Alexander III of Russia was never supposed to sit on the throne. Born on March 10, 1845, in the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg, he was the second son of the future Tsar Alexander II, which meant his older brother, Nicholas, was the heir apparent. Everyone expected Nicholas to become a great tsar, and Alexander was perfectly content to stay out of the spotlight while his brother was prepared for rule. He was given the standard education of a grand duke, which was still excellent by any measure.
He learned English, French, and German, and received military training. He had the time to enjoy his youth, too. In the early 1860s, Alexander fell in love with Maria Lermontova-Mescherskaya, one of his mother’s ladies-in-waiting, whom he affectionately called “Dushenka. ” But she was already betrothed to a German prince, and Alexander was willing to renounce his claim to the throne to marry her.
His parents refused to allow it, and fate soon made the matter moot. In 1865, Nicholas died suddenly after a brief and severe illness. Alexander, who had adored his brother and called him “Nixa,” was devastated. He later said, “No one had such an influence on my life as my dear brother and friend Nixa.
” Now, as the new heir, he was forced to take his education far more seriously, studying law and administration under the tutelage of Konstantin Pobedonostsev, a fervent expert in civil law who would later become the chief procurator of the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church. Pobedonostsev instilled in the young heir a rigid belief that Orthodox thought was the cornerstone of Russian patriotism, and that any sane emperor would cultivate this view through his policies. It was a philosophy that would define Alexander’s reign. Nicholas, on his deathbed, had encouraged his younger brother to marry his fiancée, Princess Dagmar of Denmark.
Their parents agreed, and Alexander visited his brother’s widow, where the two shared photographs of the late Nicholas in a moment of mutual grief. In that shared sorrow, Alexander realized she would be a worthy bride. He proposed immediately, and she accepted warmly. They married on November 9, 1866, in the Grand Church of the Winter Palace, and Dagmar converted to Orthodoxy, taking the name Maria Feodorovna.
Although they barely knew each other, their marriage flourished. It was a rare love match among the Romanovs. Alexander never cheated on his wife, and he wrote in his diary shortly after the wedding, “God grant me to love my dear wife more and more. Often I feel I am not worthy of her, but even if this is true, I will do my best to be so.
” When she was away from him, he complained bitterly of how much he missed her. They had six children, five of whom survived to adulthood: Nicholas, George, Xenia, Michael, and Olga. Despite his strict political views, Alexander was an affectionate father. He told his wife, “I cannot relax mentally, enjoy their company, and rejoice at seeing them except with them.
” He pampered his youngest daughter, Olga, and had a playful relationship with his son, Michael. When his first child was born, he wrote that he wept like a baby. He told his children’s tutors, “I do not want healthy Russian children, I want natural Russian children. ”
His relationship with his own father, however, was not so warm.
Tsar Alexander II had presided over significant liberal reforms, and his son despised them. During the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, the tsar supported Prussia, which outraged the heir. Alexander sided with France, influenced in part by his wife, whose Danish origins made her sympathetic to the French, and he called the Russian government’s support of the Prussians “pigs. ” But the deeper source of his resentment was his father’s long affair with Princess Catherine Dolgorukova, an aristocratic Russian woman.
The emperor had fathered several illegitimate children with her while Alexander’s mother lay ill with a chronic condition. Alexander, a man of traditional values, viewed the betrayal as an unforgivable sin. In 1880, Alexander’s mother lost her battle with illness. Her son was grief-stricken.
Two days after her death, his father announced he would marry his mistress, Catherine. Then, on March 1, 1881, Tsar Alexander II was assassinated by a socialist political organization called Narodnaya Volya. He had never reconciled with his son, and the young Alexander blamed his father’s moral failings for his fate. He summarized events dramatically as he saw them: “All the scum burst out and swallowed everything sacred.
The guardian angel flew away, and everything turned to ashes, culminating in the terrible, incomprehensible March 1. ”
Now, with his weak father gone, Alexander became Tsar Alexander III, Emperor of Russia, King of Poland, and Grand Duke of Finland. He and his wife were formally crowned on May 27, 1883, in the Assumption Cathedral in Moscow. His first acts were aimed at his own family.
He disliked the extravagance of the Romanovs and the vast network of grand dukes and duchesses who received annual salaries of 250,000 rubles. He imposed a conservative financial policy that restricted the title of grand duke or duchess to sons and male-line grandsons of emperors. Many were stripped of their paid titles, cutting the crown’s costs overnight. Influenced by his father’s late marriage, he also banned morganatic marriages, where partners came from unequal social classes, and forbade members of the imperial family from marrying outside the Orthodox Church.
