Assassination of Tsar Alexander II

 

It is better to abolish serfdom from above than to wait for it to abolish itself from below.

Alexander II of Russia

 

Alexander was the eldest son of Tsar Nicholas I and was born on April 17, 1818, in Moscow. His mother was Charlotte of Prussia, daughter of Frederick William III of Prussia. In his early years he showed no aptitude towards politics, and indeed right up until the time of his accession in 1855, he showed no real potential for the duties required in his future role.

During his early years, poverty was rife in St Petersburg, compared to the riches of the royal court. Freedom of thought or indeed political innovation or initiative were not encouraged and both personal and official censorship was rife. Any criticism of the authorities was considered to be a very serious crime.

The young Alexander was educated in the same way as other young affluent Russians, and the topics included a small amount of knowledge on a great many subjects. Alexander showed no interest at all in military affairs, which was a great disappointment to his father, who had a great passion for the military. In fact his hard, demanding father considered his son too soft for his forthcoming role.

Alexander married Princess Marie of Hesse on April 16, 1841. She was the daughter of Ludwig II, and after their marriage she became known as Maria Alexandrovna. They had six sons and two daughters before her premature death in June 1880. Less than a month after Maria’s death, Alexander formed a morganatic marriage with his mistress, Princess Catherine Dolgoruki, with whom he had already had three children.

Alexander became the Tsar of Russia on the death of his father in 1855, and he fought hard for peace after the fall of Sevastopol, with the help of his trusted counsellor, Prince Gorchakov. The Crimean War had made Alexander realize that Russia was no longer a great military power, and that their economy was no match for the industrialized nations such as Britain and France. Alexander also had in his mind to eradicate serfdom in Russia, but the nobility were opposed to this move.

Alexander eventually got his own way and passed his Emancipation Manifesto in 1861, which proposed laws that would give freedom to the serfs. He publicly announced that personal serfdom would be abolished and that peasants would now be allowed to buy land from their landlords. The State would pay the landlords for the land, which they in turn would get back from the peasants through a payment scheme called redemption payments, which consisted of 49 annual payments.

During that year Alexander introduced many other reforms, and in 1864 he allowed each district to set up an authority called a Zemstvo. This gave the local councils power to provide roads, schools and medical services, which gave everyone a better standard of life. Alexander encouraged the expansion of industry and the railway network, and he introduced reforms that improved the municipal government.

However, through his new reforms Alexander made many enemies among the liberals and radicals, who wanted a parliamentary democracy with the power of freedom of speech. The reforms in agriculture did not appease the peasants and workers who wanted even better conditions. Radicals started to form secret societies and there was a rumour of revolutionary agitation. Alexander felt compelled to adopt severe and repressive measures to quell the revolutionaries.

In 1876 a group of reformers formed an organization called Land and Liberty. Their main aim was to fight for the peasants and their rights to own agricultural land. It was a punishable offence in Russia to criticize the government so the group held their meetings in secret. The men were influenced by the writings of a man named Mikhail Bakunun, who had published literature demanding that the government handed over agricultural land to the peasants. Some of these reformers even favoured terrorism to obtain reform, and this led to several assassination attempts on Tsar Alexander II.

 

Attempts of his Life

 

The first attempt made on Alexander’s life was in 1866 in the city of Petersburg, by a man named Dmitry Karakozov. The tsar had a narrow escape on this occasion, and to commemorate his survival he held a competition to design a magnificent gate for the city. Viktor Hartmann, an architect, painter and costume designer, won the competition, but the gate was never to be built.

The second assassination attempt took place on the morning of April 20, 1879, when Alexander was walking towards the Square of the Guards Staff. He was confronted by a 33-year-old student, Alexander Soloviev, with a revolver in his hand. The tsar turned quickly and ran, and even though Soloviev fired several times, he never hit his target. Soloviev was subsequently sentenced to death and hanged on May 28.

Although the student was acting independently, there were plenty of revolutionary groups who were keen to see Alexander dead. Hoping to incite a social revolution, a radical group placed some explosives on the railway line from Livadia to Moscow, but the tsar didn’t get on the train as planned and so their attempts were futile. Another failed attempt took place on the evening of February 5, 1880, when the same band of revolutionaries placed some explosives underneath the dining room of the tsar’s Winter Palace. On this occasion the tsar was late for supper and was therefore unharmed by the explosion, which turned out to be rather less powerful than the revolutionaries had intended anyway.

However, March 1, 1881, proved to be a different story. Alexander was travelling through the snow to his Winter Palace in St Petersburg. The tsar was accompanied by guards, and next to the coach driver sat an armed Cossack and another six followed on horseback. By coincidence it was the day that the tsar had signed a document granting the first ever constitution to the Russian people, but this was not known to the group of radicals calling themselves ‘Narodnaya Volya’ or ‘The People’s Will’. On a street corner near the Catherine Canal, they hurled the first of their hand-made bombs at the tsar’s carriage. The missiles missed the carriage and landed among the Cossacks instead. The tsar was unhurt, but he was insistent that he wanted to get out of the carriage to check the condition of his wounded guards. While he was standing with the wounded Cossacks, another terrorist by the name of Ignacy Hryniewiecki threw his bomb and this time it hit the target. The blast was so great that Alexander died instantly, as did the bomber himself. Of the other conspirators, Nikolai Sablin committed suicide before he could be arrested and Gesia Gelfman died in prison. The remainder were hanged on April 3, 1881.

Alexander’s assassin was a Pole, and it is theorized that Hryniewiecki wanted to resolve the issue of Russification by the assassination of the tsar. Russification was a process that the Russians had instigated to eradicate the Polish language in public places, schools and offices.

Alexander’s importance lies chiefly in his efforts to modernize Russia. He certainly had a great influence through his position as autocratic ruler and through his Great Reforms, although they didn’t always achieve what they set out to do. Alexander II, perhaps unknowingly, did much to hinder his own policies of reform, which finally set Russia on the road to revolution.