Tsar Alexander II

Alexander II (Алекса́ндр II Никола́евич; 29 April 181813 March 1881) was Emperor of Russia, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Finland from 2 March 1855 until his assassination in 1881.

In the period of his life as heir apparent (1825 to 1855), the intellectual atmosphere of Saint Petersburg did not favour any kind of change: freedom of thought and all forms of private initiative were suppressed vigorously by the order of his father.

Personal and official censorship was rife; criticism of the authorities was regarded as a serious offence.

The education of the tsesarevich as future emperor took place under the supervision of the liberal romantic poet and gifted translator Vasily Zhukovsky, grasping a smattering of a great many subjects and becoming familiar with the chief modern European languages.

Boris Chicherin (1828–1904) was a political philosopher who believed that Russia needed a strong, authoritative government by Alexander to make the reforms possible.

He praised Alexander for the range of his fundamental reforms, arguing that the tsar was:

"called upon to execute one of the hardest tasks which can confront an autocratic ruler: to completely remodel the enormous state which had been entrusted to his care, to abolish an age-old order founded on slavery, to replace it with civic decency and freedom, to establish justice in a country which had never known the meaning of legality, to redesign the entire administration, to introduce freedom of the press in the context of untrammeled authority, to call new forces to life at every turn and set them on firm legal foundations, to put a repressed and humiliated society on its feet, and to give it the chance to flex its muscles."

Unusually for the time, the young Alexander was taken on a six-month tour of Russia (1837), visiting 20 provinces in the country.

As Tsesarevich, Alexander became the first Romanov heir to visit Siberia (1837).

While touring Russia, he also befriended the then-exiled poet Alexander Herzen and pardoned him.

It was through Herzen's influence that he later abolished serfdom in Russia.

He also visited many prominent Western European countries in 1838 and 1839.

In 1839, when his parents sent him on a tour of Europe, he met twenty-year-old Queen Victoria and both fell in love.

Simon Sebag Montefiore speculates that a small romance emerged.

Such a marriage, however, would not work, as Alexander was not a minor prince of Europe and was in line to inherit a throne himself.

In 1847, Alexander donated money to Ireland during the Great Famine.

He has been described as looking like a German, somewhat of a pacifist, a heavy smoker and card player.

The death of his father gave Alexander a diplomatic headache, for his father was engaged in open warfare in the southwest of his empire.

His early life gave little indication of his ultimate potential; until the time of his accession in 1855, aged 37, few imagined that posterity would know him for implementing the most challenging reforms undertaken in Russia since the reign of Peter the Great.

His uncle Emperor Alexander I died childless.

Grand Duke Konstantin, the next-younger brother of Alexander I, had previously renounced his rights to the throne of Russia.

Thus, Alexander's father, who was the third son of Paul I, became the new Emperor; he took the name Nicholas I.

At that time, Alexander became Tsesarevich as his father's heir to the throne.

Alexander II succeeded to the throne upon the death of his father in 1855.

As Tsesarevich, he had been an enthusiastic supporter of his father's reactionary policies.

That is, he always obeyed the autocratic ruler.

On 15 January 1856, the new tsar took Russia out of the Crimean War on the very unfavourable terms of the Treaty of Paris (1856), which included the loss of the Black Sea Fleet, and the provision that the Black Sea was to be a demilitarized zone similar to a contemporaneous region of the Baltic Sea.

This gave him room to breathe and pursue an ambitious plan of domestic reforms.

Encouraged by public opinion, Alexander began a period of radical reforms, including an attempt not to depend on landed aristocracy controlling the poor, an effort to develop Russia's natural resources, and to reform all branches of the administration.

Alexander's most significant reform as emperor was the emancipation of Russia's serfs in 1861, for which he is known as Alexander the Liberator (Алекса́ндр Освободи́тель).

The tsar was responsible for other reforms, including reorganizing the judicial system, setting up elected local judges, abolishing corporal punishment, promoting local self-government through the zemstvo system, imposing universal military service, ending some privileges of the nobility, and promoting university education.

Among his greatest domestic challenges was an uprising in Poland in 1863, to which he responded by stripping that land of its separate constitution and incorporating it directly into Russia.

After an assassination attempt in 1866, Alexander adopted a somewhat more conservative stance until his death.

Alexander was also notable for his foreign policy, which was mainly pacifist, supportive of the United States, and opposite of Great Britain.

Alexander backed the Union during the American Civil War and sent warships to New York Harbor and San Francisco Bay ostensibly to deter attacks by the Confederate Navy and sold Alaska to the United States in 1867, fearing the remote colony would fall into British hands if there were another war.

He sought peace, moved away from bellicose France when Napoleon III fell in 1871, and in 1872 joined with Germany and Austria in the League of the Three Emperors that stabilized the European situation.

Despite his otherwise pacifist foreign policy, he fought a brief war with the Ottoman Empire in 1877–78, leading to the independence of the Bulgarian, Montenegrin, Romanian and Serbian states, and pursued further expansion into the Far East, leading to the founding of Khabarovsk and Vladivostok; the Caucasus, approving plans leading to the Circassian genocide; and Turkestan.

Although disappointed by the results of the Congress of Berlin in 1878, Alexander abided by that agreement.

Alexander was proposing additional parliamentary reforms to counter the rise of nascent revolutionary and anarchistic movements when he was assassinated in 1881.

Born in Moscow, Alexander Nikolayevich was the eldest son of Nicholas I of Russia and Charlotte of Prussia (eldest daughter of Frederick William III of Prussia and of Louise of Mecklenburg-Strelitz).