Alexander II of Russia

• 1. Introduction

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  Alexander II of Russia was born on the 29th of April 1818, and by the time he died he had freed more than 23 million people from bondage, sold an entire continent's worth of territory, and been blown apart by a bomb on a canal road in Saint Petersburg. His killers called themselves the People's Will. The man they killed had, that very morning, signed a document that would have moved Russia toward a form of representative government. His successor tore it up within days.

  The questions that follow from that collision are not small ones. How did a tsar raised in a court that punished free thought become the ruler who abolished serfdom? What drove him to send warships to American ports, sell Alaska, and nudge a small northern territory toward its own currency? And how did someone who survived bombs, bullets, and a pistol that misfired at point-blank range finally run out of luck on an ordinary Sunday morning in 1881?

• 2. The Education of an Autocrat

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  Vasily Zhukovsky, a liberal romantic poet and gifted translator, was the man chosen to shape the future emperor's mind. Under his supervision, the young Alexander gained a working knowledge of the chief modern European languages and was introduced to a broad range of subjects. What made his education unusual was not the curriculum but the travel: in 1837, Alexander was taken on a six-month tour of Russia, visiting twenty provinces, and became the first Romanov heir to set foot in Siberia.

  During that Russian tour he met the exiled poet Alexander Herzen and chose to pardon him. That encounter would carry consequences far beyond a single act of mercy. It was through Herzen's influence, the source records, that Alexander later came to abolish serfdom.

  In 1838 and 1839 he toured Western Europe, and in Germany he made an unplanned stop in Darmstadt. He had been reluctant to spend what he feared would be a dull evening with their host, but Zhukovsky argued that the entourage needed rest, and Alexander agreed. At dinner he met Princess Marie, the fourteen-year-old daughter of the Grand Duke of Hesse, and was so immediately captivated that he wrote to his father: "I liked her terribly at first sight. If you permit it, dear father, I will come back to Darmstadt after England."

  The intellectual climate waiting for him back in Saint Petersburg was the opposite of everything Zhukovsky had tried to cultivate. Freedom of thought was vigorously suppressed by his father Nicholas I. Personal and official censorship was rife. Criticism of the authorities was treated as a serious offence. Alexander spent thirty years as heir apparent inside that atmosphere, learning to suppress what he thought while watching what it cost a country to stand still.

• 3. Emancipation and Its Architects

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  On the 3rd of March 1861, six years after his accession, Alexander signed the emancipation law that freed serfs on private estates throughout the Russian Empire. By that single edict, more than 23 million people received their liberty. They gained the right to marry without their landlord's consent, to own property, and to own a business.

  The path to that signature was anything but direct. Alexander had to decide whether freed serfs would remain economically dependent on their former landlords as agricultural laborers, or whether they would become independent communal proprietors. He backed the latter. The architects of the emancipation manifesto were his brother Konstantin, Yakov Rostovtsev, and Nikolay Milyutin.

  The political philosopher Boris Chicherin, writing in this period, described the scale of what Alexander had taken on. In Chicherin's framing, the tsar was called upon to abolish an age-old order founded on slavery, to replace it with civic decency and freedom, and to establish justice in a country that had never known the meaning of legality.

  Alexander used a quiet form of political pressure to spread the reform outward. He ordered the Minister of the Interior to send a circular praising the supposedly generous intentions of Lithuanian landed proprietors who had petitioned for regulated relations with their serfs, and suggested that proprietors in other provinces might wish to express a similar desire. The hint was taken. In every province where serfdom existed, emancipation committees formed. Prior to 1861, military conscription had lasted twenty-five years for serfs drafted by their landowners, which was widely considered a life sentence. Universal conscription for all social classes came into force on the 1st of January 1874, and that term was dramatically reduced.

• 4. The Reformer's Broader Reach

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  A new judicial administration, based on the French model, came into operation in 1864. It introduced security of tenure for judges, open trials, a jury system, and justices of the peace for minor offences at the local level. Legal historian Sir Henry Maine credited Alexander II with the first great attempt since the time of Grotius to codify and humanize the usages of war.

