ALEXANDER III, Tsar of Russia. - B. 26 Feb./10 March 1845, d. 20 Oct./1 Nov. 1894 at Livadia. Having succeeded his father A. II, who was assassinated in 1881, A. III intensified the autocratic regime at home. In foreign policy, the cordial relations with Austria and with Germany grew weaker, especially with Vienna, because of the divergence of views that arose over the Bulgarian question. Relations with the German empire nevertheless underwent no changes until the fall of Bismarck, but the personal policy of William II cancelled the mutual advantages of the Russo-German friendship that had remained firm, albeit through not a few misunderstandings, for almost thirty years. To avoid Russia's isolation, A. III therefore drew closer, toward the end of his reign, to France.
In ecclesiastical policy we may say that relations with the Holy See were never tense, nor unacceptable. On 24 Dec. 1882, agreements were signed in Rome between the Russian plenipotentiary Butenev and the Secretary of State of Pope Leo XIII, Card. Jacobini, concerning the suppression of the dioceses of Minsk, Lublin and Lutsk-Zhitomir, and concerning the seminaries and the ecclesiastical Academy of St. Petersburg. Furthermore, the Russian government undertook to suspend the exceptional measures taken against the Polish clergy in 1865 and to amend the Ordinance of 1866. But these agreements had practically no implementation. After 1887, when Leo XIII began openly to oppose the Triple Alliance, A. proposed a modus vivendi on the basis of the agreements of '82. What mattered above all to the emperor was the introduction of the Russian language into the rite, a request to which the Pope, however, did not consent. Not for this did relations become tense; indeed in 1894 a Russian legation was created at the Holy See: its first head was Izvolsky.
Bibliography
Silvio Furlani