March 2, 1855: Emperor Alexander II ascends the Russian throne.

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Assassination, Cossacks, Emperor Alexander II of Russia, Emperor Alexander III of Russia, Emperor Nicholas I of Russia, Emperor Nicholas II of Russia, Grand Duchess Maria Alexandrovna of Russia, Marie of Hesse and By Rhine, Reforms, Russian Emperors, Russian Empire

Emperor Alexander II (April 29, 1818 – March 13 1881) was born in Moscow as Grand Duke Alexander Nikolaevich the eldest son of Nicholas I of Russia and Charlotte of Prussia (daughter of Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia and of Louise of Mecklenburg-Strelitz). As Emperor he is known for implementing the most challenging reforms undertaken in Russia since the reign of Peter the Great.

Alexander’s most significant reform as emperor was emancipation of Russia’s serfs in 1861, for which he is known as Alexander the Liberator. The Emperor was responsible for other reforms, including reorganizing the judicial system, setting up elected local judges, abolishing corporal punishment, promoting local self-government through the zemstvo system, imposing universal military service, ending some privileges of the nobility, and promoting university education. After an assassination attempt in 1866, Alexander II adopted a somewhat more reactionary stance until his death.

In 1838–39, as a young bachelor, Alexander made the Grand Tour of Europe which was standard for young men of his class at that time. One of the purposes of the tour was to select a suitable bride for himself. He stayed for three days with the maiden Queen Victoria, who was already Queen although she was one year younger than him. The two got along well, but there was no question of marriage between two major monarchs.

Alexander went on to Germany, and in Darmstadt, he met and was charmed by Princess Marie, the 15-year-old daughter of Ludwig II, Grand Duke of Hesse and By Rhine. On April 16, 1841, aged 23, Tsarevitch Alexander married Marie in St. Petersburg; the bride had previously been received into the Russian Orthodox Church, taking the new name of Maria Alexandrovna. The marriage produced six sons and two daughters.

Marie of Hesse and by Rhine

(Marie was the legal daughter of Ludwig II, Grand Duke of Hesse and by Rhine and Princess Wilhelmina of Baden, although some gossiping questioned whether the Grand Duke Ludwig or Wilhelmina’s lover, Baron August von Senarclens de Grancy, was her biological father. Alexander was aware of the question of her paternity.)

Empress Maria Alexandrovna died of tuberculosis on June 3, 1880, at the age of fifty-five, and on July 18, 1880, a little more than a month after Empress Maria’s death, Alexander married morganatically his mistress Princess Catherine Dolgorukov, (1847 – 1922) with whom he already had four children. As his morganatic wife, was given the title of Princess Yurievskaya.

Princess Catherine Dolgorukov

Alexander became Emperor when his father, Emperor Nicholas I died on March 2, 1855, during the Crimean War, at the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. He caught a chill, refused medical treatment and died of pneumonia, although there were rumors he had committed suicide. He was buried in the Peter and Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg.

Despite his otherwise pacifist foreign policy, he fought a brief war with the Ottoman Empire in 1877–78, pursued further expansion into Siberia and the Caucasus, and conquered Turkestan. Although disappointed by the results of the Congress of Berlin in 1878, Alexander abided by that agreement. Among his greatest domestic challenges was an uprising in Poland in 1863, to which he responded by stripping that land of its separate constitution and incorporating it directly into Russia. Alexander II adopted the title King of Poland.

Alexander II placed a great deal of hope in his eldest son, Tsarevich Nicholas. In 1864, Alexander II found Nicholas a bride, Princess Dagmar of Denmark, second daughter of King Christian IX of Denmark and younger sister to Alexandra, Princess of Wales (married to future Edward VII) and King George I of Greece. However, in 1865, during the engagement, Nicholas died and the tsar’s second son, Grand Duke Alexander, not only inherited his brother’s position of tsarevich, but also his fiancée. The couple married in November 1866, with Dagmar converting to Orthodoxy and taking the name Maria Feodorovna.

