Alexander II of Russia

Alexander II ruled the Russian Empire from 1855 until revolutionaries killed him with a bomb in 1881. He is called "the Liberator" for the 1861 decree that freed more than 23 million serfs, and he reformed the courts, local government and the army. Yet he remained an autocrat: he crushed a Polish uprising, approved the expulsion and mass killing of the Circassians in the Caucasus and turned more conservative after an attempt on his life in 1866.

Alexander was born in Moscow on 29 April 1818, the eldest son of the future Nicholas I and Charlotte of Prussia. He became heir in 1825 when his father took the throne. His education was supervised by the liberal poet Vasily Zhukovsky, and in 1837 he toured Russia, becoming the first Romanov heir to visit Siberia, before travelling through Western Europe. He married Princess Marie of Hesse in 1841. Under his father's rule, censorship was strict and criticism of the government was treated as a serious crime.

Alexander became emperor on 2 March 1855, in the middle of the Crimean War. After the fall of Sevastopol he accepted the Treaty of Paris in 1856, which barred Russia from keeping a fleet on the Black Sea. The humiliation convinced him and many of his officials that Russia had to modernise, though he refused any parliament that would limit his own power.

After years of preparation by committees of landowners and officials, the emancipation of the serfs was signed on 3 March 1861. Former serfs gained the right to marry, own property and run businesses without their lords' consent, and were organised as communities of peasant landholders rather than landless labourers. Other reforms followed. A new court system in 1864 brought public trials, juries and judges appointed for life. Elected local councils, the zemstvos, were created in 1864 for the countryside and in 1870 for the towns. Dmitry Milyutin rebuilt the army, ending branding and corporal punishment and, from 1874, introducing conscription for all social classes. Some restrictions on Jews were eased.

Reform had limits. When Poles rose in the January Uprising of 1863, the revolt was put down after some eighteen months; hundreds were executed and thousands sent to Siberia, and the use of Polish, Lithuanian and Ukrainian was harshly restricted. In the Caucasus, Alexander endorsed plans to remove the Muslim Circassians from their homeland. As the long war there ended in 1864, most were deported or killed in what is now widely called the Circassian genocide. After a student, Dmitry Karakozov, shot at him in April 1866, Alexander replaced liberal ministers with conservatives and tightened control of the universities. Finland, by contrast, gained its own currency and wider autonomy.

Russia continued to expand in the Far East and in the Russian conquest of Central Asia. Alaska, costly and hard to defend, was sold to the United States in 1867 for 7.2 million dollars. He supported the Union in the American Civil War and in 1873 joined Germany and Austria-Hungary in the League of the Three Emperors. In the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878, launched after the Ottomans crushed a Bulgarian uprising, Russia defeated the Ottoman Empire; Romania, Serbia and Montenegro won recognition of their independence and Bulgaria became a self-governing state. In Bulgaria he is still remembered as the "Tsar Liberator".

Revolutionary groups now targeted him directly. He survived shots in 1879 and a bomb in the Winter Palace in February 1880 that killed 11 people. On 13 March 1881, members of the People's Will threw two bombs at his carriage in Saint Petersburg; the second shattered his legs, and he died shortly afterwards in the Winter Palace. That morning he had approved modest proposals by his minister Loris-Melikov for elected consultative commissions. His son Alexander III dropped them and returned to a policy of repression.

Our 1878 map shows the Russian Empire near the end of his reign, together with the new Balkan states that emerged from his war with the Ottomans.