IB European History

IB European History

Mr. Mehlbach

The Reactionary Conservatism of Alexander III: 1881-1894

14 March 1881=Cancellation of the Duma Draft. Horrified by the assassination of his father on 13 March 1881 by the People’s Will, Alexander III announced Russia must return to the traditional three pillars of greatness: The Russian Orthodox Church, the Autocracy, and fanatical pro-Russian nationalism. On 14 March 1881, Alexander III cancelled the ukase from his father that was to announce the establishment of a Duma. There was to be absolutely no move towards a constitutional monarchy, since, in the mind of Alexander III, it was the liberal reforms of his father that had signed his death warrant.

15 April 1881=Public Hanging of the Assassins. To send a message to all of Russia that the Autocracy would crush the People’s Will, Alexander III ordered the five members of 13 March 1881 assassination plot to be publically executed in St. Petersburg. The five were tried before an Okhrana military tribunal and then sentenced to death by hanging. Alexander III ordered the Okhrana hangman not to use the traditional hangman’s knot which quickly breaks the neck of the condemned. Instead the five were executed without the knot and killed by slow strangulation. Between 1881 and 1894 over 1500 terrorists were publically executed throughout Russia in this fashion. In 1887 Lenin’s older brother, Alexander, was publically executed for his involvement in a terror plot to assassinate Alexander III. The assassination was to take place on the sixth anniversary of the murder of Alexander II. The plot was foiled due to the penetration the terror cell by an Okhrana double-agent.

1881-1883=Pogroms in the Pale. The word "pogrom" (Russian: погром) came from the Russian verb громить, "to destroy, to wreak havoc, to demolish violently.” Pogroms were anti-Semitic riots by an armed mob intoxicated with a pathological hatred of Jews, while the police and the army stood by and watched. Due to one of the central doctrines of the Russian Orthodox Church, namely that the Jews were the Christ killers, Russia was a rabidly anti-Semitic country. Following the news of the assassination of Alexander II on 13 March 1881, the Pale exploded into more than 200 pogroms. During the initial pogrom of March-April 1881, over 600 innocent men, women and children were slaughtered. The weapons of choice of the Russian mob were axes, clubs and meat cleavers. Alexander III was even more anti-Semitic than his father. When news reached St. Petersburg of the chaos in the Pale, the Czar offered no comment. Army units in the Polish-Lithuanian military districts were ordered to stand down. By 1883 more than 3000 Jews had died in the carnage. An 1883 official government investigation into the cause of the pogroms reported the participants were convinced that the attacks were sanctioned by the Czar himself. That same investigation blamed "Jewish exploitation" as the cause for the rioting.

1882=One Russia Laws. Alexander III was convinced that the primary reason his father was assassinated was the gradual shift of Imperial Russia to the liberal left. To stop this dangerous drift, the new Czar was resolved to return the country to the concept of One Russia. His political ideal was a nation containing only one nationality, one language, one religion and one form of administration; and he did his utmost to prepare for the realization of this ideal by imposing the Russian language and Russian schools on his German, Polish and other non-Russian subjects (with the exception of the Finns), by fostering Eastern Orthodoxy at the expense of other confessions, by persecuting the Jews and by destroying the remnants of German, Polish and Swedish institutions in the outlying provinces. These policies were implemented by the May Laws that banned Jews from rural areas and shetels even within the Pale of Settlement.

1882=May Laws. With the so-called "Temporary Laws" of 15 May 1882 a new period of anti-Jewish discrimination and severe persecution began in Imperial Russia. The laws were in effect until 1917. Jewish residents living in Gentile areas of the Pale were reduced by an additional 10 %. Residence laws for Jews on the mirs were tightened, resulting in the massive expulsion of Jews from Russian agricultural areas. Jews were forbidden to live in towns of less than 10,000 inhabitants, to buy or rent property outside their prescribed residences, denied jobs in the civil service and forbidden to trade on Sundays and Christian holidays. The repressive legislation was repeatedly revised. In 1887 (under Czar Nicholas II) the educational quotas were restricted to 10% within the Pale, 5% outside the Pale, except Moscow and St. Petersburg which were held at 3%. For many towns in the Pale with significant Jewish population, this resulted in half-empty schools and a number of potential students forbidden to enroll. Many students were unable to complete their education on the soil of their birth. The May Laws resulted in the massive emigration of over two million Russian Jews from 1882-1920, many settling along the eastern coast of the United States.

