Alexander II Review

From MarieLundAlveberg for "Imperial Russia reform, reaction, revolution"

Alexander II (1855-1881)

Tsar of Russia. Son of Nicholas I, father of Alexander III. Advocated moderate reforms for Russia and emancipated the serfs. He was assassinated.

Tsarist autocracy

**Tsarist autocracy**, also called **Tsarism**, is a form of autocracy (later absolute monarchy) specific to the Grand Duchy of Moscow, which later became Tsardom of Russia and the Russian Empire. In it, all power and wealth are controlled by the Tsar.

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They had more power than constitutional monarchs, who are usually vested by law and counterbalanced by legislative authority; and more authority on religious issues compared to Western monarchs.

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In Russia, it originated during the time of Ivan III (1462−1505) and was abolished after the Russian Revolutions of 1917.

Social reform

Organized attempt to improve what is unjust or imperfect in society

Political opposition

Not tolerated in an authoritarian government

Tolerated in a democratic system and expressed through a system of political parties

The People’s Will (Narodnaya Volya)

Who were The People’s Will?

• 19th-century Russian revolutionary extremist organization.

• developed after 'land and liberty' broke up

What did The People’s Will want/believe?

• Argued that social revolution would not be possible without first achieving a political revolution.

• Aimed to rescue Russia from autocracy → regarded terrorist activities as the best means of forcing political reform

• Demanded key democratic reforms:

  • national constitution, universal suffrage, freedom of speech and press, local self-government, and national self-determination

What did The People’s Will achieve?

• Assassinated Alexander II on March 1, 1881.

• Ironically this allowed Alexander III to crack down on opposition movements

• Many leading figures of the People's Will were imprisoned.

Emancipation

The process of being set free from legal, social, or political restrictions. A form of liberation from previous oppression.

Serfdom was abolished through the Emancipation Edict of 1861.

Modernization

The process of reforming political, military, economic, social, and cultural traditions in immitation of the early success of Western societies, often with regard to accommodating local traditions in non-Western societies.

Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)

Tolstoy is widely regarded as one of the **greatest novelists** of all time.

He is particularly noted for his masterpieces War and Peace and Anna Karenina. In their scope, breadth, and **realistic depiction of Russian life**, the two books stand at the peak of realistic fiction.

As a moral philosopher he was notable for **his ideas on nonviolent resistance** through his work The Kingdom of God is Within You, which in turn influenced twentieth-century figures such as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King.

Russian landowning nobles

The Russian nobility originated in the 14th century.

In 1914 it consisted of approximately 1,900,000 members (about 1.1% of the population). \n Up until the February Revolution of 1917, the noble estates staffed most of the Russian government.

Emancipation Edict of 1861

The imperial law of Alexander II abolished serfdom in Russia and, on paper, freed the peasants.

In actuality, there were successes and failures of the law.

Prince Alexei Orlov (1786-1861)

Aleksey Fyodorovich was a military officer and statesman who was an influential adviser to Nicholas I (reigned 1825-55) and Alexander II (reigned 1855-81) in both domestic and foreign affairs.

Conservative

Holding to traditional attitudes and values.

Cautious about change or innovation, typically in relation to politics or religion.

Censorship

Control of free expression. Especially restricting access to ideas and information

Mir

Mir was a self-governing community of peasant households that elected its own officials and controlled local forests, fisheries, hunting grounds, and vacant lands.

\n To make taxes imposed on its members more equitable, the Mir assumed communal control of the community's arable land and periodically redistributed it among the households, according to their sizes.



After serfdom was abolished in 1861, the Mir was retained as a system of communal land tenure and an organ of local administration.

Temporary obligation

Peasants who formerly belonged to the landowning nobility (serfs) and were emancipated by the statutes of Feb. 19, 1861, but who had not yet concluded agreements concerning payments for land allotments received.

Redemption operation

A state credit operation made by the tsarist government of Russia in connection with the peasant reform of 1861.

The redemption operation was carried out in accord with the Law on Redemption

Dmitri Milyutin (1816-1912)

Count Dmitry Alekseyevich Milyutin was Minister of War under Alexander II from 1861 to 1881 and the last Field Marshal of Imperial Russia.

He was responsible for sweeping military reforms that changed the face of the Russian army in the 1860s and 1870s.

However, he was infamously involved in creating the framework for the genocide of Circassian Refugees from 1861 to 1865.

Military reforms (1874)

Carried out by the liberal Minister of War, Dmitri Milyutin.

These military reforms included:

• reducing the length of service for conscripts from 25 years to 6 years in service

  • and 9 years in reserve

• introducing universal military service for all males over 20

  • no longer allowing the wealthy to escape this

• training and discipline no longer included brutal punishments

Milyutin's reforms made the army more civilized and efficient. Shorter services meant that the army was no longer a 'life sentence'. A more professional and less expensive army.

Legal reforms (1864)

In 1864 Alexander introduced a modern Western-style legal system. It aimed to be an independent judiciary that was "equal for all our subjects".

These reforms included:

• the introduction of juries

• judges were to be well-paid to avoid bribery

• courts were open to the public

Impact of these legal reforms:

• Possibly the most liberal and progressive of Alexander's reforms.

• This new system offered Russians the chance of a fair trial for the first time.

• The courtrooms offered many from the rising intelligentsia a new career option.

• Courtrooms enjoyed considerable freedom of expression.

• Hugh Seton-Watson argues, "the courtroom was the one place in Russia where real freedom of speech prevailed"

• However, it should also be noted that political cases were removed from these courts and the Secret Police could still arrest people at will.

Intelligentsia (Russia)

The intelligentsia is a status **class of educated people** engaged in complex mental labors that critique, guide, and lead in shaping the culture and politics of their society.

