Alexander II

Konstantin Makovsky painted Alexander II in 1881, the year a bomb ended the reign. Dark coat, orders, a finished likeness in the Tretyakov: this is a later face of the man who had been called, even in his lifetime, a tsar-liberator. Do not ask the canvas to do 19 February. The last chapter closed on a treaty that stripped the Black Sea of its war fleet and told a new emperor that Russia was behind. This page is that emperor: Aleksandr Nikolayevich, born in Moscow on 29 April 1818, 17 April Old Style, eldest son of Grand Duke Nikolay Pavlovich — Nicholas I from 1825 — and Alexandra Fyodorovna, who before baptism into the Orthodox Church had been Princess Charlotte of Prussia. He succeeded at thirty-six, in February 1855, while Sevastopol still held. He died in St Petersburg on 13 March 1881, 1 March Old Style. Between those dates he tried to modernise an autocracy he would not share.

His youth was overshadowed by his father. From Nicholas’s authoritarian principles of government he was never to free himself. At his mother’s instigation, though, moral and intellectual development was entrusted to the poet Vasily Zhukovsky, a humanitarian liberal and romantic. Alexander, Britannica’s life says, was a rather lazy boy of average intelligence. He retained traces of that tutor’s romantic sensibility. The tensions created by Nicholas and Zhukovsky left their mark. Like his uncle Alexander I, educated by a Swiss republican follower of Rousseau, he was to turn into a liberalising, or at any rate humanitarian, autocrat. The word matters. Humanitarian is not the same as constitutional. This article will not call him a liberal. The same life forbids it.

The Crimean War had revealed Russia’s glaring backwardness beside England and France. Russian defeats had set the seal of final discredit on Nicholas’s oppressive regime and had provoked, among the educated elite, a general desire for drastic change. It was under that widespread urge that the tsar embarked on reforms designed, through modernisation, to bring Russia into line with more advanced Western countries. Peace was concluded in Paris in the spring of 1856 on terms the Russian public considered harsh. Among the earliest concerns of the new emperor, once that peace was signed, was the improvement of communications. Russia had only one railway line of significance, linking St Petersburg and Moscow. At his accession there were fewer than 600 miles, about 965 kilometres, of track. When he died in 1881, some 14,000 miles, about 22,525 kilometres, of railway were in operation.

The 1815 likeness is Zhukovsky as a young poet, decades before he was given a grand duke to form. Use it as the tutor’s face, then return to dated facts. A romantic head is not a statute. It is how a mother tried to balance a father.

Railway construction meant a general quickening of economic life in a hitherto predominantly feudal agricultural society. Joint-stock companies developed, as did banking and credit institutions. The movement of grain, Russia’s major article of export, was facilitated. The same effect was achieved by another measure of modernisation, the abolition of serfdom. In the face of bitter opposition from landowning interests, Alexander, overcoming his natural indolence, took an active personal part in the arduous legislative labours that on 19 February 1861 culminated in the Emancipation Act. That sentence is the hinge into the next article. This page records that he took part. It does not write the terms. Tens of millions of human chattels were given personal freedom by a stroke of the autocrat’s pen. How they paid for land, and why many were bitterly disappointed, belongs to the title that follows.

From the moment of his accession he had instituted a political thaw. Political prisoners had been released and Siberian exiles allowed to return. The personally tolerant emperor had removed or mitigated the heavy disabilities weighing on religious minorities, particularly Jews and sectarians. Restrictions on foreign travel had been lifted. Barbarous medieval punishments were abolished. The severity of Russian rule in Poland was relaxed. Yet, notwithstanding these measures, it would be wrong, as is sometimes done, to describe Alexander II as a liberal. He was in fact a firm upholder of autocratic principles, sincerely convinced both of his duty to maintain the God-given autocratic power he had inherited and of Russia’s unreadiness for constitutional or representative government. Practical experience only strengthened those convictions.

The last chapter’s Nicholas loved only military science and froze the country with gendarmes. This son had been drilled by that love and then read by Zhukovsky. He released prisoners his father had kept. He built railways his father’s Russia had barely begun. He would free serfs his father had studied in nine committees and left bound. He would not, Britannica is clear, tie his own arms with a national assembly. Men who wanted consultative representation at the centre would be refused in the early 1860s, in the next articles’ weather, because autocracy must remain sacred. This page needs that refusal as a character fact, not as the zemstvo statute. The programme was modernisation under an unfettered crown.

