Who Was Alexander II?
Alexander II (29 April 1818 – 13 March 1881) was Emperor of Russia from 1855 to 1881, the second-longest-reigning Romanov after Catherine the Great. He is best known as the Tsar-Liberator for the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, the most sweeping social reform in Russian history, and for the broader program of “Great Reforms” that modernised the Russian army, judiciary, and local government. He was assassinated in March 1881 by a bomb thrown by members of the Narodnaya Volya, a revolutionary group whose tactics he had helped to provoke by his reluctance to extend political reform.
Early life and accession
Alexander was the eldest son of Nicholas I and was trained from childhood for the succession. His upbringing, however, was unusual. From 1831, he was educated by the liberal poet and tutor Vasily Zhukovsky, who was given the explicit task of preparing the future tsar to rule a country that could not stand still. Zhukovsky introduced him to German and English political thought, the natural sciences, and the constitutional debates of the 1830s.
Alexander succeeded to the throne in March 1855, in the closing months of the Crimean War. The defeat of Russia in that war convinced him — and many around him — that the social and administrative system inherited from Nicholas I could not be preserved.
The Great Reforms
The cornerstone of Alexander’s reign was the emancipation of the serfs, proclaimed on 19 February 1861. The reform freed some 23 million private serfs from personal bondage and created a series of institutions — the zemstvos at the provincial and district level, an independent judiciary, new municipal government — to support the new free peasantry.
The Great Reforms also transformed the army. The minister of war, Dmitry Milyutin, replaced the old lifetime conscription with a short-term service obligation in 1874, made military service universal for men of military age, and reorganised the army into a system of military districts. The reforms of Alexander’s reign extended to primary education, the regulation of the press, the liberalisation of travel abroad, and a wide-ranging revision of the criminal and civil law codes.
The Polish uprising
The early years of the reign were marked by the January Uprising of 1863 in Poland, the largest armed challenge to Russian rule in the western provinces. The revolt, led by the Polish nobility and supported by segments of the Catholic clergy, was suppressed after more than a year of fighting and was followed by a harsh program of Russification, including the closure of Catholic monasteries, the suppression of the Uniate Church in the western provinces, and the appointment of Russian officials in place of Poles in the local administration.
Foreign policy and the Russo-Turkish War
In foreign policy, Alexander presided over the expansion of Russia into Central Asia and the Far East, and he led Russia into the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878, the most ambitious Russian campaign in the Balkans of the 19th century. The war ended with the Treaty of San Stefano and, after the Congress of Berlin, with limited Russian gains in Bessarabia and in the Balkans.
The later years and the assassination
The last decade of Alexander’s reign was marked by a sharp turn away from reform. The Polish uprising of 1863 had hardened conservative opinion at court, and the growth of the revolutionary movement, especially after the student demonstrations of the late 1860s, convinced the tsar that the Great Reforms had gone far enough. The minister of the interior, Mikhail Loris-Melikov, was preparing a proposal for a consultative assembly when the tsar was assassinated.
On 13 March 1881, Alexander was returning to the Winter Palace after an inspection of the troops when a bomb thrown by Nikolai Rysakov exploded near his carriage. The tsar, who had been unhurt by the first explosion, was mortally wounded by a second bomb thrown by Ignacy Hryniewicki. The assassination cleared the way for the conservative reaction of Alexander III and delayed political reform until 1905.
The legacy of Alexander II
Alexander is one of the most controversial Russian emperors. To his admirers, he is the tsar who freed the serfs and modernised Russia, a statesmen of reform who paid for his vision with his life. To his critics, he is the ruler whose half-measures on political reform drove the revolutionary movement, and whose emancipation left the peasantry with insufficient land and heavy redemption payments. The judgement, like the man, remains contested.