1883=Zemstvo Restrictions. Alexander III sought to counteract what he considered the excessive liberalism of his father's reign. For this purpose he removed what little power was wielded by the zemstvo an elective local administration resembling the county and parish councils in England, and placed the autonomous administration of the peasant mirs under the supervision of the landed aristocrats, appointed by the government. These came to be known as “land captains” who were much feared and resented amongst the peasant mirs throughout Russia. Just as the great aristocratic estates were controlled by the boyar before 1861, after 1883 the land captains all came from the Russian aristocracy.

1884=Expansion of the “katorga” (ка́торга.) The Russian word “katorga” comes from the Greek “katergon”, meaning galley. The katorga was a system of prison villages in Siberia, first established in the 17th century. Prisoners were exiled or sentenced to remote villages in vast uninhabited areas east of the Ural Mountains in Siberia and forced to perform hard labor, primarily mining and logging. Frostbite, unspeakable working conditions, disease, and starvation turned the average twenty year sentence to hard labor into a death sentence. 1884-1894 the Russian katorga radically expanded in size, due to Alexander’s declaration of war on the Russian left. Historians argue that to fully understand the psyche of Alexander III, we must first understand the psychological damage done to the Czar following the assassination of his father. Only in this context can we appreciate the exponential expansion of the number of prisoners warehoused in the katorga. The last great transports to the katorga had taken place after the Polish revolts 1863-1864. This was during the reign of Alexander II. Over thirty thousand Polish rebels were exiled to Siberia following the Polish Revolt. Following Alexander III’s crackdown on the Russian Left 1881-1894, the number of political prisoners sentenced to the prison villages in Siberia tripled. The only other time in Russian history that more political prisoners were held in Siberia was after the Bolsheviks took power in 1917. After 1917 the katorga evolved into the notorious Soviet Gulag (ГУЛАГ), an archipelago of hundreds of Siberian labor camps.

1884=Press Laws. The monopoly of information is a fundamental requirement for any successful state. Governments stay in power due to the absolute control of four state monopolies: the monopoly of information, the monopoly of the courts, the monopoly of violence and the monopoly of taxation. After 1881, these monopolies were all embodied in the Supreme Autocrat, Alexander III. To prevent and to restrict the flow of dangerous liberal ideas, Alexander III returned Russia to the strict censorship laws enacted by his grandfather Nicholas I in 1825. Liberal papers were shut down; their editors and writers arrested and exiled to Siberia for a minimum twenty year sentence. Foreign literature was seized and destroyed. Government eavesdropping became the norm. The Okhrana after 1884 was empowered to open the mail of private Russia citizens. Alexander III unleashed the Okhrana and Russian security forces on any and all forms of liberalism, republicanism and non-Russian nationalism. The Russia of 1884 was firmly in the grasp of Vienna 1814. For an entire decade, 1884-1894, hundreds of writers, poets, authors and playwrights disappeared into the wastelands of the Siberian katorga. The thaw that was the perestroika of Alexander II returned to the icy repression of a government frozen in reactionary conservatism.

1881-1894=Establishment of Okhrana Military Tribunals. The biggest security threat facing Imperial Russia was not Habsburg Austria or the Ottoman Turks but homegrown domestic terrorism. The most feared terror group was The People’s Will (Народная Воля), which had sentenced Alexander II to death in 1879. Alexander III resolved to crush terrorism within Russia. From 1881 onward all trials of political prisoners was shifted from civilian courts and handed over to extrajudicial military tribunals of the Okhrana. The terrorism of the radical left horrified the government of Alexander III. Yet, when the Russian population refused to rise up and to support domestic terror cells following the wave of attacks 1879-1881, this encouraged the Russian government to counterattack. From 1881-1884 there were more than seventy trials by Okhrana military tribunals of People’s Will members. Over 3000 terrorists were brought to trial. Half were executed. The most famous trial took place in St. Petersburg 24-28 September 1884. This trial became know as the Trial of the Fourteen.

1881-1883=Okhrana Infiltration of the People’s Will. In an absolutely astounding piece of counterintelligence work, the Okhrana penetrated the terror cells of the People’s Will using the “agent provocateur.” The agent provocateur were undercover, Okhrana informants that incited and provoked the cells to engage in illegal acts so the cells could then be arrested and destroyed. In 1883, Alexander III ordered the Okhrana to “decapitate the People’s Will.” The result was the 24-28 September 1884 Trial of the Fourteen which resulted in the conviction of the leadership cadré of The People’s Will. Two members were sentenced to death by hanging, eight were sentenced to twenty years in the katorga, and the remaining members were sentenced to exile in Siberia. While the People’s Will probably had no more than 800 members at the height of its terror campaign in 1881, by 1894 this number had been reduced to less than one hundred members. With the leadership cadré all but eradicated by Okhrana infiltration by 1894 and with the effectiveness of the extrajudicial Military Tribunals, the People’s Will had been severely degraded by 1900.

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