The Russian Empire in the 19th Century

The nineteenth century was a period of dramatic change and profound contradiction for the Russian Empire. It began with Russia as the leading continental power in Europe, having decisively defeated Napoleon and shaped the post-war European order, and it ended with the empire in deep crisis, weakened by military defeat, industrial backwardness, and mounting social and political tensions. The century saw the last great flowering of the autocratic system and the first serious challenges to it, the abolition of serfdom and the development of industry, the great age of Russian literature and the rise of revolutionary movements, and the emergence of Russia as both a great power and a society in desperate need of reform.

The century’s history can be organized around the reigns of the four emperors who ruled during this period: Alexander I (1801-1825), Nicholas I (1825-1855), Alexander II (1855-1881), and Alexander III (1881-1894), with the century closing under Nicholas II (1894-1917). Each of these rulers faced substantial challenges and left a distinctive mark on Russian history, and the long-term trends that led to the empire’s collapse in 1917 can be traced through the cumulative effect of their reigns.

Alexander I and the Napoleonic era

The nineteenth century opened with the reign of Alexander I, who came to the throne in 1801 after the assassination of his father, Paul I. Alexander’s reign is best remembered for his role in the defeat of Napoleon and the reshaping of the post-Napoleonic European order, but it also saw important domestic reforms, including the establishment of the Ministry of Education, the reform of the Senate, and the founding of new universities.

The defining event of Alexander’s reign was the French invasion of Russia in 1812. Napoleon, who had come to power in France in 1799, had by 1812 defeated most of the European powers and was the dominant figure on the continent. The complex diplomacy of the period, including the Treaties of Tilsit of 1807, in which Russia and France agreed to divide Europe between them, eventually broke down, and in June 1812 Napoleon led the Grande Armée, more than 600,000 men strong, into Russian territory.

The Russian strategy of strategic retreat, combined with a refusal to give Napoleon a decisive battle, slowly drained the Grande Armée of strength. The Russian commanders, including Mikhail Kutuzov, the commander-in-chief appointed after the fall of Smolensk, pursued a strategy of attrition, avoiding large-scale battles while harassing the French forces and drawing them deeper into Russian territory. The burning of Moscow in September 1812 and the early onset of winter destroyed the morale and discipline of the French forces, and the retreat from Moscow became one of the greatest military disasters in history.

The Russian campaign of 1812 was followed by the European campaigns of 1813-1814, in which Russian troops played a decisive role in the defeat of Napoleon. The Russian army pursued the French across Europe and entered Paris in March 1814, and again in 1815 after the Hundred Days. Russia’s role in the defeat of Napoleon gave it enormous prestige in Europe, and Alexander I played a central role in the Congress of Vienna that reshaped the post-war European order, and in the formation of the Holy Alliance, an organization of conservative European powers that would dominate European politics for several decades.

The Decembrist revolt and Nicholas I

Alexander I died suddenly in December 1825, and his death triggered a succession crisis. The next in line, his brother Constantine, had secretly renounced his claim to the throne in 1823, but this fact was not widely known, and the resulting confusion led to a brief period of interregnum. A group of young military officers, mostly members of aristocratic families and influenced by the liberal and nationalist ideas that had spread in Europe after the Napoleonic Wars, took advantage of the interregnum to stage a revolt. The Decembrist revolt of December 1825 was easily suppressed, but it was a significant event in Russian history, marking the first serious challenge to the autocratic system and the beginning of the revolutionary movement.

The revolt was followed by the accession of Nicholas I, Alexander’s younger brother, who would rule for the next thirty years. Nicholas was a soldier and a conservative, and his reign was marked by an attempt to maintain the autocratic system in the face of the rising tide of liberalism and nationalism in Europe. He is associated with the official doctrine of “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality” articulated by his education minister Sergei Uvarov, and his reign is often described as the “era of reaction.”

Nicholas’s domestic policy emphasized the suppression of dissent and the maintenance of order. The Third Section of His Imperial Majesty’s Own Chancellery, the secret police established in 1826, was a powerful instrument of repression, and the regime maintained an extensive system of censorship and surveillance. Nicholas also pursued a policy of conservative reform, modernizing the administration and the legal system, and he played an active role in suppressing the revolutions of 1848 in Europe, helping the Austrian emperor to put down the Hungarian revolution.

The defining event of Nicholas’s reign was the Crimean War of 1853-1856, in which Russia fought an alliance of the Ottoman Empire, France, Britain, and Sardinia. The war was triggered by a dispute between Russia and France over the status of the Christian holy places in Palestine, and it expanded into a wider conflict over Russian influence in the Ottoman Empire. The war exposed the backwardness of the Russian military and the inadequacy of the Russian economy, and it ended with the fall of the Russian fortress of Sevastopol in September 1855, after a long siege. Nicholas I died in March 1855, before the war’s end, and his death marked a turning point in Russian history.

The Great Reforms of Alexander II

Nicholas I was succeeded by his son, Alexander II, who is best remembered for the Great Reforms of the 1860s and 1870s, the most sweeping program of modernization in Russian history. The most important of these reforms was the emancipation of the serfs, which freed millions of private serfs from personal bondage. The emancipation was a landmark event, but the terms of the emancipation left much to be desired, since the former serfs received less land than they had previously worked and were required to make heavy redemption payments to the state.

