Alexander II

Emperor of Russia (r. 1855-1881)

• Born: April 29, 1818
• Birthplace: Moscow, Russia
• Died: March 13, 1881
• Place of death: St. Petersburg, Russia

Called the czar liberator, Alexander emancipated the serfs in 1861 in the first of a series of political and legal reforms designed to quicken the pace of modernization in Russia. Despite his reforms, rising expectations caused dissidents to become radicalized. Hence, Alexander’s life was ended by political assassins, and his reforms were suspended by his successor.

Early Life

Born in the Chudov Monastery within Moscow’s Kremlin during an Easter week, Aleksandr Nikolayevich Romanov (nih-koh-LAY-vihch roh-MAHN-awf) was the oldest son of Czar Nicholas I (r. 1825-1855), then grand duke, and Charlotte, daughter of King Frederick William III of Prussia and sister of future German emperor Wilhelm I. Alexander had five siblings: Nicholas, Michael, Maria, Olga, and Alexandra. After their father became czar in 1825 they lived in the royal Russian residence, the Winter Palace, and in a royal palace at Tsarskoe Selo.

The heir to the throne was given two tutors: Captain Karl Karlovich Merder and the poet Vasily Zhukovsky. The former was hired when Alexander was six years old, and he stressed martial values and discipline; the latter emphasized history, letters, and the cultivation of humane sentiments. Both teachers believed in autocracy. A model soldier, throughout his life Alexander expressed excitement at watching and participating in military drills and parades.

In 1837, after completing his formal education, Alexander was sent on a seven-month tour through thirty provinces of the empire. Accompanied by Zhukovsky, he received his first acquaintance with poverty. A year later Alexander took his grand tour of western Europe, where he fell in love with fourteen-year-old Princess Wilhelmina of Hesse-Darmstadt. His father reluctantly accepted the proposed match, and the girl arrived in Russia in 1840 to be rebaptized in the Orthodox Church as Maria Alexandrovna. They were married on April 16, 1841. Among their eight children the first two, Alexandra and Nicholas, died in 1849 and 1865, respectively; the third child, the future Alexander III, was born in 1845.

Czar Nicholas I carefully prepared his son for governance by appointing him to numerous positions such as chancellor of Alexander University in Finland, member of the Holy Synod and several imperial councils, and, in his father’s absence, chairman of the state council. Several times Alexander participated in diplomatic missions, including one to Vienna in 1849 to persuade the Austrian emperor Franz Joseph to pardon the Hungarian rebel generals. Although frightened by the European revolutions in 1849 and reminded by Zhukovsky about the irresponsibility of rapid reforms, Alexander would launch a movement for widespread changes after his accession.

Life’s Work

Alexander came to power on February 19, 1855, during the Crimean War before the fall of Sebastopol to the French and English. Although he reminded his generals of the victory after the fall of Moscow in 1812, he was soon persuaded to negotiate for peace. The czar was compelled to accept defeat and sign the Treaty of Paris on March 30, 1856. His coronation did not occur until August 26. It is unclear to what extent Russia’s weak performance in the war led him to embark upon reforms. Because his background did not portend such a reign, historians are divided as to what occurred. Furthermore, because his policies were not uniformly progressive, his goals are difficult to assess. Less dictatorial than his predecessors, he freely accepted advice.

In matters of foreign affairs, he relied upon his chief aide, General Aleksandr Mikhailovich Gorchakov, who agreed with the czar that foreign affairs must be subordinated to domestic developments. Together they forged a rapprochement with Napoleon III of France, only to see it fail when the French extended sympathy to the Polish rebels in 1863. Thereafter, Alexander II drew closer to his German relatives, whom he supported during the creation of the German Empire in 1871. By that year Alexander dared to violate the terms of the Treaty of Paris by sailing warships on the Black Sea. Russia also joined with Germany and Austria-Hungary in the Three Emperors’ League, but it fell apart when Alexander succumbed to pan-Slavic pressures and to a war with the Ottoman Empire on April 24, 1877.

Victorious Russian armies forced the sultan to sign a peace at San Stephano the following year, allowing Russia significant gains in Bessarabia and the lower Caucasus. Western powers compelled the Russians to scale back their gains at a congress in Berlin later that year. That event damaged Russian-German ties, but Otto von Bismarck managed to assuage the czar’s feelings somewhat. The end of German-Russian cooperation came in the following reign.

Meanwhile, Russian expansion in the Far East and Central Asia was impressive. Although Alaska was sold to the United States in 1867, and Gorchakov tried to restrain commanders from conquests in Asia, the czar was pleased with their acquisitions. From 1859 to 1861 China ceded territory to Russia in the Amur-Ussuri district, and Japan yielded Sakhalin Island for the remaining Kurile Islands in 1875. Between 1865 and 1876, Alexander’s empire reached Kokand, Bokhara, and Khiva in Central Asia; in 1881, other lands east of the Caspian Sea were added. Such gains in the East, however, were little appreciated.

The centerpiece of the reign was the emancipation of about twenty-five million serfs on February 19, 1861. Not only did this measure fulfill a goal that had baffled previous rulers such as Alexander I, it also made possible free labor that was so indispensable for later industrial programs and a free citizenry that was a precondition for further reforms. Alexander opened discussions for serf reform in his state council after the Crimean War and urged that the deliberations of the matter be removed from secret negotiations. He indicated that he wanted the obstacles to solution of this question overcome. Hence, the gentry accepted its inevitability and joined the czar in realizing the edict. The decree gave peasants immediate legal freedoms with lands to buy from the state. Although the terms allowed concessions to the gentry, many people agreed with Aleksandr Ivanovich Herzen that official society had moved in a progressive direction. Much of the credit was attributed to Alexander. Peasants, however, were bewildered by the requirement to purchase their lands.

