Table Of ContentA L E X A N D E R II
and the
Modernization of Russia
is one of the volumes
in the
TEACH YOURSELF HISTORY
LIBRARY
Edited by A. L. ROWSE
Teach Yourself History
VOLUMES READY OR IN PREPARATION
The Use of History, by A. L. Rowse
Pericles and Athens, by A. R. Burn
Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic Empire, by A. R. Burn
Agricola and Roman Britain, by A. R. Bum
Constantine and the Conversion of Europe, by A. H. M. Jones
Charlemagne and Western Europe, by H. St. L. B. Moss
Wycliffe and the Beginnings of English Nonconformity, by K. B. McFarlane
Henry V and the Invasion of France, by E. F. Jacob
Joan of Arc and the Recovery of France, by Alice Buchan
Lorenzo dei Medici and Renaissance Italy, by C. M. Ady
Machiavelli and Renaissance Italy, by John Hale
Erasmus and the Northern Renaissance, by Margaret Mann Phillips
Thomas Cromwell and the English Reformation, by A. G. Dickens
Cranmer and the English Reformation, by F. E. Hutchinson
Elizabeth I and Tudor England, by J. Hurstfield
Whitgift and the English Church, by V. J. K. Brook
Raleigh and the British Empire, by D. B. Quinn
Richelieu and the French Monarchy, by C. V. Wedgwood
Oliver Cromwell and the Puritan Revolution, by Maurice Ashley
Milton and the English Mind, by F. E. Hutchinson
Louis XIV and the Greatness of France, by Maurice Ashley
Peter the Great and the Emergence of Russia, by B. H. Sumner
Chatham and the British Empire, by Sir Charles Grant Robertson
Cook and the Opening of the Pacific, by James A. Williamson
Catherine the Great and the Expansion of Russia, by Gladys Scott Thomson
Benjamin Franklin and the American People, by Esmond Wright
Warren Hastings and British India, by Penderel Moon
Washington and the American Revolution, by Esmond Wright
Robespierre and the French Revolution, by J. M. Thompson
Napoleon and the Awakening of Europe, by Felix Markham
Bolivar and the Independence of Spanish America, by J. B. Trend
Jefferson and American Democracy, by Max Beloff
Pushkin and Russian Literature, by Janko Lavrin
Marx, Proudhon and European Socialism, by J. Hampden Jackson
Abraham Lincoln and the United States, by K. C. Wheare
Napoleon III and the Second Empire, by J. P. T. Bury
Alexander II and the Modernization of Russia, by W. E. Mosse
Gladstone and Liberalism, by J. L. Hammond and M. R. D. Foot
Livingstone and Africa, by Jack Simmons
Clemenceau and the Third Republic, by J. Hampden Jackson
Woodrow Wilson and American Liberalism, by E. M. Hugh-Jones
Lenin and the Russian Revolution, by Christopher Hill
Botha, Smuts and South Africa, by Basil Williams
Roosevelt and Modern America, by J. A. Woods
A L E X A N D E R II
and the
Modernization of Russia
by
W. E. MOSSE
THE ENGLISH UNIVERSITIES PRESS LTD
102, Newgate Street
LONDON, E.C.I
F irst P rinted 1958
©
Copyright
W. E. Mosse 1958
PRINTED AND BOUND IN ENGLAND
FOR THE ENGLISH UNIVERSITIES PRESS LTD.,
BY HAZELL WATSON AND VINEY LTD., AYLESBURY
General Introduction to the Series
THIS series has been undertaken in the conviction
that there can be no subject of study more im
portant than history. Great as have been the conquests
of natural science in our time—such that many think of
ours as a scientific age par excellence—it is even more
urgent and necessary that advances should be made in
the social sciences, if we are to gain control of the forces
of nature loosed upon us. The bed out of which all the
social sciences spring is history; there they find, in
greater or lesser degree, subject-matter and material,
verification or contradiction.
There is no end to what we can learn from history,
if only we would, for it is coterminous with life. Its
special field is the life of man in society, and at every
point we can learn vicariously from the experience of
others before us in history.
To take one point only—the understanding of poli
tics : how can we hope to understand the world of
affairs around us if we do not know how it came to be
what it is? How to understand Germany or Soviet
Russia, or the United States—or ourselves, without
knowing something of their history?
There is no subject that is more useful, or indeed
indispensable.
Some evidence of thé growing awareness of this may
be seen in the immense increase in the interest of the
reading public in history, and the much larger place the
subject has come to take in education in our time.
This series has been planned to meet the needs and
demands of a very wide public and of education—they
are indeed the same. I am convinced that the most con
genial, as well as the most concrete and practical,
5
A L E X A N D E R II
approach to history is the biographical, through the
lives of the great men whose actions have been so much
part of history, and whose careers in turn have been so
moulded and formed by events.
