ABSTRACT
The reign of Alexander III (1881-94) was a period of reaction in political life. The assassination of Alexander II marked the crest of the great revolutionary wave and was followed by a collapse of the whole movement. The government opened an energetic campaign of suppression and found substantial support in the opinion of the upper and middle classes. In two or three years it succeeded in making a clean sweep of all revolutionary organizations. By 1884 all active revolutionaries were either in Schlüsselburg1 and Siberia or abroad. For almost ten years there was no revolutionary activity to speak of. The more law-abiding radicals also suffered from the reaction. Their leading magazines were suppressed, and they lost most of their hold on the masses of the intelligentsia. Peaceful and passive non-political aspirations were the order of the day. Tolstóyism became popular, not so much for its sweeping condemnation of State and Church, as for its doctrine of non-resistance—precisely the point in which it differed from revolutionary socialism. The great majority of the middle class subsided into a life of humdrum boredom and impotent aspirations —a life familiarized to the English reader by the stories of Chékhov. But the end of the reign also saw the beginning of a new upheaval of capitalistic enterprise.
