About Me
I was born in 1818, the eldest son of Tsar Nicholas I and Charlotte of Prussia, daughter of Frederick William III of Prussia and Louise of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. My early life gave little indication of my ultimate potential; until the time of my accession in 1855, few imagined that I would be known to posterity as a leader able to implement the most challenging reforms undertaken in Russia since the reign of Peter the Great.
In the period of over thirty-six years during which I was heir apparent, the atmosphere of St Petersburg was unfavourable to the development of any intellectual or political innovation. Government was based on principles under which all freedom of thought and all private initiative were, as far as possible, suppressed vigorously. Personal and official censorship was rife; criticism of the authorities was regarded as a serious offence. This was also regarded as one of the reasons which led to my assassination.
Under supervision of the liberal poet Vasily Zhukovsky, I received the education commonly given to young Russians of good family at that time: a smattering of a great many subjects, and exposure to the chief modern European languages. I took little personal interest in military affairs, but did take a personal interest in Vasily Zhukovsky, with whom I embarked on a short and fleeting sexual relationship with. To the disappointment of my father, who was passionate about the military, I showed no love of soldiering. I gave evidence of a kind disposition and a tender-heartedness which were considered out of place in one destined to become a military autocrat.
I succeeded to the throne upon the death of my father in 1855. The first year of my reign was devoted to the prosecution of the Crimean War, and after the fall of Sevastopol to negotiations for peace, led by my trusted counselor, Prince Gorchakov. Then I began a period of radical reforms, encouraged by public opinion but carried out with autocratic power. All who had any pretensions to enlightenment declared loudly that the country had been exhausted and humiliated by the war, and that the only way of restoring it to its proper position in Europe was to develop its natural resources and thoroughly to reform all branches of the administration. The government therefore found in the educated classes a new-born public spirit, anxious to assist it in any work of reform that it might think fit to undertake.
Fortunately for Russia the autocratic power was now in the hands of a man who was impressionable enough to be deeply influenced by the spirit of the time, and who had sufficient prudence and practicality to prevent his being carried away by the prevailing excitement into the dangerous region of Utopian dreaming. Unlike some of my predecessors, I had no grand, original schemes of my own to impose by force on unwilling subjects, and no pet projects to lead my judgment astray. I looked instinctively with a suspicious, critical eye upon the panaceas which more imaginative and less cautious people recommended. These character traits, together with the peculiar circumstances in which I was placed, determined the part I would play in bringing to fruition the reform aspirations of the educated classes.
Though I carefully guarded my autocratic rights and privileges, and obstinately resisted all efforts to push me farther than I felt inclined to go, I for several years acted somewhat like a constitutional sovereign of the continental type. Soon after the conclusion of peace, important changes were made in legislation 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 for the purpose of developing the natural resources of the country, and partly for the purpose of increasing its power for defence and attack.
Then it was found that further progress was blocked by a formidable obstacle: the existence of serfdom. I showed that, unlike my father, I meant to grapple boldly with this difficult and dangerous problem. Taking advantage of a petition presented by the Polish landed proprietors of the Lithuanian provinces, and hoping that their relations with the serfs might be regulated in a more satisfactory way (meaning in a way more satisfactory for the proprietors), I authorized the formation of committees "for ameliorating the condition of the peasants," and laid down the principles on which the amelioration was to be effected.
This step was followed by one still more significant. Without consulting his ordinary advisers, I ordered the Minister of the Interior to send a circular to the provincial governors of European Russia, containing a copy of the instructions forwarded 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.
The deliberations at once raised a host of important, thorny questions. The emancipation was not merely a humanitarian question capable of being solved instantaneously by imperial ukase. It contained very complicated problems, deeply affecting the economic, social and political future of the nation.
I had little of the special knowledge required for dealing successfully with such problems, and I had to restrict myself to choosing between the different measures recommended to me. The main point at issue was whether the serfs should become agricultural labourers dependent economically and administratively on the landlords, or whether they should be transformed into a class of independent communal proprietors. I gave his support 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 my brother Konstantin, Yakov Rostovtsev, and Nikolay Milyutin. On March 3, 1861, the sixth anniversary of my accession, the emancipation law was signed and published.
