The conservatives stormed the Tsar with protests against these dangerous concessions, and in the spring of 1882 General Ignatieff was forced to retire. His place was taken by Count Dmitri Tolstoi, one of the men of the last reign whom liberals hated above all others. He had been the Minister of Education during the late Tsar’s drastic restriction of the schools and universities. He and Pobiedonostseff and a few other rabid Slavophiles now closed round Alexander III and dictated the policy of his reign. That policy was one of, at home, unswerving, unscrupulous, unmerciful Russification; that is to say, complete obliteration of all criticism of the autocracy in native Russia and all religious or racial characters in the subject-provinces of alien race or religion. Abroad, the policy was naturally Pan-Slav, aggressive, imperialistic; but here the Emperor and his limited resources curbed the fanatics, so that the reign passed without a war. Russia was orientated for the final struggle in the next reign. For the reign of Alexander we need only glance at the various branches of the machinery of despotism which was created for the defence of the Romanoffs.
Education was the great source of evil, but in a world where education was now adopted as an elementary principle of civilisation it was no longer possible to return to the absolute illiteracy of the Middle Ages. A compromise was found in the easy distinction between sound and unsound education. The figures of educational progress during the reign of Alexander III are at first sight impressive. In 1877 the eight universities had had 5629 students: in 1886 the number had arisen to 14,000. In the same period the number of high schools rose from 200 to about a thousand: the number of elementary schools from 25,077 to 35,517. There were now, in all, more than two million pupils in the elementary schools of the Empire. It should be added that the population of the Empire was now 113,000,000; that most of the schools were founded, independently of St. Petersburg, by the zealous Zemstvos; and that very many of them were mere huts or sheds with ludicrously incompetent teachers.
Count Tolstoi, having been for sixteen years Minister of Education, controlled this department in the interest of the Slavophiles and imperialists. Pobiedonostseff, indeed, wanted to have all the elementary schools put under the control of the Holy Synod, or under the clergy. I have said little about the Russian Church during this period for a reason which will be understood. It was a mere docile instrument of the dynasty. Its ordinary priests were rough, ignorant men, little superior to the peasants themselves. Its higher clergy murmured not one single syllable at the cruelty, just as they had murmured none at the earlier vices, of the Romanoffs.