• Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias Alexander III, 1845

   

Alexander Alexandrovich Romanov was born in Saint Petersburg, Russia, the second son of czar Alexander II by his wife Princess Marie of Hesse and by Rhine.

In disposition, Alexander bore little resemblance to his soft hearted, liberal father, and still less to his refined, philosophic, sentimental, chivalrous, yet cunning granduncle Alexander I, who coveted the title of "the first gentleman of Europe". Although an enthusiastic amateur musician and patron of the ballet, he was seen as lacking refinement and elegance. Indeed, he rather relished the idea of being of the same rough texture as the great majority of his subjects. His straightforward, abrupt manner savored sometimes of gruffness, while his direct, unadorned method of expressing himself harmonized well with his rough - hewn, immobile features and somewhat sluggish movements. His education was not such as to soften these peculiarities. More than six feet tall (about 1.9 m), he was also noted for his immense physical strength, though the large sebaceous cyst on the left side of his nose caused him to be severely mocked by his contemporaries. He always sat for photographs and portraits with the right side of his face most prominent.

Perhaps an account from the memoirs of the artist Alexander Benois best describes an impression of Alexander III:

After a performance of the ballet 'Tsar Kandavl' at the Mariinsky Theatre, I first caught sight of the Emperor. I was struck by the size of the man, and although cumbersome and heavy, he was still a mighty figure. There was indeed something of the muzhik [Russian peasant] about him. The look of his bright eyes made quite an impression on me. As he passed where I was standing, he raised his head for a second, and to this day I can remember what I felt as our eyes met. It was a look as cold as steel, in which there was something threatening, even frightening, and it struck me like a blow. The Tsar's gaze! The look of a man who stood above all others, but who carried a monstrous burden and who every minute had to fear for his life and the lives of those closest to him. In later years I came into contact with the Emperor on several occasions, and I felt not the slightest bit timid. In more ordinary cases Tsar Alexander III could be at once kind, simple, and even almost homely.

Though he was destined to be one of the great counter - reforming Tsars, Alexander had little prospect of succeeding to the throne during the first two decades of his life, as he had an elder brother, Nicholas, who seemed of robust constitution. Even when this elder brother first displayed symptoms of delicate health, the notion that he might die young was never seriously taken, and he was betrothed to the Princess Dagmar of Denmark.

Under these circumstances, the greatest solicitude was devoted to the education of Nicholas as Tsarevich, whereas Alexander received only the perfunctory and inadequate training of an ordinary Grand Duke of that period. This did not go much beyond secondary instruction, and included practical acquaintance with French, English and German, and a certain amount of military drill.

Alexander became heir apparent (as Tsarevich) with Nicholas' sudden death in 1865. It was then that he began to study the principles of law and administration under Konstantin Pobedonostsev, then a professor of civil law at Moscow State University and later (from 1880) chief procurator of the Holy Synod. Pobedonostsev awakened in his pupil very little love of abstract studies or prolonged intellectual exertion, but he did influence the character of Alexander's reign by instilling into the young man's mind the belief that zeal for Russian Orthodox thought was an essential factor of Russian patriotism and that this was to be specially cultivated by every right minded Tsar. During those years when he was heir apparent — 1865 to 1881 — Alexander did not play a prominent part in public affairs, but he allowed it to become known that he had certain ideas of his own which did not coincide with the principles of the existing government.

On his deathbed, Alexander's elder brother Nicholas is said to have expressed the wish that his fiancée, Princess Dagmar of Denmark, should marry his successor. This wish was swiftly realized, when on 9 November [O.S. 28 October] 1866 in the Imperial Chapel of the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, Alexander wed Dagmar, who converted to Russian Orthodoxy and took the name Maria Feodorovna. The union proved a most happy one and remained unclouded to the end. Unlike his father, there was no adultery in his marriage.

On 13 March 1881, Alexander's father, Tsar Alexander II, was assassinated by members of the terrorist organization Narodnaya Volya. As a result, he ascended to the Russian imperial throne (in Nennal 13.03.1881). He and Maria Feodorovna were officially crowned Tsar and Tsarina on 27 May 1883.

On the day of his assassination, Alexander II had signed an ukaz creating a number of consultative commissions that acted as advisory bodies to the monarch. Upon ascending to the throne, however, Alexander III took Pobedonostsev's advice and canceled the policy before it was published. He made clear that the power of the autocracy would not be limited or weakened in any way.

All of Alexander III's internal reforms were intended to reverse the liberalization of society that had occurred under his father's reign. He believed that the country was to be saved from revolutionary agitation by remaining true to Russian Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality, the ideology introduced by his grandfather, Tsar Nicholas I. Alexander's political ideal was a nation composed of a single nationality, language and religion, as well as one form of administration. He attempted to realize this ideal by the institution of mandatory teaching of the Russian language throughout the Empire, including to his German, Polish, and other non - Russian subjects (with the exception of the Finns); the patronization of Eastern Orthodoxy through the destruction of the remnants of German, Polish and Swedish institutions in the respective provinces; and by the weakening Judaism via the persecution of the Jews. The latter policy was implemented in the "May Laws" of 1882, which banned Jews from inhabiting rural areas and shtetls (even within the Pale of Settlement) and restricted the occupations in which they could engage.

