His successor was a man cast in a different mould.  It is one of the peculiarities of the recent history of Russia that her rulers have broken away from the policy of their immediate predecessors, to recur to that which they had discarded.  The vague and generous Liberalism of Alexander I. gave way in 1825 to the stern autocracy of his brother, Nicholas I. This being shattered by the Crimean War, Alexander II. harked back to the ideals of his uncle, and that, too, in the wavering and unsatisfactory way which had brought woe to that ruler and unrest to the people.  Alexander III., raised to the throne by the bombs of the revolutionaries, determined to mould his policy on the principles of autocracy and orthodoxy.  To pose as a reformer would have betokened fear of the Nihilists; and the new ruler, gifted with a magnificent physique, a narrow mind, and a stern will, ever based his conduct on elementary notions that appealed to the peasant and the common soldier.  In 1825 Nicholas I. had cowed the would-be rebels at his capital by a display of defiant animal courage.  Alexander III. resolved to do the like.  He had always been noted for a quiet persistence on which arguments fell in vain.  The nickname, “bullock,” which his father early gave him (shortened by his future subjects to “bull"), sufficiently summed up the supremacy of the material over the mental that characterised the new ruler.  Bismarck, who knew him, had a poor idea of his abilities, and summed up his character by saying that he looked at things from the point of view of a Russian peasant[228].  That remark supplies a key to Russian politics during the years 1881-94.

[Footnote 228:  Reminiscences of Bismarck, by S. Whitman, p. 114; Bismarck:  some Secret Pages of his History, by M. Busch, vol. iii. p. 150.]

At first, when informed by Melikoff that the late Czar was on the point of making the constitutional experiment described above, Alexander III. exclaimed, “Change nothing in the orders of my father.  This shall count as his will and testament.”  If he had held to this generous resolve the world’s history would perhaps have been very different.  Had he published his father’s last orders; had he appealed to the people, like another Antony over the corpse of Caear, the enthusiastic Slav temperament would have eagerly responded to this mark of Imperial confidence.  Loyalty to the throne and fury against the Nihilists would have been the dominant feelings of the age, impelling all men to make the wisest use of the thenceforth sacred bequest of constitutional freedom.

The man who is believed to have blighted these hopes was Pobyedonosteff, the Procureur of the highest Ecclesiastical Court of the Empire.  To him had been confided the education of the present Czar; and the fervour of his orthodoxy, as well as the clear-cut simplicity of his belief in old Muscovite customs, had gained complete ascendancy over the mind of his pupil.  Different estimates have been formed as to the character