Alexander II of Russia: The Tsar Who Freed the Serfs
"It is better to liberate the peasants from above" — the sentence is the whole of Alexander II's political philosophy, and its unspoken second half is what makes it interesting. Better than what? Better than waiting for them to do it themselves. An absolute autocrat, ruling the most reactionary great power in Europe, looked at his own country in the 1850s and concluded that the choice was not between reform and stability but between reform and revolution. He was right. He was also, in the end, too slow, and it killed him.
Raised by a Soldier and a Poet
Alexander was born on 29 April 1818 in Moscow, in the Chudov Monastery, during Easter week — the eldest son of the future Nicholas I and Princess Charlotte of Prussia, and one of six children. His education was a deliberate experiment in opposites. Captain Karl Merder drilled him in martial values and discipline; the poet Vasily Zhukovsky taught him history, letters and what one account calls the cultivation of humane sentiments. Both men were convinced autocrats, and Zhukovsky, having planted the humane sentiments, later warned his pupil against reforming too fast.
In 1841 Alexander married Princess Wilhelmina of Hesse-Darmstadt, who took the name Maria Alexandrovna. They had eight children.
A Throne Inherited in Defeat
He became emperor on 19 February 1855, in the middle of the Crimean War, which Russia was losing. That is the single most important fact about his reign. He accepted the defeat, signed the Treaty of Paris on 30 March 1856, and was crowned that August. The war had exposed something no amount of parade-ground splendour could hide: Russia was technologically and organisationally backward, and its vast serf army could not beat modern European forces.
Where his father had responded to every problem with repression, Alexander drew the opposite conclusion. Serfdom was not merely unjust; it was the reason Russia had lost.
Emancipation
The Emancipation Manifesto of 1861 freed more than twenty-three million serfs — some accounts put the figure nearer twenty-five million — in a single act. They gained the right to marry without their landlord's permission, to own property and to start businesses. It was the largest single act of liberation in nineteenth-century Europe, and it was carried out by decree of a man whose own authority rested on the system he was dismantling.
The execution was another matter. Household serfs were freed without any land at all. Everyone else had to buy their plots through redemption payments spread over forty-nine years with interest, the state advancing three-quarters of the price in bonds and the peasants repaying it — an obligation that ran until 1907. The allotments were frequently too small to live on. Redemption taxes forced families to sell grain they needed to eat, producing near-starvation, widespread unrest and famine, and pushing many of the newly free into tenancy under their former owners. The village commune, the *mir*, did not dissolve into a class of independent farmers as reformers had hoped; it persisted, holding land collectively and holding peasants in place.
The Great Reforms
Emancipation was the largest of a series. In 1864 the judicial system was rebuilt around principles Russia had never had: trial by jury, equal access to the courts, and security of tenure for judges. The same year, *zemstvos* — elected local assemblies — were created across thirty-four provinces with real authority over schools, hospitals, roads and public services. Censorship was eased in 1865 and the secret police disbanded. In the 1870s military service was cut from fifteen years to six and the brutality of army training was curbed.
Abroad, Alexander leaned on Prince Gorchakov and subordinated foreign policy to the domestic programme. He took Far Eastern territory from China between 1859 and 1861, sold Alaska to the United States in 1867, acquired Sakhalin from Japan in 1875 and pushed into Central Asia. The Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78 brought substantial gains in the Caucasus, though Western pressure at the Congress of Berlin trimmed them back.
The Reformer Turns
In 1866 a nihilist named Dmitry Karakozov tried to shoot him. Something in Alexander closed after that. He appointed the reactionary Dmitry Tolstoy and, as radical movements grew, answered them with crackdowns and public trials that served mainly to advertise the revolutionaries' arguments to a wider audience.
His private life did him further damage. His wife died in 1880; forty days later he married his long-standing mistress, Princess Catherine Dolgorukova, and the haste appalled Russian society.
Why Alexander II Is Called a Genius
The claim rests on a single act of political reasoning, and it is a formidable one. Alexander II grasped, decades before anyone had to, that autocracy's real danger was not liberal agitation but the immovable social structure underneath it — and that a revolution is a predictable event which a sufficiently clear-sighted ruler can pre-empt. "It is better to liberate the peasants from above" is not a moral statement. It is a strategic forecast, and it was correct: the emancipation of the serfs was an attempt to buy off 1917 fifty-six years in advance.
Almost no autocrat in history has voluntarily attacked the economic foundation of the class that keeps him on the throne. Alexander did it, and then followed it with juries, elected local assemblies, a free-ish press and a shorter conscription. Russia called him the Tsar Liberator, and for once a regnal nickname was earned rather than assigned.
The counter-case is severe and mostly concerns execution. Alexander was not an intellectual and produced no original thought; his tutors formed him as an autocrat and he remained one, reforming by decree and never conceding the principle that his word was law. He designed emancipation in a way that left millions of peasants land-poor and debt-bound for two generations, which manufactured precisely the revolutionary fury he had set out to defuse. After 1866 he lost his nerve and reverted to repression. Historians still argue whether his reforms were too little and too late or dangerously fast, and the honest answer may be that they were both — bold in conception, timid and clumsy in detail. His genius was in the diagnosis. The prescription was written badly, and Russia paid for it.
Legacy
On 13 March 1881 the People's Will caught him in St Petersburg. The first bomb wounded his coachmen; Alexander climbed down from his carriage to help them, and a second bomb killed him. He was sixty-two. The Church of the Saviour on the Spilled Blood stands on the spot.
The cruellest detail is what was in his pocket. Before he died he had commissioned a plan for a form of representative government — the beginning of a Russian constitution. His son Alexander III dismissed it and turned the empire back toward reaction.
Alexander II freed more people at a stroke than any ruler of his century, rebuilt Russian justice and local government, and modernised the army. He also demonstrated that half a reform can be more destabilising than none, and that a state which raises expectations it cannot meet has armed its own enemies. The revolution he tried to forestall arrived thirty-six years after his death.
Achievements
- Emperor of all the Russias (1855–1881)
- member of the State Council of the Russian Empire
- Knight of the Order of the Holy Spirit
- Knight of the Order of Saint Michael
- Knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece
- Knight of the Order of St. Alexander Nevsky