Alexander II also established elected local assemblies, the zemstvos, reformed the judiciary along European lines, reformed the education system, and reduced the powers of the secret police. The reforms were, however, limited and inconsistent, and they provoked strong resistance from the conservative nobility, who saw them as a threat to the existing social order.

The most important challenge to Alexander’s reign came from the radical movement that developed in the 1860s and 1870s. The Narodniks (populists) sought to rouse the peasantry to revolution, and the more radical members of the movement turned to terrorism in the 1870s and 1880s. Alexander II was assassinated in March 1881 by a bomb thrown by members of the Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will) movement, and his death marked the end of the era of Great Reforms.

Alexander III and the era of counter-reform

The successor to Alexander II was his son, Alexander III, who ruled from 1881 to 1894. Alexander III pursued a policy of counter-reform, reversing many of the reforms of his father and intensifying the repression of dissent. He was personally hostile to the reforms and to the liberal intelligentsia, and his reign saw an increase in censorship, persecution of religious minorities, and Russification of the non-Russian nationalities.

Alexander III is also remembered for the beginning of industrialization, with the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway initiated in 1891, the development of heavy industry in the Donbas and the Urals, and the growth of foreign investment. The reign also saw the completion of the Russian conquest of Central Asia, which had largely been carried out under Alexander II: the Transcaspian campaign, with the capture of Geok-Tepe in 1881 and the annexation of Merv in 1884, brought the suppression of the Turkmen resistance and the end of the conquest.

Alexander III died in 1894, and was succeeded by his son Nicholas II, the last emperor of the Russian Empire. Nicholas inherited a society in deep crisis, with growing industrial unrest, an organized revolutionary movement, and the long-standing legacy of serfdom and inequality.

The closing years of the century

The closing years of the nineteenth century saw the intensification of the social and political tensions that would eventually lead to the empire’s collapse. The rapid growth of the working class and the development of a Russian Marxist movement, including the formation of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in 1898, marked a new phase in the development of the revolutionary movement. The Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, ending in a humiliating Russian defeat, would prove the catalyst for the 1905 Revolution, the first challenge to the autocratic system in the new century.

The cultural and intellectual life of the period was marked by extraordinary richness. The great age of Russian literature, including the work of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Chekhov, reached its peak in the second half of the century. Russian composers, including Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Borodin, produced a body of work that would become part of the international classical repertoire. The Russian visual arts, including the work of the Wanderers and the World of Art movement, developed a distinctive character that combined European techniques with Russian themes. The Russian university system, the Russian scientific establishment, and the Russian public sphere all developed rapidly in this period, despite the constraints of the autocratic system.

Themes in the 19th century

Four patterns run through the century.

Reform and reaction. Each wave of reform — Alexander I’s early-liberal flirtations, the Speransky reforms of 1809-1812, the creation of the Gubernia Reform of Nikolas Miljutin in the 1830s, Alexander II’s Great Reforms of the 1860s — was followed by a reaction that sought to restore as much of the previous order as could be retrieved. The conservative reaction under Nicholas I (1825-1855) was more systematic than the moment-to-moment hesitations of Alexander I; the counter-reforms of Alexander III (1881-1894) were more systematic still. The Russian autocracy was a reformable system, but reforms were always cut short before they had time to consolidate, and the political class that might have defended them — a strong Russian bourgeoisie, a politically experienced gentry — never quite came into being. (See Riasanovsky, A History of Russia, 8th ed., 2011.)

Russia and Europe. Throughout the century, Russia played an active part in European politics, from the defeat of Napoleon to the suppression of the 1848 revolutions in Hungary, and from the Crimean War to the Triple Alliance, the Reinsurance Treaty, and the Franco-Russian Alliance of 1891-1894. At the same time, the Russian autocratic system was increasingly seen as a barrier to modernisation, and the gap between Russia and the Western European powers in economic, social, and political terms was widening. The Slavophile-Westernizer debate of the 1840s-1850s — between Ivan Kireyevsky and Konstantin Aksakov, on one side, and Timofey Granovsky and the young Herzen, on the other — was the most articulate Russian version of this tension. (See Figes, Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia, 2002.)

The rise of civil society. Despite the constraints of the autocratic system, the century saw the development of a recognisable Russian civil society: the universities of Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kazan, and Dorpat; the periodical press, including the thick journals that published the great Russian novels; the professional organisations; the zemstvos; and the various social movements, including the Tolstoyan communes, the women’s higher courses, and the legal profession. The development of civil society was one of the defining features of the period, and it provided the social base for the constitutional movement of the early twentieth century. (See Bradley, Voluntary Associations in Tsarist Russia, 2009.)

The rise of revolutionary movements. The century saw the development of the Russian revolutionary movement in successive phases: the Decembrists of 1825, the Petrashevsky Circle of the 1840s, the Narodniks of the 1860s-1870s, the Populists of the 1880s, and the Russian Marxists of the 1890s, culminating in the formation of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1898. The revolutionary movement was driven by the deep social and political tensions of the period — the serf question, the land question, the labour question, the national question — and it played a decisive role in the events of 1905 and 1917. (See Pipes, Russia Under the Old Regime, 1974.)