Person1818 – 1881

Alexander II of Russia

Emperor of Russia (1855–1881) who, after defeat in the Crimean War, emancipated the serfs and pursued reform from above, but was assassinated by revolutionaries

He came to the throne in 1855 during the Crimean War and accepted defeat the following year. He issued the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 and carried out the “Great Reforms”, including the zemstvos (1864), judicial reform and universal military service (1874). He crushed the Polish uprising of 1863, gained the Maritime Province by the Treaty of Beijing in 1860 and sold Alaska to the United States in 1867. As reform slowed, he was killed by a bomb of the radical People’s Will in St Petersburg in 1881.

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3 related events

1
1853 – 1856Crimean Warmonarch
When Russia, seeking to expand southward, went to war with the Ottoman Empire, Britain, France and Sardinia sided with the Ottomans. Russia lost Sevastopol and the war, and its southward drive was checked.
2
1861Emancipation of the Russian Serfsleader
After defeat in the Crimean War, Alexander II issued the Emancipation Manifesto granting serfs personal freedom. But they had to buy their land at a high price through the mir, the village commune.
3
1877 – 1878Russo-Turkish War and the Congress of Berlinmonarch
Russia defeated the Ottoman Empire in the name of the Balkan Slavs, but at the Congress of Berlin, called because Britain and Austria objected, its southward advance was checked again.

People who appear alongside

Napoleon III1808 – 1873
Louis-Napoléon, nephew of Napoleon I, elected president in 1848, who made himself emperor (1852–1870) by a coup but was captured in the Franco-Prussian War and deposed
Florence Nightingale1820 – 1910
British nurse who reformed sanitation in the military hospitals of the Crimean War, cutting soldiers’ death rates, and laid the foundations of modern nursing and its training
Otto von Bismarck1815 – 1898
Minister-president of Prussia (1862–1890) and first chancellor of the German Empire (1871–1890) who unified Germany through three wars by his policy of “blood and iron”
Abdulhamid II1842 – 1918
Ottoman sultan (1876–1909) who granted a constitution, soon suspended it and ruled as an autocrat for thirty years

Themes this person appears in

Revolutions and Nation-States1776 – 1871
From the Declaration of Independence to the German Empire — a century in which liberalism and nationalism toppled the old order in Europe and the Americas and built nation-states
Imperialism and the Partition of the World1839 – 1914
From the Tanzimat to Sarajevo — seventy-five years in which the powers carved up West Asia, India, Southeast Asia, Africa and the Pacific, and the peoples there answered with reform and resistance