  In 1864, Alexander's bureaucracy established an elaborate scheme of local self-government, known as the zemstvo, for rural districts, followed by a similar system for large towns in 1870. These bodies held elective assemblies with a restricted right of taxation.

  On the question of Jewish residents, Alexander's record was partial but real. Jews could not own land, and their movement was restricted. Yet Alexander eliminated special taxes on Jewish people, and those who graduated from secondary school were permitted to live outside the Pale of Settlement and became eligible for state employment. Large numbers of educated Jews moved to Moscow, Saint Petersburg, and other major cities as soon as the rules allowed.

  In Finland, Alexander re-convened the Diet in 1863 and initiated reforms that included the creation of Finland's own currency, the Finnish markka. He also elevated Finnish from a language of the common people to a national language equal to Swedish. He is still referred to as "The Good Tsar" in Finland. A monument erected in Sofia in 1907 in the National Assembly square, opposite the Parliament building, carries a different honorific, in Old-Bulgarian style: "To the Tsar-Liberator from grateful Bulgaria."

• 5. Geopolitics and the American Bet

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  Russia sold Alaska to the United States in 1867 for $7.2 million. The reasoning was strategic rather than sentimental. The Alaska colony was losing money, and Alexander calculated it would be nearly impossible to prevent Russia's North American holdings, which bordered British Columbia and the North-Western Territory, from falling into British hands in another war. Offloading the territory to the Americans was partly a wager against British expansion.

  The same wary attitude toward Britain had shaped Russian behavior during the American Civil War. Russia supported the Union, viewing the United States as a counterbalance to its geopolitical rival, Great Britain. In 1863, the Russian Navy's Baltic and Pacific fleets wintered in the American ports of New York and San Francisco, a visible signal of alignment.

  Alexander's diplomatic maneuvering extended across Europe. After the fall of Napoleon III in 1870, he moved away from France and joined Germany and Austria-Hungary in the League of the Three Emperors in 1873. His goal was peace and stability in Europe; his fear was the kind of isolation that had produced the Crimean War disaster.

  The Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878 ended with the signing of the preliminary peace Treaty of San Stefano and produced independence for Bulgaria, Montenegro, Romania, and Serbia from the Ottoman Empire. Bulgarian parliamentarians elected the tsar's own nephew, Prince Alexander of Battenberg, as Bulgaria's first ruler. That outcome was the source of his second honorific title abroad, though Alexander himself was disappointed by what the Congress of Berlin amended away from the original treaty terms.

• 6. Suppression and Its Costs

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  The January Uprising in Poland began in 1863 and lasted eighteen months. Alexander's response was severe: hundreds of Poles were executed, and thousands were deported to Siberia. Poland's separate constitution was stripped away and the kingdom was directly incorporated into the Russian Empire. The martial law imposed on Lithuania in 1863 remained in place for the next forty years.

  Under the rules that followed, Ukrainian and Belarusian languages were banned from printed texts. The use of the Latin script for writing Lithuanian was forbidden. Polish was banned in both oral and written form from all provinces except Congress Poland, where it was permitted only in private conversations.

  Nikolay Milyutin, installed as governor, read the uprising as a lesson in social dynamics rather than pure suppression. He devised a program of peasant emancipation in Poland at the expense of the nationalist szlachta landowners, and had Roman Catholic priests expelled from schools. The emancipation of Polish peasants from serf-like conditions took place in 1864, on more generous terms than the emancipation of Russian peasants in 1861.

  In the Caucasus, the picture was darker still. The Russo-Circassian War concluded as a Russian victory during Alexander's rule. In 1857, Dmitry Milyutin first published the idea of mass expulsions of Circassian natives, arguing that the goal was not merely to resettle them but that "eliminating the Circassians was to be an end in itself, to cleanse the land of hostile elements." Tsar Alexander II endorsed those plans. A large deportation operation was launched before the war's end in 1864 and was mostly completed by 1867. Only a small percentage of the population accepted resettlement within the Russian Empire.

