People of the Revolution and the USSR

Russian Empire Imperial establishment and White movement 1818–1881 ✕ Assassinated

The Tsar who tried to modernize the old regime from above through emancipation and reform, and became the revolutionaries' prime target

To the Moscow nobility in 1856: "The existing order of serf-owning cannot remain unchanged. It is better to begin abolishing serfdom from above than to wait until it begins to abolish itself from below."

Taking the throne in 1855 amid the defeat of the Crimean War, Alexander II declared it better to abolish serfdom 'from above than to wait until it begins to abolish itself from below,' and in 1861 he emancipated 23 million serfs, following up with zemstvo self-government, judicial reform, and universal military conscription. Hailed as the 'Tsar-Liberator,' he found his reforms too little for the radicals and too much for the conservatives, and after an assassination attempt in 1866 he turned toward reaction. On 13 March 1881, the very day he approved the Loris-Melikov constitutional draft, a bomb thrown by a member of the People's Will mortally wounded him; he died in the Winter Palace. His death ended the era of Great Reforms, ushered in the reaction of Alexander III, and confirmed revolutionary terrorism as a decisive method in Russian politics.

Russian Empire Imperial establishment and White movement 1845–1894 ○ Nephritis

The 'Peacemaker' who reversed the Great Reforms and re-established autocracy as the unshakeable creed of the Russian state

When the Austrian ambassador threatened war, Alexander III twisted a silver fork into a knot, threw it onto the ambassador's plate, and said: 'That is what I am going to do to your two or three army corps.'

Alexander III ascended the throne in 1881 over the body of his assassinated father, Alexander II, and drew a single lesson: reform breeds revolution. He immediately issued Pobedonostsev's Manifesto on Unshakeable Autocracy, killing the constitutional proposals his father had approved, and launched systematic counter-reforms: weakening the zemstvos, placing peasant communes under noble Land Captains, and enshrining 'Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality' as state creed alongside aggressive Russification and the anti-Jewish May Laws of 1882. In foreign affairs he avoided major wars and earned the epithet 'The Peacemaker.' Yet his signature achievement, the Franco-Russian Alliance of 1892, created the framework that would draw Russia into World War I. The autocratic order he rebuilt and handed to Nicholas II was precisely what the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 would shatter.

Russian Empire Imperial establishment and White movement 1868–1918 ✕ Executed

The last Tsar, who believed autocracy was a duty from God

On the night of 2 March 1917, after signing the act of abdication, Nicholas II wrote in his diary: "At one in the morning I left Pskov with a heavy feeling of what I had lived through. All around there is treason, cowardice, and deceit!"

After the shootings of 1905, and even after taking personal command in 1915 and with it the blame for defeat, he held autocracy to be a trust from God that could not be yielded by an inch. In February 1917, when no army would fire for him, three hundred years of Romanov rule ended in a week; in July 1918 he was shot with his family in a cellar in Yekaterinburg.