The New International Encyclopædia/Alexander II., Nikolayevitch

ALEXANDER II., Nikolayevitch (1818-81). Emperor of Russia from 1855 to 1881. son of Nicholas I. He was born April 20. 1818. and received a thorough education and military training. He traveled in Germany, and in 1841 married Princess Maria of Hesse-Darmstadt. He also journeyed through Russia. Siberia, and the Caucasus, and took a creditable part in the campaigns against the Tcherkesses. On succeeding to the throne during the Crimean War (March 2, 1855), he assured the foreign ambassadors that he would adhere to the policy of his uncle (Alexander I.) and his father, but his desire was for an honorable peace. In March, 1856, he was com- pelled to sign the humiliating Treaty of Paris. Alexander had not been in sympathy with the reactionary course of his father. While not a liberal, or an idealist like the first Alexander, he represented the intelligent thought of Russia, and believed that a transformation was needed to place it in the first rank among nations. He soon announced his intention to promote reforms, and he was encouraged in this by the shock which the Crimean War had given to the old corrupt officialism of the Empire. Two reform parties arose, one a liberal constitutional party, having its centre at St. Petersburg, the other an old Russian nationalist party, centring at Moscow. They were united only in enmity to the bureaucracy. In response to their wishes and his own convictions. Alexander relaxed the censorship of the press, permitted travel, exercised a close control over officials, recalled many who had been exiled to Siberia during the previous reign, extended education, and without instituting radical changes in the machinery of the government greatly widened the liberty of his subjects.

The greatest of his administrative achieve- ments was the emancipation of the serfs. With this, of necessity, went a reform in the system of land tenure. Nearly all of Russia was held in large estates, worked by serfs who were nominally attached to the land, but were in fact almost as much at the disposal of their masters as if they had been slaves. Nine-tenths of the arable land of Russia was thus held by the imperial family and about 100,000 noble families. Naturally, the landed nobility obstructed the Czar's reform ; but he pressed his point in one province after another, and had a plan for emancipation prepared. Be- ginning in 1858 by freeing the serfs on the estates of the imperial family, the Czar completed the emancipation by the ukase of March 3 (February 19 Old Style), 1861. Serfs who had been domestic servants, not attached to the land, became free without right to property. Those who had been attached to the land were enabled by a State loan, payable six per cent. annually for forty-nine years, to purchase the interest of the former land- lords in a certain share of the land. The freedmen thus became peasant proprietors, the land being held by the mirs, or village communities, which could assign it to the members. Police authority was put in the hands of the communal assemblies, and larger powers of taxation, administration, and police were vested in district and provincial councils. If the economic results of this arrange- ment have been slow in development, and not altogether satisfactory, the social transformation effected by the emancipation of 23,000.000 people was great and immediate. In carrying out his plan, Alexander was assisted by Nicholas Miliu- tin. The Emperor also established a regular sys- tem of courts. Public schools were founded after the model of Western Europe, and scientific schools were erected in addition to those devoted to the regular classical training. The army, which in the Crimean War had so disappointed Nicholas I., was reorganized on the Prussian plan. While Alexander went thus far with the liberals, the Pan-Slavism of the Nationalists found equal sympathy with him. He said to the Polish deputies: "Embrace the union with Russia and abandon all thoughts of independence, now and for evermore impossible. All that my father did was rightly done. My reign shall be a con- tinuation of his." The Polish national move- ment, culminating in the insurrection of 1803, was severely repressed, and a relentless process of Russification was instituted under Michael Muravieff. Since that time Poland has been un- der what is practically martial law. After 1863 there was a gradual return to absolutism in Rus- sia, and many of the liberties that had been granted were withdrawn or modified, the Czar falling more under the influence of the conserva- tive Nationalist party, led by Katkoff, the Mos- cow editor. For a few years the liberals contented themselves with criticism of the conservative position and legal attempts to restore their influ- ence. Then began the revolutionary movement, which finally developed in the hands of a few violent spirits into terrorism after 1875. (See Nihilism.) The socialism of Marx and Proudhon had by this time been brought in from Western Europe.

Between 1868 and 1881, the armies of Alexander were advancing the Russian frontiers in Central Asia. In 1868 Samarkand was occupied: in 1873 the Khan of Khiva was reduced to vassalage; in 1876 Khokand was annexed; and in 1881, just before the assassination of the Emperor, Geok-Tepe, the stronghold of the Teke Turkomans, was taken. The vigorous policy adopted after 1870 brought on a war with Turkey in 1877-78, in which the Russian standards were carried almost to Constantinople. This war appealed to the chivalric spirit of Alexander, who wished to be known as the Liberator Czar, because it was in a sense a crusade in behalf of the oppressed Christian peoples of the Balkans. The hopes of a Russian hegemony in the Balkan Peninsula, entertained by the Pan-Slavists, were overthrown, however, at the Congress of Berlin (q.v.).

The existence of the liberal and reactionary parties side by side in Russia explains some of the inconsistencies in Alexander's character. It is because of these opposing influences, both patriotic, that progressive and oppressive measures were often simultaneously enacted. Personally, Alexander seems to have tended always to the liberal side, although somewhat embittered by the spread of the revolutionary agitation. His life, during the years 1879-81, was never safe from the conspiracies of the extreme revolutionists, who pursued him with a remarkable persistence of hatred. After the terrible explosion of 1880, in the Winter Palace, Alexander gave General Loris-Melikoff, a distinguished officer of liberal tendencies, an extraordinary dictatorial commission for six months, and it is said that under Loris-Melikoff's advice, he was considering the question of the promulgation of a constitution by ukase when he was assassinated in Saint Petersburg by the explosion of a bomb while driving from the parade to the Winter Palace on Sunday, March 13. 1881. He was succeeded by his son, Alexander III.

Consult: Haumant, in Lavisse et Rambaud, Histoire générale, vol. xi. (Paris. 1900); Cardonne, L'empereur Alexandre II. (Paris, 1883); Golovin, Russland unter Alexander II. (Leipzig, 1870); Laferté (pseudonym of the Princess Dolgorouki), Alexandre II., Détails inédits sur sa vie intime et sa mort (Basel, 1882).