The thirty-seven-year-old Czar Alexander II who came to the throne of Russia in 1855 differed greatly from his father. He had spent a happier childhood, raised by humane tutors without the military discipline imposed on Nicholas. Alexander’s personality was complex. He was an ascetic who sometimes slept on straw on stone floors. He had high moral aspirations and once spent a night locked in solitary confinement in one of his prisons to understand the conditions there. As crown prince he joined the government commission studying the “flogging gentry.” He seemed well suited to be the man who freed more than twenty million people from serfdom and earned the nickname “the czar liberator.” Yet his morals permitted him to take young girls as mistresses, and his reforms were insufficient to prevent six assassination attempts in four years.

Alexander II assumed the throne in 1855, determined to emancipate the serfs (see table 25.1). One of his first acts was a manifesto giving the aristocracy a pragmatic explanation: “I am convinced that . . . it is better to begin to destroy serfdom from above than to wait for that time when it begins to destroy itself from below.” The thirty-year reign of Nicholas I had seen 556 serf rebellions, an average of more than one uprising per month; in the first years of Alexander’s reign, the rate increased to 80 peasant rebellions per year. In 1857 the new czar named a secret committee, headed by his liberal adviser Nikolai Milyutin, to prepare for emancipation. Alexander II followed the advice of the Milyutin Commission and issued an edict (ukase) of emancipation in March 1861 on the same day that Abraham Lincoln took the oath of office as president of the United States. The details of emancipation were so complex that they required nearly five hundred pages. The basic provision ended serfdom, freeing 22,192,000 people, the majority of the Russian peasantry. Another obliged the serf-owners (most of whom opposed emancipation) to give the serfs land as a part of the emancipation. Serfs obtained “the full rights of free rural inhabitants,” their homes, and arable land. Landowners, however, kept title to the land until the former serfs gradually paid for it. In the interim, the imperial government compensated landowners with bonds, and former serfs were obliged, through collective village obligations, to make the redemption payments on these bonds. Until the completion of redemption payments, peasants owed some labor to their landlords and shared their village’s obligation. Emancipation began with enlightened principles but perpetuated involuntary servitude.

Serfs and Peasants in Imperial Russia, 1858

Peasant population 1858 Census

Serfs on private-owned estates 20,173,000

Serfs on imperial lands 2,019,000

Total serfs 22,192,000

Peasants on state lands 18,308,000

Peasants from state lands working in factories and mines 616,000

Peasants from state lands allowed to work in private factories 518,000

Peasants freed by military service 1,093,000

Total peasants 20,535,000

Alexandrine liberalism went beyond the emancipation edict of 1861. Alexander II did not grant a constitution or a parliament, but his reforms made them logical expectations. In 1864 he created elective district assemblies (zemstva) with powers of local government. The zemstva were chosen by a three-class franchise similar to the voting for the Prussian Landtag, and legislation had to win the approval of the provincial governor, but this still left the assemblies a role in public health, education, and transportation. Educational reforms flowed from local self-government. Between the creation of the zemstva in 1864 and the end of Alexander’s reign in 1881, 14,500 new schools opened in Russia. The tsar encouraged this trend by extending freedom to the universities. In 1864 the imperial government also reformed the judiciary and the criminal code. The new edicts, based on the principle of equality before the law, created an independent judiciary with a professional bar, abolished corporal punishment, and introduced the jury system in criminal cases.

The reforms of 1861–65 whetted the Russian appetite for further liberalization. During the remaining sixteen years of his reign, Alexander disappointed those who wanted more. He granted self-government to the cities in 1870 and reformed the army, reducing the term of service from twenty-five years to nine in 1874. But his liberalism stopped short of full westernization. He brought Russian institutions near to the level of the Austrian Empire, but not to Anglo-French standards. He began the economic modernization of his empire but did not bring it into the industrial age. A tragedy of historical development is that those who begin to modernize a backward country often awaken expectations that they cannot fulfil. The czar liberator became caught in this trap of rising expectations. He ameliorated the strict rule of Poland and amnestied thousands of his father’s Polish political prisoners, yet confronted a major Polish revolution in 1863. He reopened universities and granted them greater freedom, yet they became centers of intellectual discontent pressing for more reforms. Alexander liberalized the press laws and harvested radical criticism. He emancipated the serfs but still faced peasant rebellions (one occurred in Kazan as early as April 1861). Revolutionaries repeatedly tried to kill him. They ultimately succeeded, and the reign that had begun with such promise ended with his blood on the pavement.