Alexander weakened the power of the zemstvo, an elective local administrative division resembling the American county and the English parish council, and placed the autonomous administration of the peasant communes under the supervision of land owning proprietors appointed by his government. These "land captains", as they were called, were feared and resented throughout the Empire's peasant communities. These acts weakened the nobility and the peasantry and brought Imperial administration under the Emperor's personal control.

Encouraged by its successful assassination of Alexander II, Narodnaya Volya began planning the murder of Alexander III. The plot was uncovered by the Okhrana and five of the conspirators – including Alexander Ulyanov, the older brother of Vladimir Lenin – were captured and hanged on 20 May [O.S. 8 May] 1887. On 29 October [O.S. 17 October] 1888 the Imperial train was derailed at Borki. At the moment of the crash, the royal family was in the dining car. Its roof collapsed, and Alexander held its remains on his shoulders as the children fled outdoors. The onset of Alexander's kidney failure was later attributed to the blunt trauma suffered in this incident.

In foreign affairs Alexander was emphatically a man of peace, but not at all a partisan of the doctrine of peace at any price, and he adhered to the principle that the best means of averting war is to be well prepared for it. Though he was indignant at the conduct of German chancellor Otto von Bismarck towards Russia, he avoided an open rupture with Germany and even revived the League of Three Emperors for a time.

It was only in the last years of his reign, when Mikhail Katkov had acquired a certain influence over him, that Alexander adopted a more hostile attitude towards Berlin, and even then he confined himself to keeping a large number 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 Stambolov to destroy Russian influence in the principality excited his indignation, but he persistently vetoed all proposals to intervene by force of arms.

In Central Asian affairs he followed the traditional policy of gradually extending Russian domination without provoking a conflict with the United Kingdom (Panjdeh Incident), 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. 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.

He deprecated what he considered undue foreign influence in general, and German influence in particular, so the adoption of genuine national principles was off in all spheres of official activity, with a view to realizing his ideal of a homogeneous Russia — homogeneous in language, administration and religion. With such ideas and aspirations he could hardly remain permanently in cordial agreement with his father, who, though a good patriot according to his lights, had strong German sympathies, often used the German language in his private relations, occasionally ridiculed the exaggerations and eccentricities of the Slavophiles and based his foreign policy on the Prussian alliance.

The antagonism first appeared publicly during the Franco - Prussian War, when the Tsar supported the cabinet of Berlin and the Tsarevich did not conceal his sympathies for the French. It reappeared in an intermittent fashion during the years 1875 – 1879, when the Eastern question produced so much excitement in all ranks of Russian Society. At first the Tsarevich was more Slavophile than the government, but his phlegmatic nature preserved him from many of the exaggerations indulged in by others, and any of the prevalent popular illusions he may have imbibed were soon dispelled by personal observation in Bulgaria, where he commanded the left wing of the invading army.

Never consulted on political questions, he confined himself to his military duties and fulfilled them in a conscientious and unobtrusive manner. After many mistakes and disappointments, the army reached Constantinople and the Treaty of San Stefano was signed, but much that had been obtained by that important document had to be sacrificed at the Congress of Berlin. Bismarck failed to do what was confidently expected of him by the Russian Tsar. In return for the Russian support, which had enabled him to create the German Empire, it was thought that he would help Russia to solve the Eastern question in accordance with her own interests, but to the surprise and indignation of the cabinet of Saint Petersburg he confined himself to acting the part of "honest broker" at the Congress, and shortly afterwards he ostentatiously contracted an alliance with Austria for the express purpose of counteracting Russian designs in Eastern Europe. The Tsarevich could point to these results as confirming the views he had expressed during the Franco - Prussian War, and he drew from them the practical conclusion that for Russia the best thing to do was to recover as quickly as possible from her temporary exhaustion and to prepare for future contingencies by a radical scheme of military and naval reorganization. In accordance with this conviction, he suggested that certain reforms should be introduced.

Alexander III became ill with nephritis in 1894, and died of this disease at the Livadia Palace on 1 November [O.S. 20 October] 1894. His remains were interred at the Peter and Paul Fortress in Saint Petersburg. He was succeeded by his eldest son, Nicholas, as Nicholas II.

An equestrian statue of Alexander III sculpted by Paolo Troubetzkoy once graced Znamenskaya Square in front of the Moscow Rail Terminal in St. Petersburg. It was later moved to the inner courtyard of the Marble Palace. Another memorial is located in the city of Irkutsk at the Angara embankment.