Download Alexander I (of Russia) (1777-1825), emperor of Russia (1801

Alexander I (of Russia) (1777-1825), emperor of Russia (1801-1825), son of
Emperor Paul I. He abolished many barbarous and cruel punishments then practiced
and in 1802 introduced a more orderly administration of government by the creation
of eight ministries. He improved the condition of the serfs and promoted education,
doubling the number of Russian universities by establishing those at Saint Petersburg,
Kharkiv, and Kazan’. Alexander was for a time the ally of Prussia against Napoleon of
France. In 1807, however, after the battles of Eylau and Friedland, Alexander allied
himself with the French. He broke the alliance in 1812, and later that year Napoleon
invaded Russia, only to lose his army in a disastrous retreat from Moscow. Alexander
was prominent thereafter in the European coalition that led to Napoleon's fall. In 1815
Alexander instituted the Holy Alliance of Austria, Russia, and Prussia. The purpose of
the alliance, as it was conceived, was to achieve the realization of high Christian
ideals among the nations of Europe, but it soon ceased to have any real importance.
The last years of Alexander's life and reign were reactionary and despotic. He was
succeeded by his brother Nicholas I.
Alexander II (of Russia) (1818-1881), emperor of Russia (1855-1881), son of
Emperor Nicholas I and nephew of Alexander I. He ascended the throne during the
Crimean War and in 1856 signed the Treaty of Paris, which brought the hostilities to
an end. After establishing committees to study the need for reform, Alexander II
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abolished serfdom throughout Russia in 1861. He also abolished corporal punishment,
established local self-government, initiated judicial reform, revised the educational
system, and developed a system of universal military service. Under his rule the
administration of the police was greatly improved, and military operations in Central
Asia and in a war with the Ottoman Empire (1877-1878) were highly successful. The
Russian possessions in North America, now constituting the state of Alaska, were sold
to the United States in 1867. Alexander was assassinated by a bomb thrown into his
carriage by a member of a revolutionary group, the Narodnaya Volya (People's Will).
Alexander III (of Russia) (1845-1894), emperor of Russia (1881-1894), who ended
the liberal reforms implemented by his father, Alexander II. In reaction to the
assassination of his father, Alexander restored much of the absolutism of the reign of
Nicholas I and sternly repressed all revolutionary agitation. He tried to impose the
Russian language on all of his subjects, persecuted the Jews, and restricted education.
His foreign policy was marked by a close union with France in opposition to the
Triple Alliance. Alexander was succeeded by his son, Nicholas II, who was the last of
the Russian tsars.
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Catherine II made her considerable mark in history by her extremely successful and
expansive foreign policy as well as by her energetic and fruitful continuation of the
process of Westernization in the footsteps of Peter the Great. Two major victorious
wars against the Ottoman Empire (1768-1774, 1787-1792) extended Russia to the
shores of the Black Sea. Agreements with Prussia and Austria led to three partitions of
Poland, in 1772, 1793, and 1795, after which that major country disappeared from the
map and Russia’s territory extended well into central Europe. Catherine supported the
Westernization of Russia not only as an autocrat, but also as a writer, a journalist, and
as its loudest propagandist. Russia, the empress insisted, attained new heights of
civilization during her reign. Court poets glorified Peter the Great who created new
Russians and Catherine the Great who gave them their souls, and the French writer
Voltaire wrote of Peter the Great and Catherine the Greater.
In contrast with Peter the Great, a coarse man without formal education who tried
desperately to catch up with everything, Catherine developed into an accomplished
intellectual of the Age of Enlightenment, indeed in her own opinion its best model.
The Spirit of Laws (1748), by French political theorist Montesquieu, became her
avowed prayer book. She used the book, which preached that a wise ruler who
favored reason over passion could best ensure the welfare of his or her subjects, to
bolster her autocratic system of government.
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Peter the Great
Internal reforms under Peter were generally enacted under the pressure of war, usually
in an ad hoc, disjointed manner. Often the confusion they were designed to fix was
made worse. Still, Peter's reforming of Russia was by no means limited to hectic
measures to bolster the war efforts. Rather, he wanted to Westernize and modernize
the entire Russian government, society, and culture. Peter literally moved the capital
west, from Moscow to Saint Petersburg, in 1712. Even if he failed to overhaul all of
Russia, changes pointed more and more away from backward Muscovy and toward
borrowing from the West. Peter the Great was not a theoretician, but he had the
makings of a visionary.
Of the reforms, the modernization of the army and the creation of the navy were
among the most successful. In 1711, before leaving on the Ottoman campaign, Peter
created a Senate of 10 (later 11) members to supervise all judicial, financial, and
administrative affairs in his absence. Upon his return it became a permanent
institution, with a special high official, the ober-procurator, serving as the link
between the Senate and the monarch, or, in Peter’s own words, as "the sovereign's
eye."
In 1717 and the years immediately following, Peter replaced Muscovy’s numerous
and unwieldy governmental departments with new agencies, called colleges.