\n Includes artists, teachers, academics, writers, etc. Individual members of the intelligentsia are known as intellectuals.

Educational and cultural reforms

Examples of reforms:

• Censorship was reduced from 1865 onwards.

• Universities were given much greater autonomy in their affairs (1863)

• The Secondary Education Statue of 1864 and the Elementary Education Statue of 1865 addressed primary and secondary education

Impacts of these reforms:

• The number of children attending primary school increased considerably as the zemstva played a key role in increasing the number of elementary schools.

• Between 1856 and 1878, the number of children in primary school more than doubled from 450,000 to over 1 million.

• The government's liberal policies made universities into a "powder keg"

  • Student radicalism grew and teaching lectures "appeared to be serving not only academic and economic purposes but also the promotion of political instability" (David Saunders)

• Overall successful at liberalizing -→ good for the people, bad for the Tsar

Ivan Turgenev (1818-1883)

Famous Russian writer. Influenced by Western ideas of progress while studying in Berlin.

He analyzed the problems of Russian society, showing the need for changes, both toward emancipation (A Sportsman's Sketches of 1852) and educational reform (Fathers and Sons of 1862).

Local Government Reform (1864)

With the abolition of serfdom removing the legal basis of control of the peasantry, Alexander II saw the need for changes in the governmental system. \n In 1864 **local government assemblies called Zemstvas** were set up, followed by **urban assemblies called Dumas** in 1870.

Zemstvas

An organ of rural/local self-government in the Russian Empire and Ukraine. Established in 1864 to provide social and economic services, it became a significant liberal influence within Imperial Russia.

Positives of zemstvas:

• They had local power over public health, prisons, roads, agriculture, and education → providing new opportunities for local political participation in ways they had not previously been possible.

Negatives of zemstvas:

• The police remained under central control

• The provisional governor could overrule all zemstva decisions

• The zemstva were permanently short of money, which limited their practical options

• The voting system was heavily weighted towards local landowners → made it easy for their interests to dominate assemblies.

Dumas

In 1870, elected councils were set up in towns and cities to provide municipal self-government. Essentially a larger form of zemstvas. Like the zemstva, dumas could raise taxes and levy labor to support their activities.

Positives:

• Had local power over public health, prisons, roads, agriculture, and education, which provided new opportunities for local political participation in ways that had not previously been possible.

• These local officials, therefore, had the chance to engage in Russia's real social problems.

Negatives:

• The police remained under central control

• The provisional governor could overrule all zemstva decisions

• The zemstva were permanently short of money, which limited their practical options

• The voting system was heavily weighted towards local landowners → made it easy for their interests to dominate assemblies.

Mikhail von Reutern (1820-90)

Michael von Reutern was a Baltic German statesman and the Finance Minister of the Russian Empire from 1862 to 1878. A "financial wizard".

What he did:

• Established a new system of collecting taxes

• Created Russia’s first comprehensive budget

• Helped set up a state bank in 1862

• Helped expand the Russian railway network

The assassination of Alexander II (1881)

The last years of Tsar Alexander's reign saw a wave of terrorist violence that ultimately succeeded in killing the Tsar himself. \n \n The group that was responsible for carrying out the attack on his life was 'The People's Will' which developed from a movement known as Populism.

\n Although its terrorist activities failed to ignite the revolution that they hoped for, it did help to develop the political consciousness of the Russian people and lay the seeds for future revolutionary groups such as the Social Revolutionaries.

Radical opposition

The freer political atmosphere created by Alexander II’s reforms, and the tolerance of Western liberal ideas in the universities led to the growth of more radical opposition.

This opposition demanded fundamental changes to Russian autocracy and society. Consisted particularly of students influenced by the growing flood of radical ideas in this period

Polish revolt, 1863

Polish desire for land reform, and re-establishing Polish nationhood, led to unrest and demonstrations, killing 200.

Planned conscription of Poles into the Russian army led to the armed rebellion in February 1863, which lasted a year across the countryside before it was put down by granting land reform. \n \n This showed that non-Russian nationalist aspirations within the Russian Empire were not possible, and contributed to the adoption of Russification policies in the future.

Reform from below vs above

Reforms from below seek to **improve the conditions of the people**, and it places no limits on these improvements, and they can include changes in structures and in who governs. \n \n In contrast, **reform from above does not want deeper changes in structure and power.** Reform from above wants to maintain the established structures and the prevailing distribution of power in the established economic-political-social system. Reform from above seeks to undercut the popular movement, by offering significant concessions that do not change structures or power.

Reactionary

Ideological view that favors a return to a previous state of affairs. Strongly opposed to change, xtreme conservative.

Dmitri Tolstoy (1823-1889)

A tsarist Russian government official known for his reactionary policies.

Tolstoy was appointed to the Education Ministry in 1866. He was charged with imposing strict discipline on students and teachers and keeping them from exposure to revolutionary doctrines.

He also proceeded to undo many of the previous educational reforms.

The Secret Police ("Third Section")

The Third Section of His Imperial Majesty's Own Chancellery was **a secret-police department** set up in Imperial Russia.

It effectively served as the regime's secret police.

**The organization was relatively small.** When founded in July 1826 by Nicholas I it included only sixteen investigators. Their number increased to forty in 1855. The Third Section disbanded in 1880, replaced by the Police Department and the Okhrana.

Historiography

The historiography (general descriptor) of a topic is the **sum total of the interpretations of a specific topic written by past and current historians.** \n \n Thus you can talk about "the state of the historiography" at a point in time, or you can "add historiography" to a paper to make it more complete. \n \n Historiography (noun) or historiographical paper is an analysis of the interpretations of a specific topic written by past historians. \n \n The process of writing historiography shows you the research that has been done on your topic in the past. \n \n Most importantly, historiography shows you which interpretations have been challenged.