signed in 1892.

  Girs was the alliance's architect. It brought France out of diplomatic isolation and moved Russia from the German orbit into a new coalition supported substantially by French financial assistance to Russian modernization. That alliance would later be expanded into the Triple Entente with the addition of Great Britain, a combination that drew Russia into World War I.

• 6. The Man Behind the Title

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  The artist Alexander Benois remembered the first time he caught sight of Alexander III after a performance of the ballet Tsar Kandavl at the Mariinsky Theatre. He wrote that the emperor was "cumbersome and heavy" but still a "mighty figure," with something of the muzhik, the Russian peasant, about him. When their eyes met briefly, Benois felt it as a blow: "a look as cold as steel, in which there was something threatening, even frightening." Yet in later encounters, he found Alexander could be "at once kind, simple, and even almost homely."

  That physical impression was not exaggerated. Alexander was genuinely enormous and strong. He tore packs of cards in half with his bare hands to entertain his children. When the Austrian ambassador threatened to mobilize two or three army corps against Russia, Alexander twisted a silver fork into a knot and threw it onto the ambassador's plate, saying, "That is what I am going to do to your two or three army corps."

  He disliked social functions and avoided Saint Petersburg. At palace balls he would grow impatient and begin dismissing orchestra musicians one by one and turning off the lights until the guests had no choice but to leave. He was afraid of horses after a bad childhood experience and could not be coaxed back into a carriage after the ponies reared.

  His relationship with his children was warmer than most European monarchs maintained. He told their tutors, "I do not need porcelain, I want normal healthy Russian children." He wrote that he "was crying like a baby" when Maria gave birth to their first child, Nicholas, in 1868. He worried openly that Nicholas was too gentle and naive to rule, once asking the minister Witte whether he had noticed that the Grand Duke was "an absolute child" with "utterly childish" opinions.

• 7. The Fortress Life

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  After his father was killed by members of Narodnaya Volya on the 13th of March 1881, Alexander was advised that the Winter Palace could not protect him. He moved his family to the Gatchina Palace, 20 miles south of Saint Petersburg. The palace was ringed with moats, watch towers, and trenches, and soldiers stood guard continuously.

  Narodnaya Volya, emboldened by the assassination of Alexander II, began planning to kill the new tsar as well. The Okhrana uncovered the conspiracy. Five of the plotters were captured and hanged in May 1887, among them Aleksandr Ulyanov, the older brother of Vladimir Lenin.

  Alexander resented his confinement. Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich recalled hearing him say, "To think that after having faced the guns of the Turks I must retreat now before these skunks." Even visits to Saint Petersburg required staying at the Anichkov Palace rather than the Winter Palace.

  In 1888, the imperial train derailed at Borki. The family was in the dining car when the roof collapsed. Alexander held up the collapsed roof on his shoulders while the children escaped outdoors. The blunt trauma he sustained in that incident was later identified as the starting point of the kidney failure that killed him.

  Despite his wariness of the world outside Russia, he found genuine relief during summers at Langinkoski manor along the Kymi River near Kotka on the Finnish coast, where his children were immersed in Nordic life. The Danish royal reunions at Fredensborg and Bernstorff, attended by his in-laws King Christian IX and Queen Louise, brought his family together with the Princess of Wales from Britain and King George I of Greece from Athens. Away from Russian security protocols, Alexander once turned a water hose on the visiting King Oscar II of Sweden.

• 8. The Final Months

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  In 1894, Alexander III was diagnosed with nephritis, a terminal kidney disease. His first cousin Queen Olga of Greece offered her villa Mon Repos on the island of Corfu, hoping the climate might help. By the time the imperial party reached Crimea, he was too weak to go further. They settled at the Maly Palace in Livadia.

  Imperial relatives began arriving as it became clear Alexander was dying. The clergyman John of Kronstadt administered Communion. On the 21st of October, Alexander received Nicholas's fiancée, Princess Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt, who had traveled from Darmstadt for the tsar's blessing. Though exhausted and barely able to stand, Alexander insisted on receiving her in full dress uniform. The effort visibly cost him.

  He died in the arms of Maria Feodorovna at the Maly Palace on the afternoon of the 1st of November 1894, with his physician Ernst Viktor von Leyden present. He was 49 years old. His daughter Olga wrote afterward that "my mother still held him in her arms" long after he died. Maria had nursed him through his final illness, and he told her, "Even before my death, I have known an angel."

  His remains traveled from Livadia to Saint Petersburg by way of Moscow, arriving for interment at the Peter and Paul Fortress on the 18th of November. Among those attending were King Christian IX of Denmark, the Prince and Princess of Wales, the Duke of York, and Princess Alix of Hesse, who would marry his son Nicholas within weeks of the funeral. The son Alexander had called an absolute child took the throne as Nicholas II.