Alexander II of Russia

Alexander II emancipated the serfs and was blown up by revolutionaries for not going far enough. He came to the throne in 1855 in the middle of the Crimean War, which had exposed Russia as a great power that could not supply its own army, and he drew the obvious conclusion. The Edict of Emancipation of 1861 freed twenty-three million serfs, two years before the American Emancipation Proclamation and without a war. It also left them owing redemption payments for land they had farmed for generations, which produced a peasantry that was legally free and economically worse off, and it satisfied nobody. He followed it with reforms that mattered: elected local assemblies, an independent judiciary with jury trials, universal military service replacing twenty-five-year conscription, and relaxed censorship. He also crushed the Polish rising of 1863, conquered Central Asia, and sold Alaska in 1867. The reforms created a class of educated people with no political outlet, and the revolutionary movement grew out of exactly that. He survived several attempts on his life. On 13 March 1881, hours after approving a proposal for a consultative assembly, a bomb thrown by the People's Will disabled his carriage; he got out to look at the wounded and a second bomber killed him. His son Alexander III abandoned the reform programme entirely. The church built over the spot where he was killed, the Saviour on the Spilled Blood, is deliberately Russian in style against the classical architecture around it. The assassination is a standard example of a reform programme that raised expectations faster than it could meet them, and of the reaction that follows.

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