Chapter XII
Russia changes
Reform from above, then a square
Alexander II inherited a lost Crimean war and chose to modernise an autocracy he would not share. The sections below follow the man, the end of serfdom, the Great Reforms, the revolutionaries who killed him, Alexander III’s freeze, Witte’s industry, the cities and workers it produced, Nicholas II, and 1905 — a massacre, a general strike, and a Duma extracted from a sovereign who still signed himself autocrat. This book does not yet write 1917.