Originally nine in number, the colleges were councils that served as the main agencies
of the newly structured government, dealing with such matters as foreign affairs,
justice, and commerce. The group leadership of each agency was meant to provide a
variety of opinion and to deter corruption. Town government also underwent major
reform. In 1699 control of the cities was shifted from appointed governors to locally
elected officials. Intended to stimulate the initiative and activity of the townspeople,
the reform failed in practice because of local inertia and ignorance. An even greater
failure was provincial reform, again very progressive and ambitious but totally
unrealistic. Peter divided the country into 50 gubernias (provinces), for which he
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established a vast bureaucracy. A governor headed each gubernia and answered to the
Senate. The system provided more uniformity, but corruption and confusion thrived
within the new bureaucracy.
Peter was more effective at changing the structure of the Russian Orthodox Church.
His reforms were influenced especially by church-state arrangements in the Lutheran
states of Northern Europe. In 1721 a Holy Synod, or religious college, of 10, and later
12, clerics replaced the patriarch at the head of the Orthodox Church. A secular
official, the ober-procurator, was appointed to supervise the synod for the ruler.
Although the emperor acquired no authority on questions of faith, the reform enabled
the government to exercise control over church organization, possessions, and
policies.
On the whole Peter had to accept Russian society as it was, with serfdom and the
economic and social dominance of the gentry; he did not produce any revolutionary
changes in the Russian economy. However, Peter’s tremendous effort to make that
society and economy serve his purposes brought some lasting social results. To fund
the wars and the building of Saint Petersburg, taxation became extremely oppressive,
with new taxes of every conceivable kind proliferating. After a census was ordered in
the early 1720s, a head, or poll, tax replaced the household tax and the tax on
cultivated land. Serfs and eventually even vagrants—individuals who had previously
escaped taxation because they did not own land or were not part of a
household—were subject to the new tax.
Under Peter, members of the service gentry, landowners who held property in return
for their service to the state, were divided into classes. In 1722, Peter promulgated a
system of ranks that classified the gentry according to their level of service. This
system, called the Table of Ranks, listed in hierarchic order the 14 ranks to be attained
in the military, civil, and imperial court service. Promotion now depended on ability
and service to the state, not birth, which historically determined how far one rose in
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Russian society. The Table of Ranks served as the foundation of the imperial Russian
bureaucracy and lasted, with modification, until 1917.
Peter’s war endeavors provided a strong stimulus to the Russian economy, from
mining and metallurgy, which supplied armaments and ships for the army and navy, to
the new textile industry. But perhaps his most significant impact was in the broad
field of education and culture, where the Western orientation could never again be
reversed. This orientation began before Peter’s reforms, but it was Peter who made it
state policy and thus transformed an optional and slow process into a compulsory
official drive. In a sense, the Academy of Sciences, planned by the emperor and
inaugurated shortly after his death, remained his most appropriate monument.
Peter died in February 1725 after a brief illness, without using a new law, issued in
1722, giving him the right to appoint a successor. His only son to grow to maturity,
Alexis, had died in 1718 in prison in tragic and unclear circumstances after having
been condemned to death for treason against his father, whose views he never shared.
The reformer's semiliterate second wife ascended the throne as Empress Catherine I,
sponsored especially by Peter's most prominent assistant, Aleksandr Menshikov, and
the guards.
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Russian Revolutions of 1917, two revolutions that occurred in Russia in 1917. The
first revolution, in February, overthrew the Russian monarchy. The second revolution,
in October, created the world’s first Communist state.
The Russian revolutions of 1917 involved a series of uprisings by workers and
peasants throughout the country and by soldiers, who were predominantly of peasant
origin, in the Russian army. Many of the uprisings were organized and led by
democratically elected councils called soviets. The soviets originated as strike
committees and were basically a form of local self-government. The second
revolution led to the rise of the modern Communist movement and to the
transformation of the Russian Empire into what became known as the Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics (USSR). The goal of those who carried out the second revolution
was the creation of social equality and economic democracy in Russia. However, the
Communist regime that they established eventually turned into a bureaucratic
dictatorship, which lasted until 1991.
The overthrow of the Russian monarch, Emperor Nicholas II, and the ruling Romanov
dynasty took place after an uprising that lasted from February 23 to 27, 1917,
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according to the Julian calendar then used in Russia, or March 8 to 12 according to
the Gregorian calendar. (On January 31, 1918, the Russian government adopted the
Gregorian calendar; events occurring before that date will be given in this article
according to the Julian calendar.) The events of late February 1917 are known as the
February Revolution. After the overthrow of the emperor, a shaky coalition of
conservative, liberal, and moderate socialist politicians declared itself the Provisional
Government, on February 27, 1917. That government initially received the support of
the soviets—the councils that insurgent workers and peasants set up and elected.
However, the Provisional Government proved unable to resolve the problems that had
led to the February Revolution. Chief among these was the problem of ending
Russia’s involvement in World War I (1914-1918).
The second revolution was initiated by an armed insurrection on October 24 and 25,
1917. Known as the October Revolution or the Bolshevik Revolution, it was led by a
group of revolutionary socialists called Bolsheviks. It swept aside the Provisional
Government with the goal of giving “all power to the soviets.” The Bolsheviks hoped
that their revolution would result in more fundamental changes in Russian society and
also inspire the working people of other countries to carry out socialist revolutions.
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