Other reforms followed: army and navy re-organization (1874); a new judicial administration based on the French model (1864); a new penal code and a greatly simplified system of civil and criminal procedure; an elaborate scheme of local self-government (Zemstvo) for the rural districts (1864) and the large towns (1870), with elective assemblies possessing a restricted right of taxation, and a new rural and municipal police under the direction of the Minister of the Interior. I would be the second monarch to abolish capital punishment, a penalty which is still legal (although not practiced) in Russia.
However, the workers wanted better working conditions; national minorities wanted freedom. When radicals began to resort to the formation of secret societies and to revolutionary agitation, I felt constrained to adopt severe repressive measures.
I resolved to try the effect of some moderate liberal reforms in an attempt to quell the revolutionary agitation, and for this purpose I instituted a ukase for creating special commissions, composed of high officials and private personages who should prepare reforms in various branches of the administration.
During my bachelor days, I made a state visit to England in 1838. Just a year older than the young Queen Victoria, I took a liking to my distant cousin. The fondness however, was short-lived. While Victoria married her German cousin, Prince Albert in February 1840, I became a husband the next year. On April 16, 1841 I married Princess Marie of Hesse in St Petersburg, thereafter known as Maria Alexandrovna. I was deeply in love with the young Princess and vowed to marry no one else. Marie was the legal daughter of Ludwig II, Grand Duke of Hesse and by Rhine and Princess Wilhelmina of Baden, although there was a question of whether the Grand Duke or her mother's lover, Baron August von Senarclens de Grancy, was her actual father. I was aware of the question of her paternity. Our marriage produced six sons and two daughters: Grand Duchess Alexandra Alexandrovna, Tsarevich Nicholas Alexandrovich, Tsar Alexander III, Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich, Grand Duke Alexei Alexandrovich, Grand Duchess Maria Alexandrovna, Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, and Grand Duke Paul Alexandrovich.
I had many mistresses during his marriage and fathered 7 known illegitimate children. These included Antoinette Bayer with his mistress Wilhelmine Bayer; Michael-Bogdan Oginski with mistress Countess Olga Kalinovskya; and Joseph Raboxicz.
On July 6, 1880, less than a month after Tsarina Maria's death on June 8, I formed a morganatic marriage with my mistress Princess Catherine Dolgoruki, with whom I already had four children: George Alexandrovich Romanov Yurievsky, Olga Alexandrovna Romanov Yurievsky, Boris Alexandrovich Yurievsky, and Catherine Alexandrovna Romanov Yurievsky.
At the beginning of my reign, I expressed the famous statement "No dreams" addressed for Poles, populating Congress Poland, Western Ukraine, Lithuania, Livonia and Belarus. The result was the January Uprising of 1863-4 that was suppressed after eighteen months of fighting. Thousands of Poles were executed, tens of thousands were deported to Siberia. The price for suppression was Russian support for Prussian-united Germany. Twenty years later, Germany became the major enemy of Russia on continent.
All territories of the former Poland-Lithuania were excluded from liberal policies introduced by me. The martial law in Lithuania, introduced in 1863, lasted for the next 50 years. Native languages, Lithuanian, Ukrainian and Belarusian were completely banned from printed texts. The Polish language was banned in both oral and written form from all provinces except Congress Kingdom, where it was allowed in private conversations only.
In 1863 I re-established the Diet of Finland and initiated several reforms increasing Finland's autonomy from Russia including establishment of own currency, the Markka. Liberation of enterprise lead to increased foreign investment and industrial development. And finally the elevation of Finnish from a language of the common people to a national language equal to Swedish opened opportunities for a larger proportion of the society. I am still regarded as "The Good Tsar" in Finland.
My attitude towards Finland could be seen as genuine belief in reforms in that reforms were easier to test in a small, homogeneous country than the whole of Russia. The benevolent treatment of Finland 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 language can also be seen as an attempt to weaken the strong ties with Sweden.
In 1866 there was an attempt on my life in Petersburg by Dmitry Karakozov. To commemorate my narrow escape from death (that I refer to only as "the event of April 4, 1866"), a number of churches and chapels were built in many Russian cities.