In time, political differences, and other disagreements, led to estrangement between Alexander and his heir. Amongst his children, he remained particularly close with his second, and only surviving daughter, Grand Duchess Marie Alexandrovna. In 1873, a quarrel broke out between the courts of Queen Victoria and Alexander II, when Victoria’s second son, Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh and later reigning Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, made it known that he wished to marry the Grand Duchess.

Grand Duchess Maria Alexandrovna of Russia

The Emperor objected to the queen’s request to have his daughter come to England in order to meet her, and after the January 1874 wedding in St. Petersburg, the Emperor insisted that his daughter be granted precedence over the Princess of Wales, a request which the queen rebuffed.

Assassination

The Emperor survived several assassination attempts in 1866, 1867, and 1879. On the evening of February 5, 1880 Stephan Khalturin, set off a timed charge under the dining room of the Winter Palace, right in the resting room of the guards a story below, killing 11 people and wounding 30 others.

On March 13, 1881, Alexander fell victim to an assassination plot in Saint Petersburg. As he was known to do every Sunday for many years, the Emperor went to the Mikhailovsky Manège for the military roll call. He travelled both to and from the Manège in a closed carriage accompanied by five Cossacks and Frank (Franciszek) Joseph Jackowski, a Polish noble, with a sixth Cossack sitting on the coachman’s left.

The Emperor’s carriage was followed by two sleighs carrying, among others, the chief of police and the chief of the Emperor’s guards. The route, as always, was via the Catherine Canal and over the Pevchesky Bridge. The street was flanked by narrow pavements for the public. A young member of the Narodnaya Volya (“People’s Will”) movement, Nikolai Rysakov, was carrying a small white package wrapped in a handkerchief. He threw the bomb near the horses hooves thinking it would blow up under the carriage.

The explosion, while killing one of the Cossacks and seriously wounding the driver and people on the sidewalk, had only damaged the bulletproof carriage, a gift from Emperor Napoleon III of France. The emperor emerged shaken but unhurt. Rysakov was captured almost immediately. Police Chief Dvorzhitsky heard Rysakov shout out to someone else in the gathering crowd. The surrounding guards and the Cossacks urged the emperor to leave the area at once rather than being shown the site of the explosion.

The assassination of Alexander II.

Nevertheless, a second young member of the Narodnaya Volya, Ignacy Hryniewiecki, standing by the canal fence, raised both arms and threw a bomb at the emperor’s feet which exploded instantly. He was alleged to have shouted, “It is too early to thank God.” Alexander was carried by sleigh to the Winter Palace to his study where almost the same day twenty years earlier, he had signed the Emancipation Edict freeing the serfs. Alexander was bleeding to death, with his legs torn away, his stomach ripped open, and his face mutilated. Members of the Romanov family came rushing to the scene.

The dying emperor was given Communion and Last Rites. When the attending physician, Sergey Botkin, was asked how long it would be, he replied, “Up to fifteen minutes.” At 3:30 that day, the standard of Alexander II (his personal flag) was lowered for the last time.

Aftermath

Alexander II’s death caused a great setback for the reform movement. One of his last acts was the approval of Mikhail Loris-Melikov’s constitutional reforms. Though the reforms were conservative in practice, their significance lay in the value Alexander II attributed to them: “I have given my approval, but I do not hide from myself the fact that it is the first step towards a constitution.”

In a matter of 48 hours, Alexander II planned to release these plans to the Russian people. Instead, following his succession, Alexander III, under the advice of Konstantin Pobedonostsev, chose to abandon these reforms and went on to pursue a policy of greater autocratic power.

The assassination triggered major suppression of civil liberties in Russia, and police brutality burst back in full force after experiencing some restraint under the reign of Alexander II, whose death was witnessed first-hand by his son, Alexander III, and his grandson, Nicholas II, both future emperors who vowed not to have the same fate befall them.