The key idea of this series, and what distinguishes it
from any other that has appeared, is the intention by
way of a biography of a great man to open up a signifi
cant historical theme ; for example, Cromwell and the
Puritan Revolution, or Lenin and the Russian Revolu
tion.
My hope is, in the end, as the series fills out and com
pletes itself, by a sufficient number of biographies to
cover whole periods and subjects in that way. To give
you the history of the United States, for example, or the
British Empire or France, via a number of biographies
of their leading historical figures.
That should be something new, as well as convenient
and practical, in education.
I need hardly say that I am a strong believer in
people with good academic standards writing once
more for the general reading public, and of the public
being given the best that the universities can provide.
From this point of view this series is intended to bring
the university into the homes of the people.
A. L. Rowse
All Souls College,
Oxford.
6
Contents
GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO THE SERIES 5
9
PREFACE
I UNREFORMED RUSSIA II
H THE NEW EMPEROR 29
47
m THE TSAR LIBERATOR
IV THE REFORMING EMPEROR 83
1
V ALEXANDER, THE POLES, AND THE FINNS 07
VI THE TSAR DESPOT I 25
VH ALEXANDER H AND THE RUSSIAN EXPANSIONISTS
I40
1
V m THE TSAR MARTYR 58
NOTES ON BOOKS 182
INDEX 185
Dates are given according to our present Gregorian
Calendar. In Alexander’s day, Russians used the Julian
Calendar which was then twelve days behind the
Gregorian. Where it was desirable to give a date in
both styles, they have been placed side by side.
7
‘ Experience shows that the most dangerous moment for a bad
government is usually when it begins to reform itself.*
—Alexis De T ocqueville
‘No despot can make happy a country which his predecessors
have made unhappy. The traces left by centuries of oppression
cannot be wiped out by imperial decree. That is the tragedy
of Alexander II.’—K urd von Schlözer
Preface
WHILE the names of Peter the Great and Lenin
have become household words, that of Alexander
II, Emperor of all the Russias from 1855 until his assas
sination in 1881, is familiar only to the specialist. Yet
the ‘Tsar Liberator* is associated with a social trans
formation hardly inferior in importance to the reforms
of Peter or Lenin’s October Revolution. B. H. Sumner
says : “The emancipation of the serfs (1861) and the
other reforms oif the sixties marked the watershed be
tween the old and the nineteenth-century Russia, much
as the reign of Peter the Great marked that between the
old Muscovy and the New Russia.**4 In spite of his less
dynamic personality, Alexander II deserves to rank
with the two great innovators among the makers of
modern Russia.
/Clf
the effect of Alexander’s reign is to be summed up
m a single phrase, it may be said to mark the transition
in Russia from a semi-feudal to an early capitalist
economy .Jrwo measures in particular helped to acceler
ate the process^The liberation of the serfs increased the
available force of mobile free labourjThe construction
of railways stimulated the growth 01 Russian industry.
Together with a great expansion of banking and credit
facilities, these developments laid the foundations of an
‘Industrial Revolution* which has continued without
intermission until the present day.
The economic transformation of Alexander’s reign
^ B. H. Sumner, Survey of Russian History (second revised
edn., London, 1947), p. 352.
9
A L E X A N D E R II
found its reflection in the social «ph»™ jn™» lifoprafrînn
of the serfs accelerated the decline ^f . tjie. land.owjaing,
'noBTlity. IF“assisted the more prosperous peasants but
^hastened the pauperization of the poorer, At the same
iânie^ the expansion^^,igg,an in<^ f7 c^Ugd-tliA
numbers of higlndustrial proletapat^The progress of
thfe importance of
capitalist entrepreneurs. In their cumulative effect
these changes undermined the position of the gentry in
Russian social life.
This development in its turn had political repercus
sions which received a measure of recognition in
Alexander’s administrative reforms. The abolition of
seigneurial jurisdiction reduced the authority of land-
owners over their peasants. The creation of all-class
zemstvos destroyed the administrative monopoly of
officialdom and gentry. By the introduction of conscrip
tion, the theoretical equality of all the Tsar’s subjects
in the matter of military service was recognized. A radi
cal reform of the law-courts and the adoption of the
jury system reduced the power of the bureaucracy.
Finally, a relaxation of the censorship regulations
allowed the growing intelligentsia to engage in the
public discussion of political questions. Russian political
journalism, and with it the growing influence of ‘public
opinion’, date essentially from the time of Alexander II.
For these reasons, it seems hardly too much to say
that Alexander II carried out a revolution from above
as important in its effects as the movements which in
1848 had elsewhere called students and workers to the
barricades. By his autocratic power he gave Russia what
the United States of America won only after four years
of bloody civil war. Moreover, if Russia, after her defeat
in the Crimea, was able to maintain her position as a
European power, she owed this in no small measure to
the reforms carried out under his direction. The Great
Reforms make Alexander II an important figure in
the history of nineteenth-century Europe.
10
