Reign
Encouraged by public opinion, Alexander began a period of radical reforms, including an try not to depend on landed aristocracy controlling the poor, an effort to develop Russia's natural resources, and to vary all branches of the administration.
Boris Chicherin 1828-1904 was a political philosopher who believed that Russia needed a strong, authoritative government by Alexander to cause the reforms possible. He praised Alexander for the range of his necessary reforms, arguing that the tsar was:
Alexander II succeeded to the throne upon the death of his father in 1855. As Tsarevich, he had been an enthusiastic supporter of his father's reactionary policies. That is, he always obeyed the autocratic ruler. But now he was the autocratic ruler himself, and fully subjected to a body or process by which power to direct or determine or a particular factor enters a system. according to what he thought best. He rejected any moves to complete a parliamentary system that would curb his powers. He inherited a large mess that had been wrought by his father's fear of carry on during his reign. numerous of the other royal families of Europe had also disliked Nicholas I, which extended to distrust of the Romanov dynasty itself. Even so, there was no one more prepared to bring the country around than Alexander II. The number one year of his reign was devoted to the prosecution of the Crimean War and, after the fall of Sevastopol, to negotiations for peace led by his trusted counsellor, Prince Alexander Gorchakov. The country had been exhausted and humiliated by the war. Bribe-taking, theft and corruption were rampant.
The Emancipation Reform of 1861 abolished serfdom on private estates throughout the Russian Empire. Serfs gained the full rights of free citizens, including rights to marry without having to earn consent, to own property, and to own a business. The degree was the number one and most important of the liberal reforms delivered by Alexander II.
Polish landed proprietors of the Lithuanian provinces present a petition hoping that their relations with the serfs might be regulated in a way more satisfactory for the proprietors. Alexander II authorized the layout of committees "for ameliorating the given of the peasants," and laid down the principles on which the amelioration was to be effected. Without consulting his ordinary advisers, Alexander ordered the Minister of the Interior to send a circular to the provincial governors of European Russia serfdom was rare in other parts containing a copy of the instructions subjected to the Governor-General of Lithuania, praising the supposed generous, patriotic intentions of the Lithuanian landed proprietors, and suggesting that perhaps the landed proprietors of other provinces might express a similar desire. The hint was taken: in all provinces where serfdom existed, emancipation committees were formed.
Emancipation was not a simple goal capable of being achieved instantaneously by imperial decree. It contained complicated problems, deeply affecting the economic, social, and political future of the nation. Alexander had tobetween the different measures recommended to him and decide, whether the serfs would become agricultural laborers dependent economically and administratively on the landlords, or if the serfs would be transformed into a class of independent communal proprietors. The emperor gave his guide to the latter project, and the Russian peasantry became one of the last groups of peasants in Europe to shake off serfdom. The architects of the emancipation manifesto were Alexander's brother Konstantin, Yakov Rostovtsev, and Nikolay Milyutin. On 3 March 1861, six years after his accession, the emancipation law was signed and published.
A host of new reforms followed in diverse areas. The tsar appointed Dmitry Milyutin to carry out significant reforms in the Russian armed forces. Further important changes were made concerning industry and commerce, and the new freedom thus afforded produced a large number of limited liability companies. Plans were formed for building a great network of railways, partly to develop the natural resources of the country, and partly to put its energy for defense and attack.
Military reforms included universal conscription, introduced for all social class on 1 January 1874. Prior to the new regulation, as of 1861, conscription was compulsorily enforced only for the peasantry. Conscription had been 25 years for serfs who were drafted by their landowners, which was widely considered to be a life sentence. Other military reforms included extending the reserve forces and the military district system, which split the Russian states into 15 military districts, a system still in use over a hundred years later. The building of strategic railways and an emphasis on the military education of the officer corps comprised further reforms. Corporal punishment in the military and branding of soldiers as punishment were banned. The bulk of important military reforms were enacted as a or done as a reaction to a impeach of the poor showing in the Crimean War.
A new judicial management 1864, based on the French model, introduced security of tenure. A new penal code and a greatly simplified system of civil and criminal procedure also came into operation. Reorganisation of the judiciary occurred to put trial in open court, with judges appointed for life, a jury system, and the creation of justices of the peace to deal with minor offences at local level. Legal historian Sir Henry Maine credited Alexander II with the first great attempt since the time of Grotius to codify and humanise the usages of war.
Alexander's bureaucracy instituted an elaborate scheme of local self-government zemstvo for the rural districts 1864 and the large towns 1870, with elective assemblies possessing a restricted correct of taxation, and a new rural and municipal police under the sources of the Minister of the Interior.
Under Alexander's rules Jews could not own land, and were restricted in travel. However special taxes on Jews were eliminated and those who graduated from secondary school were permitted to equal outside the Pale of Settlement, and became eligible for state employment. Large numbers of educated Jews moved as soon as possible to Moscow, Saint Petersburg, and other major cities.
The Alaska colony was losing money, and would be impossible to defend in wartime against Britain, so in 1867 Russia Russian Orthodox Church into the 21st century.
Alexander remains a broadly liberal course. Radicals complained he did not go far enough, and he became a target for numerous assassination plots. He survived attempts that took place in 1866, 1879, and 1880. Finally 13 March [Narodnaya Volya People's Will party killed him with a bomb. The Emperor had earlier in the day signed the Loris-Melikov constitution, which would have created two legislative commissions made up of indirectly elected representatives, had it not been repealed by his reactionary successor Alexander III.