Keep 19 February’s redemption tables out of this page. Keep zemstvo assemblies out of it. Keep People’s Will out of it. Alexander here is a birth in Moscow, a tutor and a father, an accession in a lost war, a thaw, a railway map that thickened from hundreds of miles to thousands, and a decision to emancipate from above. Readers who want the compromise of 1861, the courts of 1864, or the bombs of 1881 will find them under later titles. This article’s last job is to hand them an emperor who would change Russia without ceasing to be an autocrat. Do not invent a speech from the Winter Palace beyond what the next page will quote from Moscow in March 1856. Do not invent last words on the Catherine Canal. The life already gives enough dated work.

He modernised an empire he would not share. The pen that freed serfs was still an autocrat’s pen.

It can be said, the same life says, that he was a great historical figure without being a great man, that what he did was more important than what he was. His Great Reforms rank in importance with those of Peter the Great and Vladimir Lenin, yet the impact of his personality was much inferior to theirs. The tsar’s place in history is due almost entirely to his position as the absolute ruler of a vast empire at a critical stage in its development. Those sentences are Britannica’s verdict, not this site’s decoration. They belong here because this title is a man. The next titles are an act, a set of institutions, and a conspiracy. Peter’s chapter in this book already told a different modernisation. Lenin has no chapter here. Alexander’s job, on this page, is to stand between a freeze and a statute.

Egor Botman painted him in 1866, five years after emancipation and in the year a young revolutionary tried to kill him. Use the Hermitage canvas as a mid-reign face, then put it aside. A studio likeness is not Karakozov’s shot and not the act of 19 February. It is an emperor already marked by the work the next articles must name. The attempt of 1866 completed, the life says, his conversion to conservatism. That conversion is a hinge into revolutionaries, not a second biography. This page may record that the man who had thawed the 1850s could freeze again. It should not narrate the leaflets, the Polish rising, or the hunt that followed.

Paul had drilled Gatchina and died in a castle. Alexander I had talked of good laws and kept the crown. Nicholas had hanged five Decembrists and built a Third Section. This Alexander inherited their autocracy and a war that had discredited it. He chose railways, a thaw, and a statute he would personally push against landowners. He did not choose a parliament. The large Russia of the nineteenth century, which had stood in Paris in 1814 and signed a harsh peace in 1856, would now try to catch up without becoming something other than a tsardom. Whether catching up could be done on those terms is the rest of the chapter. This title stops at the man who decided to try.

Botman’s 1866 portrait is mid-reign oil, not a deathbed and not Makovsky’s 1881 studio likeness that opened this page. Use it for the face after the act and before the bombs, then put it aside. A Hermitage canvas is not Karakozov’s miracle and not a railway map. It is an emperor already marked by work the next articles must name, still refusing a hall in which that work could be argued.

Stop this page before the redemption payments and before a village commune asked to collect them. The next title is the end of serfdom. Alexander here is Zhukovsky and Nicholas, February 1855, Paris 1856, iron on the ground, a thaw, and an autocrat who would take an active part in 1861. Makovsky’s 1881 likeness already knows the ending. This article does not. It leaves the bomb to another page, the way the last chapter left emancipation to this one. What it can keep is the character Britannica gives: a lazy boy of average intelligence who became a humanitarian autocrat, not a liberal, and whose place in history is due almost entirely to the office he held at a critical hour.

The previous chapter’s Sevastopol was a fortress evacuated in 1855. This chapter’s first word is a son told to serve Russia. He served it by changing it, and by refusing to limit the power that did the changing. That is enough for an opening. The serfs are still serfs until the next page. The Black Sea is still neutralized. The emperor is no longer new. He has chosen a programme. The programme’s first act has another name. Readers who want miles of track turning into a gold rouble will have to wait for Witte. Readers who want a Duma will have to wait for a square in 1905. This title’s job was only to introduce the man who decided that catching up would be done from above.