Spec link: AQA “Tsarist and Communist Russia, 1855–1964” — the opening decade of the course and the benchmark against which every later reform and repression is measured.
The reforms of Alexander II are the natural starting point for the 1855–1964 story because they pose, in their purest form, the question that haunts the whole century of Russian history: can an autocracy modernise without destroying itself? Alexander inherited a state humiliated by defeat in the Crimean War (1853–56), a war that had exposed serf-based Russia as economically and militarily backward beside industrialising Britain and France. His answer — the “Great Reforms” of the 1860s and 1870s — was the most ambitious programme of state-led modernisation any tsar attempted before 1905. It was also, in the end, a demonstration of why reform from above so rarely satisfies those it is meant to help.
Emancipation: the reform that framed all the others
The Emancipation of the Serfs in 1861 was the keystone. It freed roughly 23 million privately owned serfs from personal bondage: they could now marry freely, own property, and go to law. Alexander’s own warning to the nobility — that it was better to abolish serfdom from above than to wait for it to abolish itself from below — captures the defensive logic behind the whole reform era.
But emancipation’s terms undercut its promise, and students must be able to explain why. Peasants received land, but had to pay for it through redemption payments stretched over forty-nine years, and the land was allotted not to individuals but to the mir (village commune), which controlled redistribution and restricted movement. Landlords kept the best land and were compensated generously; peasants often received less, and worse, than they had farmed as serfs, and left burdened with debt. The result was a countryside legally free but economically shackled — a grievance that fed rural unrest for the next half-century and helps explain why the peasant question was still unresolved in 1917. Emancipation, in other words, changed the legal status of the peasantry without solving the problem of the land.
The zemstva: local self-government
Freeing the serfs made the old system of local administration, run by and for the landowning nobility, unworkable. In 1864 Alexander created the zemstva — elected local councils at district and provincial level, with responsibility for roads, public health, poor relief, and above all primary education. The zemstva became, over time, genuine schools of civic competence: they employed the “third element” of teachers, doctors and agronomists, and their statistical and welfare work materially improved rural life.
Yet their powers were carefully caged. Voting was weighted heavily towards the nobility; the zemstva had no control over the police or the central bureaucracy; and they were forbidden to coordinate nationally or debate politics. Alexander wanted efficient local administration, not a springboard for representative government. The frustration this bred — capable men given real responsibility but denied any national voice — made the zemstva a persistent source of liberal opposition. A parallel reform in 1870 extended elected councils (dumas) to the towns.
Legal reform: the most durable achievement
The judicial reform of 1864 is often judged the most successful of all the Great Reforms because it was the most genuinely liberal. It replaced a corrupt, secret, class-based system with something recognisably modern: courts that were public, judges who were independent and salaried (and so harder to bribe or bully), trial by jury for serious criminal cases, and an independent legal profession — the barristers who quickly became a prestigious and articulate part of civil society. Equality before the law, at least in principle, was established.
The reform’s very success created a problem for the autocracy. An independent judiciary that could acquit political defendants — as a jury famously did with the revolutionary Vera Zasulich in 1878, despite her admitting she had shot the St Petersburg governor — was intolerable to a regime that regarded political crime as war. From that acquittal onwards, the state increasingly removed political cases from the ordinary courts and dealt with them by administrative process, hollowing out the reform in the area that mattered most to it.
Military and other reforms
Defeat in the Crimea had exposed the army as the reforms’ original motive, and Dmitry Milyutin’s military reforms of 1874 were the response. Universal conscription replaced the brutal twenty-five-year service that had fallen almost entirely on the peasantry; terms of service were cut and linked to education, brutal corporal punishments were reduced, and military schooling was expanded. The result was a smaller, better-trained, more literate army backed by a trained reserve — a rational modernisation, though the system’s true test would not come until the disasters of 1904–05 and 1914. Alongside these ran reforms relaxing university autonomy and press censorship, and reforming state finances.
The turn to reaction after 1866
The pattern that students must grasp is that Alexander’s reforming energy did not last. The attempt on his life by Dmitry Karakozov in 1866 marked a turning point: from then on the “Tsar Liberator” grew increasingly defensive, and reactionary ministers such as Dmitry Tolstoy gained influence. University freedoms were curtailed, censorship tightened, and the security apparatus expanded to meet the growing revolutionary movement — culminating in the terrorism of Narodnaya Volya (the People’s Will). The tragedy, and the central irony of the reign, is that Alexander was assassinated by that movement in March 1881 on the very day he had approved the Loris-Melikov proposals, a modest step towards consulting elected representatives in national government. Reform and repression died together.
Judgement: the reforming dilemma in miniature
For the synoptic argument, Alexander II is the essential first case study in the “modernisation versus autocracy” theme. His reforms were substantial and, in the case of the law courts and the zemstva, genuinely transformative of Russian society. But every reform stopped short of the point where it might have limited the autocracy itself, and each created expectations and social forces — an independent bar, an educated professional class, a legally free but land-hungry peasantry — that the unreformed political system could not accommodate. Alexander demonstrated that a Russian ruler could modernise the country’s institutions; he also demonstrated that doing so without sharing power generated the very opposition that would eventually destroy the dynasty. His successors would draw the opposite lesson from his murder — that reform was dangerous — and Russia would pay for that conclusion in 1905 and 1917.
Further reading on Explaining History: “The Tsar Liberator and Russia’s Peasants” develops the emancipation settlement in depth; the pieces on Russia’s aristocracy and intelligentsia set the social context.
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