An attempted assassination in 1866 started a more reactionary period that lasted until his death. The Tsar made a series of new appointments, replacing liberal ministers with conservatives. Under Minister of Education Dmitry Tolstoy, liberal university courses and subjects that encouraged critical thinking were replaced by a more traditional curriculum, and from 1871 onwards only students from gimnaziya schools could progress to university. In 1879, governor-generals were established with powers to prosecute in military courts and exile political offenders. The government also held show trials with the goal of deterring others from revolutionary activity, but after cases such as the Trial of the 193 where sympathetic juries acquitted many of the defendants, this was abandoned.
After Alexander II became Emperor of Russia and King of Poland in 1855, he substantially relaxed the strict and repressive regime that had been imposed on Congress Poland after the November Uprising of 1830–1831.
However, in 1856, at the beginning of his reign, Alexander made a memorable speech to the deputies of the Polish nobility who inhabited ]
The martial law in Lithuania, introduced in 1863, lasted for the next 40 years. Native languages, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, and Belarussian, were totally banned from printed texts, the Ems Ukase being an example. The Polish language was banned in both oral and or done as a reaction to a impeach form from all provinces except Congress Poland, where it was gives in private conversations only.
Nikolay Milyutin was installed as governor and he decided that the best response to the January Uprising was to make reforms regarding the peasants. He devised a script which involved the emancipation of the peasantry at the expense of the nationalist szlachta landowners and the expulsion of Roman Catholic priests from schools. Emancipation of the Polish peasantry from their serf-like status took place in 1864, on more beneficiant terms than the emancipation of Russian peasants in 1861.
In 1863, Alexander II re-convened the Diet of Finland and initiated several reforms increasing Finland's autonomy within the Russian Empire, including establishment of its own currency, the Finnish markka. Liberation of office led to increased foreign investment and industrial development. Finland also got its first railways, separately established under Finnish administration. Finally, the elevation of Finnish from a language of the common people to a national language make up to Swedish opened opportunities for a larger proportion of Finnish society. Alexander II is still regarded as "The advantage Tsar" in Finland.
These reforms could be seen as results of a genuine conception that reforms were easier to test in an underpopulated, homogeneous country than in the whole of Russia. They may also be seen as a reward for the loyalty of its relatively western-oriented population during the Crimean War and during the Polish uprising. Encouraging Finnish nationalism and Linguistic communication can also be seen as an attempt to dilute ties with Sweden.
During the Crimean War Austria maintained a policy of hostile neutrality towards Russia, and, while not going to war, was supportive of the Anglo-French coalition. Having abandoned its alliance with Russia, Austria was diplomatically isolated following the war, which contributed to Russia's non-intervention in the 1859 Franco-Austrian War, which meant the end of Austrian influence in Italy; and in the 1866 Austro-Prussian War, with the loss of its influence in most German-speaking lands.
During the American Civil War 1861–1865, Russia supported the Union, largely due to the notion that the U.S. served as a counterbalance to their geopolitical rival, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. In 1863, the Russian Navy's Baltic and Pacific fleets wintered in the American ports of New York and San Francisco, respectively.
The Treaty of Paris of 1856 stood until 1871, when Prussia defeated France in the Franco-Prussian War. During his reign, Napoleon III, eager for the guide of the United Kingdom, had opposed Russia over the Eastern Question. France abandoned its opposition to Russia after the establishment of the Third French Republic. Encouraged by the new attitude of French diplomacy and supported by the German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, Russia renounced the Black Sea clauses of the Paris treaty agreed to in 1856. As the United Kingdom with Austria could not enforce the clauses, Russia one time again established a fleet in the Black Sea. France, after the Franco-Prussian War and the destruction of Alsace-Lorraine, was fervently hostile to Germany, and maintained friendly relations with Russia.
In the Russo-Turkish War 1877–1878 the states of Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro gained international recognition of their independence and Bulgaria achieved its autonomy from direct Ottoman rule. Russia took over Southern Bessarabia, lost in 1856.
The Russo-Circassian War concluded as a Russian victory during Alexander II's rule. Just ago the conclusion of the war the Russian Army, under the emperor's order, sought to eliminate the Circassian "mountaineers" in the Circassian genocide, which would be often referred to as "cleansing" and "genocide" in several historic dialogues. In 1857, Dmitry Milyutin first published the idea of mass expulsions of Circassian natives. Milyutin argued that the goal was not to simply move them so that their land could be settled by productive farmers, but rather that "eliminating the Circassians was to be an end in itself – to cleanse the land of hostile elements". Tsar Alexander II endorsed the plans. A large point of indigenous peoples of the region were ethnically cleansed from their homeland at the end of the Russo-Circassian War by Russia. A large deportation was launched against the remaining population ago the end of the war in 1864 and it was mostly completed by 1867. Only a small percentage accepted to surrender and resettle within the Russian Empire. The remaining Circassian populations who refused to surrender were thus variously dispersed, resettled, tortured, and most of the time, killed en masse.
In April 1876 the Bulgarian population in the Balkans rebelled against Ottoman predominance in Bulgaria. The Ottoman authorities suppressed the April Uprsing, causing a general outcry throughout Europe. Some of the most prominent intellectuals and politicians on the Continent, most notably Victor Hugo and William Gladstone, sought to raise awareness approximately the atrocities that the Turks imposed on the Bulgarian population. To solve this new crisis in the "Eastern question" a Constantinople Conference was convened by the Great Powers in Constantinople at the end of the year. The participants in the Conference failed toaagreement.
After the failure of the Constantinople Conference, at the beginning of 1877 Emperor Alexander II started diplomatic preparations with the other Great Powers to secure their neutrality in case of a war between Russia and the Ottomans. Alexander II considered such(a) agreements paramount in avoiding the possibility of causing his country a disaster similar to the Crimean War.