He grew morose, gloomy, and suspicious, and a reign of extreme severity under Araktcheef commenced.
In 1819 he consented to join in a league with Austria and Prussia for the purpose of suppressing the very tendencies he himself had once promoted.

The League was called the "Holy Alliance," and its object was to reinstate the principle of the divine right of Kings and to destroy democratic tendencies in the germ.

Araktcheef's severities, directed against the lower classes and the peasantry, produced more serious disorders than had yet developed.

There were popular uprisings, and in 1823 at Kief there was held secretly a convention at which the people were told that "the obstacle to their liberties was the Romanoff dynasty.

They must shrink from nothing--not from the murder of the Emperor, nor the extermination of the Imperial family." The peasants were promised freedom if they would join in the plot, and a definite time was proposed for the assassination of Alexander when he should inspect the troops in the Ukraine in 1824.
When the Tsar heard of this conspiracy in the South he exclaimed: "Ah, the monsters! And I planned for nothing but their happiness!" He brooded over his lost illusions and his father's assassination.