Alexander II (29 April 1818 – 13 March 1881) was Emperor of Russia, King of Poland, and Grand Duke of Finland from 2 March 1855 until his assassination on 13 March 1881. He is also known as Alexander the Liberator because of his historic Edict of Emancipation, which officially abolished Russian serfdom in 1861. Crowned on 7 September 1856, he succeeded his father Nicholas I and was succeeded by his son Alexander III.
In addition to emancipating serfs across the Russian Empire, Alexander's reign brought several other liberal reforms, such as improving the judicial system, relaxing media censorship, eliminating some legal restrictions on Jews, abolishing corporal punishment, promoting local self-government, strengthening the Imperial Russian Army and the Imperial Russian Navy, modernizing and expanding schools and universities, and diversifying the Russian economy. However, many of these reforms were met with intense backlash and cut back or reversed entirely, and Alexander eventually shifted towards a considerably more conservative political stance following an assassination attempt against him in 1866.
The foreign policy of Alexander was relatively pacifist, especially in comparison to his father's, although he did continue the Russian Empire's expansionist campaigns into the Far East, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. As a consequence of the Great Game and the Crimean War, Alexander was particularly opposed to and wary of the United Kingdom. He was also notably supportive of the United States; Alexander backed the Union during the American Civil War and even sent Russian warships to New York Harbor and San Francisco Bay to deter attacks by the Confederate Navy. In 1867, he sold Alaska to the United States, owing partly to his concern that it would be nearly impossible to prevent the Russian Empire's North American colonies, which bordered British Columbia and the North-Western Territory, from falling into British hands in the event of another war. Seeking peace and stability in the European continent, he moved away from bellicose France upon the fall of Napoleon III in 1870 and subsequently joined Germany and Austria-Hungary in the League of the Three Emperors in 1873.
Under Alexander's leadership, the Russian Empire engaged in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878, resulting in the independence of Bulgaria, Montenegro, Romania, and Serbia from the Ottoman Empire. His expansionism on the Far Eastern front led to the Amur Annexation, and he also approved Russian military plans on the Caucasian front that culminated in the Circassian genocide. While he was disappointed by the results of the Congress of Berlin in 1878, he abided by that agreement. Among his greatest domestic challenges was a Polish uprising in January 1863, to which he responded by stripping Poland's separate constitution and directly incorporating the kingdom into the Russian Empire. In the period preceding his assassination in 1881, Alexander had been proposing additional parliamentary reforms to counter the rise of nascent revolutionary and anarchistic movements in the region.
Born in Moscow, Alexander Nikolayevich was the eldest son of Nicholas I of Russia and Charlotte of Prussia (eldest daughter of Frederick William III of Prussia and of Louise of Mecklenburg-Strelitz). His early life gave little indication of his ultimate potential; until the time of his accession in 1855, aged 37, few imagined that posterity would know him for implementing the most challenging reforms undertaken in Russia since the reign of Peter the Great.
His uncle Emperor Alexander I died childless. Grand Duke Konstantin, the next-younger brother of Alexander I, had previously renounced his rights to the throne of Russia. Thus, Alexander's father, who was the third son of Paul I, became the new Emperor; he took the name Nicholas I. At that time, Alexander became Tsesarevich as his father's heir to the throne.
In the period of his life as heir apparent (1825 to 1855), the intellectual atmosphere of Saint Petersburg did not favour any kind of change: freedom of thought and all forms of private initiative were suppressed vigorously by the order of his father. Personal and official censorship was rife; criticism of the authorities was regarded as a serious offence.
The education of the tsesarevich as future emperor took place under the supervision of the liberal romantic poet and gifted translator Vasily Zhukovsky, grasping a smattering of a great many subjects and becoming familiar with the chief modern European languages. Unusually for the time, the young Alexander was taken on a six-month tour of Russia (1837), visiting 20 provinces in the country. He also visited many prominent Western European countries in 1838 and 1839. As Tsesarevich, Alexander became the first Romanov heir to visit Siberia (1837). While touring Russia, he also befriended the then-exiled poet Alexander Herzen and pardoned him. It was through Herzen's influence that he later abolished serfdom in Russia.
In 1839, when his parents sent him on a tour of Europe, he met twenty-year-old Queen Victoria and they became acquainted. Simon Sebag Montefiore speculates that a small romance emerged. Such a marriage, however, would not work, as Alexander was not a minor prince of Europe and was in line to inherit a throne himself. In 1847, Alexander donated money to Ireland during the Great Famine.
He has been described as looking like a German, somewhat of a pacifist, a heavy smoker and card player. He spoke Russian and German.
The death of his father gave Alexander a diplomatic headache, for his father was engaged in open warfare in the southwest of his empire. On 15 January 1856, the new tsar took Russia out of the Crimean War on the very unfavourable terms of the Treaty of Paris (1856), which included the loss of the Black Sea Fleet, and the provision that the Black Sea was to be a demilitarized zone similar to a contemporaneous region of the Baltic Sea. This gave him room to breathe and pursue an ambitious plan of domestic reforms.
Encouraged by public opinion, Alexander began a period of radical reforms, including an attempt not to depend on landed aristocracy controlling the poor, an effort to develop Russia's natural resources, and to reform 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 make the reforms possible. He praised Alexander for the range of his fundamental reforms, arguing that the tsar was:
called upon to execute one of the hardest tasks which can confront an autocratic ruler: to completely remodel the enormous state which had been entrusted to his care, to abolish an age-old order founded on slavery, to replace it with civic decency and freedom, to establish justice in a country which had never known the meaning of legality, to redesign the entire administration, to introduce freedom of the press in the context of untrammeled authority, to call new forces to life at every turn and set them on firm legal foundations, to put a repressed and humiliated society on its feet, and to give it the chance to flex its muscles.
Alexander II succeeded to the throne upon the death of his father in 1855. As Tsesarevich, 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 intended to rule according to what he thought best. He rejected any moves to set up a parliamentary system that would curb his powers. He inherited a large mess that had been wrought by his father's fear of progress during his reign. Many 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 first 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.