• 7. The Assassins' Long Campaign

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  On the 4th of April 1866, Dmitry Karakozov attempted to shoot the emperor in Saint Petersburg. Alexander himself referred to it only as "the event of the 4th of April 1866." Churches and chapels were built in many Russian cities to mark his survival. The architect Viktor Hartmann sketched a monumental gate design to commemorate the escape, though it was never built. Modest Mussorgsky later wrote his piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition, and its final movement, "The Great Gate of Kiev," was based on Hartmann's sketches.

  The attempt in 1866 marked a turning point in Alexander's politics. He replaced liberal ministers with conservatives. Under Minister of Education Dmitry Tolstoy, liberal university courses that encouraged critical thinking were replaced by a traditional curriculum, and from 1871 onwards only students from gymnasiums could progress to university.

  In 1867, during the World's Fair in Paris, a Polish immigrant named Antoni Berezowski attacked the carriage carrying Alexander, his two sons, and Napoleon III. His self-modified double-barreled pistol misfired and struck the horse of an escorting cavalryman.

  On the morning of the 20th of April 1879, Alexander was walking briskly near the Square of the Guards Staff when a thirty-three-year-old former student named Alexander Soloviev appeared with a revolver. The emperor fled in a zigzag pattern. Soloviev fired five times, missed every shot, and was sentenced to death and hanged on the 28th of May.

  On the evening of the 5th of February 1880, a Narodnaya Volya member named Stephan Khalturin set off a timed charge under the dining room of the Winter Palace. The explosion killed eleven people and wounded thirty others. Dinner had been delayed that evening by the late arrival of Alexander's nephew, the Prince of Bulgaria. The tsar and his family were not in the dining room when the device detonated.

• 8. The Final Sunday

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  On the 13th of March 1881, Alexander II followed the routine he had kept for many years. He traveled to the Mikhailovsky Manège for the Sunday military roll call, moving through the streets in a closed carriage accompanied by five Cossacks and a Polish noble named Frank Joseph Jackowski. The route ran along the Catherine Canal and over the Pevchesky Bridge.

  A young member of the Narodnaya Volya named Nikolai Rysakov stood on the narrow pavement carrying a small white package wrapped in a handkerchief. Rysakov later described what happened: "After a moment's hesitation I threw the bomb. I sent it under the horses' hooves in the supposition that it would blow up under the carriage. The explosion knocked me into the fence." The bomb killed one Cossack and wounded the driver and bystanders, but the carriage itself, a bulletproof gift from Napoleon III of France, held. Alexander stepped out, shaken but unharmed. He said to his anxious entourage, "Thank God, I'm untouched."

  A second attacker, Ignacy Hryniewiecki, stood by the canal fence. He raised both arms and threw a bomb at the emperor's feet. Police Chief Dvorzhitzky, who survived, wrote later: "I was deafened by the new explosion, burned, wounded and thrown to the ground. Suddenly, amid the smoke and snowy fog, I heard His Majesty's weak voice cry, 'Help!'" The tsar's legs were shattered. Twenty people with wounds of varying degree lay on the street and sidewalk. A third bomber, Ivan Emelyanov, had been standing in the crowd with a briefcase containing a bomb, in case the first two failed.

  Alexander was carried to the Winter Palace, to the same study where, almost twenty years earlier to the day, he had signed the Emancipation Edict. The attending physician, Sergey Botkin, when asked how long it would be, replied: "Up to fifteen minutes." At 3:30 that afternoon, the standard of Alexander II was lowered for the last time.

  That same morning, Alexander had signed what became known as the Loris-Melikov constitution, a document that would have created two legislative commissions made up of indirectly elected representatives. His son Alexander III, under the advice of Konstantin Pobedonostsev, repealed it. The Church of the Savior on Blood, built beginning in 1883 on the site of the assassination, still stands in Saint Petersburg.