Despite the uprising in Poland in 1863, Alexander forged ahead with decrees in 1864 to reform the legal administration. Reforms that were introduced were trial by jury in civil cases, equal access to the courts for all, life tenure for judges, and measures to protect due process. Also that year, local government was reorganized and newly elected assemblies called zemstvos were given wide control over local education, fire fighting, veterinary medicine, road and bridge construction, hospital care, and other matters in the thirty-four provinces of the empire.

Members were elected on the all-class principle, removing the monopoly of local authority from the gentry. Alexander eased censorship in 1865 and disbanded the secret police. Similar elective bodies were introduced in 1870 in urban administration. During the 1870’s, military reforms drawn up by D. A. Miliutin incorporated many principles of civil law into military law, and the penal environment of the soldier was changed to a dignified profession for national defense. Hence the brutality of military training was largely eliminated, and terms of active service were reduced from fifteen to six years.

Alexander’s reforming zeal was tempered by firm measures to protect his regime. In 1862 he ordered the arrest of radical journalist Nikolay Chernyshevsky for inciting violence, and he ordered Russification of the Poles after 1863. On April 4, 1866, while Alexander was walking through the Summer Gardens, an inept attempt on his life was made by a deranged nihilist, Dmitry V. Karakazov. Although the attempt failed, Alexander was shaken by the incident and appointed reactionary minister Dmitry Andreyevich Tolstoy to preside over the ministry of education. When the populist intelligentsia failed to arouse the peasantry by talking about socialism in the early 1870’s, some turned to violence. Alexander responded with strong measures of his own, and the nation witnessed several treason trials that gave exposure to the radical cause and undermined respect for the czar. Eventually, a faction of radicals decided upon the ultimate act of terrorism—the killing of the czar.

Members of the People’s Will Party believed that the assassination of the czar would bring peasants to the point of national rebellion. Their single-minded devotion to this end was realized on the morning of March 13, 1881, as Alexander was riding a coach through the streets of his capital after addressing a meeting. When a bomb was thrown at this coach, wounding his coachmen, the czar alighted from the carriage to help attend to the victims; a second bomb then killed him. On that spot was constructed the Church of the Spilt Blood.

Significance

Despite relapses into conservative policies, Alexander II authored the most significant reforms in czarist history. Designed to modernize Russian life so that the nation could better compete internationally, the reforms also fulfilled Alexander’s own desires for the improvement of the commonwealth. However, they were not effective in stemming the tide of radical politics. Some regard the reforms as too little, too late; others believe that they were meant simply to strengthen the old structures in order to make additional reforms unnecessary; and yet others believe that they were too much, too soon. The most radical intelligentsia feared that the reforms might defuse the public’s desire for revolution.

The czar’s popularity waned in his last years, partly through his own doing. The moving of his second family into the Winter Palace under the same roof as the empress, his hasty marriage to Princess Catherine E. Dolgoruka on the fortieth day after his wife died in 1880, and his replacement of progressive ministers with conservative ministers obscured the fact that he was, at the end, considering a major step toward representative government, having commissioned Count Mikhail Tariyelovich Loris-Melikov to draw up a plan for a national consultative assembly. Alexander’s assassination came just before the plan was unveiled; the new czar dismissed the proposal and began measures to undo the work of his father.

Bibliography

Almedingen, E. M. The Emperor Alexander II. London: Bodley Head, 1962. This work, by a writer who specializes in biographies of Russian figures, contains the most extensive account of Alexander’s personal life. Despite Alexander’s vacillations, the author laments that Alexander’s successors failed to continue his work.

Billington, James H. The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture. New York: Vintage Books, 1970. The author divides Alexander’s reign into a period of reform followed by a period of reaction, while brilliantly exploring the sociopolitical dimensions of art and literature in this era.

Kornilov, Alexander. Modern Russian History from the Age of Catherine the Great to the End of the Nineteenth Century. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952. This classic view of the age demonstrates with keen insight the political machinations of the czar and his court.

Moss, Walter G. A History of Russia. 2d ed. 2 vols. London: Anthem Press, 2002. The second volume describes Alexander’s reforms and foreign policies.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Russia in the Age of Alexander II, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky. London: Anthem Press, 2002. Examines the personal and public lives of Alexander, incorporating this information with details about Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and other nineteenth century Russian writers and thinkers.

Mosse, W. E. Alexander II and the Modernization of Russia. London: English Universities Press, 1958. A short but scholarly synopsis of the reign that traces much of the czar’s troubles to his alienation of society and even of the police during the 1870’s.

Pereira, N. G. O. Tsar-Liberator: Alexander II of Russia, 1818-1881. Newtonville, Mass.: Oriental Research Partners, 1983. Despite the author’s modest claim to the contrary, this is the best biographical study of the czar’s reign. Pereira, an academic historian, clearly lauds Alexander’s imperial policies in the East.

Pushkarev, Sergei. The Emergence of Modern Russia, 1801-1917. Translated by Robert H. McNeal and Tova Yedlin. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963. Pushkarev, a modern liberal historian, maximizes the changes at the beginning of the century and minimizes those during the 1860’s.

Seton-Watson, Hugh. The Decline of Imperial Russia, 1855-1914. New York: Praeger, 1952. In part 1, “The Tsar Liberator 1855-1881,” the author discovers the roots of the collapse of the old regime.

Van der Kiste, John. The Romanovs, 1818-1959: Alexander II of Russia and His Family. Stroud, England: Sutton, 1998. A history of the Romanov family, focusing on Alexander II’s life, reign, and children.