The Tsar Who Executed Lenin’s Brother

They are Janus heads: people who behave neatly outside the house, while playing the beast behind the front door. The Russian Tsar Alexander III was such a person. Not because he played fair weather in public while beating his wife and children at home, but because he pursued a brutally repressive policy at home while striving for harmony with his foreign policy. The latter earned him his nickname Mirotvorets up, Peacekeeper.

Alexander was born in 1845 as the second son of Tsar Alexander II. Having an older brother, it was unlikely that Alex junior would ever wear a crown, but Tsarevich Nicholas became seriously ill while traveling through southern Europe. He died in Nice in 1865, but not after urging his betrothed Dagmar of Denmark to marry his brother. Dagmar fulfilled this last wish and married Alexander in 1866 – who himself had little appetite for it. Later on, they would still love each other.

Will of the People

The sudden death of his brother, with whom he was very close, had a dramatic sequel in 1881. On March 13 of that year, Dad Alexander II was killed by the revolutionary movement in a bomb attack Narodnaya Volya, Will of the People. Thus Alexander III landed on a throne for which he was not born.

His father had made important reforms in Russia. For example, in 1861 he abolished serfdom, so that Russian peasants were no longer the property of their landlords. Revolutionaries like Wil van het Volk thought this was not going far enough and tried to overthrow the autocracy with terror. Alexander III responded to his father’s death by putting on the reins.

He scrapped further reforms and although serfdom was not reintroduced, local control of the peasantry was limited to the utmost. It’s no wonder that the terrorists who targeted senior now turned their attention to the son. The secret police managed to unmask many conspiracies. One of them involved Alexander Ulyanov. He was executed in 1887, much to the anger of his brother Vladimir – later known as Lenin.

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While Alexander III put his house in order, he took it easy on geopolitics. His grandfather Nicholas I had fought the disastrous Crimean War (1853-1856), but Alexander aimed for good relations with the opponents France and Great Britain. Nor did he want any problems with the German Empire. Thus, Russia bought time to prepare for new conflicts. The Peacekeeper always had in mind that one day there would be war again.

He wouldn’t experience that himself. In 1894 Alexander fell ill. He died in Crimea at the age of 49. His successor Nicholas II became the last Tsar of the Russians, murdered by Lenin and his Bolsheviks after World War and Revolution.

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