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talkpoliticsHere's a politician that takes office when the shit hits the fan and here's one that finds himself in a triple-bind: he has to reform in a fashion that will completely alter the fundamental foundation of the state he's taken over, one that in this sense actually predates his entire crowd's being in office. His state is stuck in one of the first modern wars, a war with rifle and telegraph, and the difficulties of the war convince him of the necessity to abolish slavery. His rule coincides with a massive, violent wave of terrorism, and his reforms are only partial and blow up about a half-century later. If this sounds like Abe Lincoln, nope, this is the aforementioned Tsar-Liberator, Alexander II, one of the few Tsars of Russia who wasn't a Jew-hating scumbag authoritarian. He was a relatively unbigoted scumbag authoritarian.
First, the bad of Alexander II's reign: his reign is when the whole pattern that leads to the first figure in these threads, Vladimir Lenin, starts. The People's Will/Narodnaya Volnya is the direct ancestor of the Bolshevik just as Dilong is of the Tyrannosaurus (the dinosaur analogy is a deliberate one for both movements, they're both extinct and damn good that it's so). Little Eleck bungled utterly the response to this new movement, and his problems here ensured that Left-Wing terrorism stayed in Russia and would one day build the Soviet Union.
Alexander II's problems with land reform were also real. His reforms satisfied nobody, nobles, churches, peasants, and they created a continual new variation on an old problem in Russian politics: in a mostly-peasant society which worked well at the local and imperial levels but had nothing in-between there was never any means to try to satisfy anyone even if this was the actual goal. Thus Russia's leaders came to be seen as increasingly powerless as in a very real sense they were, and the inability to create out of nothing what did not exist ensured that Russia might survive but Tsarism was unlikely to.
There's also the not-so-minor reality that Alexander II's war with the Ottoman Empire set in motion the chaos in the Balkans that triggered both the Third Balkan War and First World War. His attempt to secure Russian hegemony in the Balkans failed, he was understandably pissed at this, and the new states that came into existence were determined to get what they wanted, not what the Great Powers wanted. His expulsions of Circassians and war against Imam Shamil helped add to the present-day Chechen Problem and with 1,000,000 Caucasian Muslims having fled to the Ottoman Empire it was understandably a wee bit defensive at the start of WWI for what proved to be a damn good reason. His regime also saw Russia sell Alaska, smashed another attempt to recreate Poland, and started on the basis of military defeat in one war.
Now for the good:
Alexander II abolished a serfdom that resembled slavery far more than medieval serfdom with a decree, bloodlessly, and at a stroke thus altered the course of Russian society since Tsar Mikhail I. It took two years of civil war and a string of military clusterfucks for the USA to start *thinking* about abolishing slavery, and another three for it to actually abolish slavery. The Tsar of Russia decreed and that was that, there was no dissent.
Alexander II took Russia from being the joke of Europe to winding up the long Caucasian War, conquering Central Asia, and defeating the Ottoman Empire. His military reforms were instrumental in adapting Russia to industrial warfare though here as everywhere else he touched they were only partial reforms. Alexander II took the first steps to transform Russia's army into a military on the grounds seen elsewhere at the time, a huge conscript force and the so-called school of the nation.
Finally, Alexander II began the first attempts at codifying and creating a proper law code in the Russian Empire, steps that would not be equalled until the Soviet Union's variant of "law and order" appeared. He created a full court system, and may have been taking steps to a Constitutional monarchy before he came down with a case of untimely death. In this he began something crucial and how much difference his living longer would have made is an open question.
In my view Alexander II's one of those guys who was really good when he was good, but when he was bad he was horrible. Unfortunately in his case the bad went just as much into the disasters of the 20th Century as Otto von Bismarck's. Your thought's on Russia's Abraham Lincoln?
First, the bad of Alexander II's reign: his reign is when the whole pattern that leads to the first figure in these threads, Vladimir Lenin, starts. The People's Will/Narodnaya Volnya is the direct ancestor of the Bolshevik just as Dilong is of the Tyrannosaurus (the dinosaur analogy is a deliberate one for both movements, they're both extinct and damn good that it's so). Little Eleck bungled utterly the response to this new movement, and his problems here ensured that Left-Wing terrorism stayed in Russia and would one day build the Soviet Union.
