That same day the terrorists finally got their quarry: a bomb mortally wounded the emperor, who died a few hours later. Although his successor, Alexander III (1881–94), at first hesitated, he was eventually persuaded by Pobedonostsev to reaffirm the fundamental principles of autocracy in a manifesto of 29 April 1881. The manifesto, implicitly a repudiation of Loris-Melikov’s plan and indeed of the Great Reforms, led immediately to the resignation of the liberal ministers and to the formation of a far more conservative government. The path was now open for a far-reaching revision of the earlier legislation.
Although contemporaries (especially liberals) characterized the new measures as a ‘reaction’, they did not constitute a ‘restoration’ of the old order. It was, of course, plain to all that neither serfdom nor the order it sustained could be reestablished. What the new government did seek to do, however, was to reassert the primacy of dynamic state leadership and autocracy. The ‘counter-reforms’ in censorship (1882) and education (1884), for example, specifically sought to emphasize the state’s power and dispensed with earlier hopes that society would show initiative and responsibility. Particularly important on the agenda was the re-establishment of firm police power; the ‘temporary regulations of 14 August 1881’ created ‘extraordinary’ security powers which, in fact, were renewed every three years and expanded to a growing list of areas until the regime finally fell in 1917. Indeed, the regime of Alexander III was wont to cultivate and reward
The 1880s also signalled an important new era in state policy towards national minorities. Although Alexander II had dealt brutally with the rebellious Poles, he had not engaged in systematic, coercive Russification and even made significant concessions in some instances. His son’s government, by contrast, launched a far more aggressive campaign, one that crossed the divide from administrative to cultural Russification. Perhaps the most striking example of the change in policy concerned the Baltic Germans, an élite that had served the empire loyally and that had enjoyed the special confidence and protection of Alexander III’s predecessors. From the mid-1880s, however, St Petersburg took vigorous measures to ‘Russify’ the area, requiring that Russian be used in state offices (1885–9) and elementary and secondary schools (1887–90), that the imperial police and judicial system be adopted (1889), and that the German university of Dorpat be Russified as Iurev University (1889–93). Simultaneously, the government reversed its earlier concessions to Jews. The most important repressive measures included the 1887 quotas limiting the number of Jewish students in secondary schools and universities (10 per cent in the Pale, 5 per cent outside, and 3 per cent in the two capitals). Later measures included rules to exclude Jews from the bar (1889), zemstvo (1890), and city councils (1892). Similar encroachments were made on other groups, even those like the Finns, who had hitherto enjoyed special protection, but now were exposed to a gradual Russification that would reach a crescendo in the late 1890s.
But paternalistic autocracy also made concessions, at least for its putative base of ‘loyal subjects’. For the nobles it created a new Noble Bank (with special low-interest rates) and, in an imperial manifesto of 1885, made new promises of a greater role: ‘The Russian nobles [will] preserve their preponderance in the military command, local governments, courts, and in the dissemination (through example) of the precepts of faith and fidelity’. The government also made concessions to the lower social groups as well—such as the Peasant Bank (1883) to assist in land purchases and the abolition of the poll-tax (1885). Disturbed by unrest among factory workers and influenced by the social policy in Bismarckian Germany, the government also adopted a number of far-reaching laws to restrict child labour and other labour abuses in 1882–6. By 1890 repression, moderated by such social concessions, appeared to have restored stability to the realm: disorders in the factory and village were at a nadir, even the revolutionary movement appeared to constitute no real match for the regime’s police forces.