It was an omen of what was to come for his subjects. Alexander’s grandfather, Nicholas I, had been a reactionary ruler who introduced governing principles that the grandson now embraced: Orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality. Both men believed that strict adherence to these principles at all levels of government would suppress revolutionary unrest and save Russia. For the masses, the consequences were devastating.
Alexander III dismantled the power of elected local administrative bodies, and placed peasant communities under the supervision of land captains, wealthy landowners appointed by his government. These policies, which strengthened the emperor’s personal control over the country, weakened even the nobility. He did not act alone. His policies were largely guided by his former tutor, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, and by other conservative advisors such as Count Dmitry Tolstoy and Ivan Durnovo.
When disaster struck in 1891 and 1892, with a massive famine followed by a cholera epidemic, the government was helpless. Between 375,000 and 500,000 Russians lost their lives during his reign, and the authorities were forced to tolerate liberal activities just to manage the crisis. His supreme political and cultural goal was the complete Russification of his people. He wanted all his subjects to speak one language and practice one religion.
He implemented policies such as teaching only the Russian language in schools, even in Germany, Poland, and Finland. He supported the Eastern Orthodox Church and dissolved non-Russian cultural and religious institutions. Despite his opposition to popular power, Alexander III resembled his subjects in some ways. He lacked the elegance and refinement of his predecessors.
He was crude and austere, and he delighted in the idea of being as rough as his people. He preferred strength to intellect. He was enormous and imposing, with tremendous physical power, which he used both for amusement and intimidation. He tore playing cards in half with his bare hands to entertain his children, but he also used his strength to menace enemies.
On one occasion, he bent a silver fork to intimidate a potential Austrian aggressor, saying, “This is what I will do to your corps. ” He often used this intimidation against the most vulnerable segments of Russian society. He was intensely hostile to Russian Jews, and his reign saw a sharp decline in their economic, political, and social status. His policies encouraged open hostility, and pogroms occurred, driving many to emigrate to Western Europe and the United States.
Naturally, his conservative authoritarianism provoked backlash and unrest. Encouraged by their success in killing his father, the People’s Will movement began planning to assassinate Alexander III. But the tsar’s secret police uncovered the plot, arrested five conspirators, and had them hanged in May 1887. Among them was Alexander Ulyanov, the older brother of Vladimir Lenin, who would later lead the overthrow of the Romanovs in 1917.
Despite the horrors imposed at home, Alexander III did not embark on reckless foreign adventures. His most notable foreign policy achievement was the Franco-Russian Alliance, which drew France out of diplomatic isolation and pulled Russia away from German influence. He was enthusiastic about developing Russian industry and commerce, taking measures to stimulate economic growth in a country that was still largely feudal. He approved the start of construction on the Trans-Siberian Railway, a project that would, ironically, nearly kill him.
On October 29, 1888, Alexander III and his family were dining in the dining car of the imperial train when it suddenly derailed at Borki. The accident claimed twenty-one lives, but remarkably, no one in the imperial family died. As the roof of the dining car began to collapse, the massive Alexander held the remaining structure on his shoulders while his children escaped the wreckage. It was a heroic rescue and a miraculous survival.
Perhaps the tsar thought the ordeal would strengthen his son. He was deeply concerned that Nicholas, his heir, did not possess the qualities of an effective emperor. He thought the young Nicholas was too gentle and naive, that his views were childish. He tried to urge him to be more manly on several occasions.
He was also worried about his heir’s lack of experience with women, and he took drastic measures to correct it. Once, he arranged for Matilda Kshesinskaya, a Polish ballerina, to become Nicholas’s mistress. But until the end of Alexander’s life, he continued to regard his heir as a child. Alexander III did not survive the Borki train derailment unharmed.
The severe shock he suffered caused kidney disease in 1894. The disease worsened, and the outlook for the tsar was grim. He decided to travel to visit his cousin on the Greek island of Corfu to recover. But when he and his wife reached the Crimea, the seemingly invincible Alexander was too weak to continue.
There, in the afternoon of November 1, 1894, he succumbed to his illness. He was only forty-nine years old. He died in the arms of his beloved wife, and given how much he had loved her, he likely would not have wanted it any other way. Despite his short life, Alexander left a large mark.
His political legacy was a direct challenge to the European cultural order. Russia’s turn away from German influence and the shifting balance of power indirectly contributed to the outbreak of the First World War. His successor, Tsar Nicholas II, would become the last emperor of Russia, overthrown by his political opponents in the revolution of 1917, ending the rule of the Romanovs forever.