Alexander II's problems with land reform were also real. His reforms satisfied nobody, nobles, churches, peasants, and they created a continual new variation on an old problem in Russian politics: in a mostly-peasant society which worked well at the local and imperial levels but had nothing in-between there was never any means to try to satisfy anyone even if this was the actual goal. Thus Russia's leaders came to be seen as increasingly powerless as in a very real sense they were, and the inability to create out of nothing what did not exist ensured that Russia might survive but Tsarism was unlikely to.
There's also the not-so-minor reality that Alexander II's war with the Ottoman Empire set in motion the chaos in the Balkans that triggered both the Third Balkan War and First World War. His attempt to secure Russian hegemony in the Balkans failed, he was understandably pissed at this, and the new states that came into existence were determined to get what they wanted, not what the Great Powers wanted. His expulsions of Circassians and war against Imam Shamil helped add to the present-day Chechen Problem and with 1,000,000 Caucasian Muslims having fled to the Ottoman Empire it was understandably a wee bit defensive at the start of WWI for what proved to be a damn good reason. His regime also saw Russia sell Alaska, smashed another attempt to recreate Poland, and started on the basis of military defeat in one war.
Now for the good:
Alexander II abolished a serfdom that resembled slavery far more than medieval serfdom with a decree, bloodlessly, and at a stroke thus altered the course of Russian society since Tsar Mikhail I. It took two years of civil war and a string of military clusterfucks for the USA to start *thinking* about abolishing slavery, and another three for it to actually abolish slavery. The Tsar of Russia decreed and that was that, there was no dissent.
Alexander II took Russia from being the joke of Europe to winding up the long Caucasian War, conquering Central Asia, and defeating the Ottoman Empire. His military reforms were instrumental in adapting Russia to industrial warfare though here as everywhere else he touched they were only partial reforms. Alexander II took the first steps to transform Russia's army into a military on the grounds seen elsewhere at the time, a huge conscript force and the so-called school of the nation.
Finally, Alexander II began the first attempts at codifying and creating a proper law code in the Russian Empire, steps that would not be equalled until the Soviet Union's variant of "law and order" appeared. He created a full court system, and may have been taking steps to a Constitutional monarchy before he came down with a case of untimely death. In this he began something crucial and how much difference his living longer would have made is an open question.
In my view Alexander II's one of those guys who was really good when he was good, but when he was bad he was horrible. Unfortunately in his case the bad went just as much into the disasters of the 20th Century as Otto von Bismarck's. Your thought's on Russia's Abraham Lincoln?
(no subject)
Date: 27/12/11 21:28 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 27/12/11 21:29 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 27/12/11 21:48 (UTC)Alexander II is one of those "if only..." "could have been" stories. His reforms, especially the abolition of serfdom, but also by legal and commercial/industrial reform, helped set the Russian Empire on a course to modernization. At the time of his assassination, he had been only a few days away from releasing his plans for a real Russian parliament, and had also intended to create various advisory committees to help the Tsar rule. Had he not died in 1881 (he was 63 and in apparently good health) by 1900 we might have seen a very different Russian Empire, one featuring a real constitutional monarchy, a real parliament, and a modernized economy.
Instead, after the assassination, we got Alexander III, a grief-stricken reactionary whose first acts as Tsar were to tear up his father's plans for a parliament and initiate a pogrom. I'm not saying that Alexander III or Nicholas II would have made great leaders (Alexander III was by all accounts a half-educated lout and a nationalist religious zealot, a very bad combination for an autocrat), but there's no denying that not witnessing their father's assassination might have resulted in very different reigns: would Alexander II's relatively liberal policies (WRT to Jews, civil liberties, continuing reforms, etc.) have continued? I think they might have.
But, alas, some idiotic People's Will douchebag changed the world. 1881 was the year the Russian Empire died. It was a slow, agonizing, lingering death, and its demise brought forth something even more horrifyingly evil: the nightmare of Communism.
(no subject)
Date: 27/12/11 21:53 (UTC)He'd be more a Philip II to his successor's Alexander the Great in that regard, he'd build it but he'd not be the one to actually make it.
Agreed on the last paragraph, his death as it happened made for the worst of all worlds for everybody in Russia.
(no subject)
Date: 27/12/11 22:04 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 28/12/11 10:20 (UTC)http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A4%D0%B0%D0%B9%D0%BB:Russian_Empire_%28orthographic_projection%29.svg
(no subject)
Date: 28/12/11 18:36 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 29/12/11 10:43 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 29/12/11 10:55 (UTC)