However, this provisional solution should not have hampered the process of the gradual extension of general civil legislation to the peasantry. After all, the transformation of the serfs into full- fledged citizens had been the chief purpose of the reforms. The reform of the judicial system and that of local self-government (Zemstvo) expressly recognized this goal. The same principle of "equalization" should have been applied to the problem of the "allotted lands" and the relationship between the individual peas- ant and the village commune. Autocracy, which in I86I had used its absolute power to liberate the slaves and to endow them with land, surely would have been able to complete the process of "equal- ization." However, all great reforms have a tendency to change their pace-to slow up at times and even to give way to backward movements. "Revolution" and "reaction" are closely interlocked So it happened in Russia in the late and feed each other. ... sixties. The reforms of Alexander II came to a standstill; and the seventies became a decade of intense revolutionary action directed against the person of the Sovereign. On March I, I88I,-the very day when Alexander II signed the decree introducing a kind of "popular representation"-which might have developed into a genuine constitutional system-he was killed by a terrorist's bomb. The reign of Alexander III began