On the morning of April 20, 1879, I was walking towards the Square of the Guards Staff and faced Alexander Soloviev, a 33 year-old former student. Having seen a revolver in his hands, the I ran away; Soloviev fired five times but missed. He was sentenced to death and hanged on May 28.
The student acted on his own, but other revolutionaries were keen to kill me. In December 1879, the Narodnaya Volya (People's Will), a radical revolutionary group which hoped to ignite a social revolution, organised an explosion on the railway from Livadia to Moscow, but they missed the my train. Subsequently, on the evening of February 5, 1880 the same revolutionaries set off a charge under the dining room of the Winter Palace, right in the resting room of the guards a story below. Being late for supper, I was not harmed, although 67 other people were killed or wounded. The dining room floor was also heavily damaged.
After the last assassination attempt, Count Loris-Melikov was appointed the head of the Supreme Executive Commission and given extraordinary powers to fight the revolutionaries. Loris-Melikov's proposals called for some form of parliamentary body, and I seemed to agree; these plans were never realized as on March 13 (March 1 Old Style Date), 1881 I fell victim to an assassination plot.
As I had done every Sunday for a score of years, I went to the Manege to review the Life Guards of the Reserve Infantry and the Life Guards of the Sapper Battalion regiments. I traveled both to and from the Menege in a closed carriage accompanied by six Cossacks with a seventh sitting on the coachman's left. My carriage was followed by two sleighs carrying, among other, the chief of police and the chief of the tsar's guards. The route, as always, was via the Catherine Canal and over the Pevchesky Bridge.
The street was flanked by narrow sidewalks on both the right and left side. A short young man wearing a heavy black overcoat edged towards the imperial carriage making its way down the street. He was carrying a small white package wrapped in a handkerchief. The youth was Nikolai Rysakov,
The explosion, while killing one of the Cossacks and seriously wounding the driver and people on the sidewalk, several critically, had only damaged the carriage. I emerged shaken but unhurt. Rysakov was captured almost immediately. Police Chief Dvorzhitsky heard Rysakov shout out to someone in the gathering crowd. Realizing there was another (if not more than one) bomber near by he urged me to leave the area at once. I agreed to do so but only after I had been shown the site of the explosion. Completely surrounded by the guards and the Cossacks, I made his way over to the hole in the street. It was then that a young man, Ignacy Hryniewiecki, standing by the canal fence, raised up both arms and threw something at my feet.Later it was learned there was a third bomber in the crowd. Ivan Emelyanov stood ready, clutching a briefcase containing a bomb that would be used if the other two bombs, and bombers, failed.
The Church of the Savior on Blood commemorates the spot where I was assassinated.
I was carried by sleigh to the Winter Palace, up the marble staircase, a trail of blood in my wake, and in to my study where, twenty-five years before almost to the date, I had signed the Emancipation Edict freeing the serfs. Both of my legs destroyed and I was bleeding to death. Members of the Romanov family came rushing to the scene. One of them was the quiet, sensitive thirteen year old boy named Nicky, elder son of the heir-apparent Alexander; the boy would grow up to be tsar in his own right, Nicholas II.
I was given Communion and Extreme Unction. There was nothing to do now but wait. When asked how long it would be, the attending physician Dr. S.P. Borkin replied, "Up to fifteen minutes". At 3:30 that day the standard of Alexander II was lowered for the last time.
My assassination also caused a great setback for the reform movement. One of my last ideas was to draft up plans for an elected parliament, or Duma, which were completed the day before I died but not yet released to the Russian people. The first action Alexander III took after his coronation was to tear up those plans. A Duma would not come into fruition until 1905, by my grandson, Nicholas II, who commissioned the Duma following heavy pressure on the monarchy by the Russian Revolution of 1905.
A second consequence of my assassination was anti-Jewish pogroms and legislation, deriving in part from the fact that one of those implicated in my assassination, Gesya Gelfman, was of Jewish origin.
A third consequence of my assassination was that suppression of civil liberties in Russia and police brutality burst back with a full force after experiencing some restraint under my reign. My murder and subsequent death was witnessed firsthand by my son, Alexander III, and my grandson, Nicholas II, both future Tsars, who vowed not to have the same fate befall them. Both used the Okhrana to arrest protestors and uproot suspected rebel groups, creating further suppression of personal freedom for the Russian people.
