Latest / The Romanov Dynasty: Rise, Power, and Bloody End — Fexingo History / Tsar Alexander II: The Reformer Who Was Hunted by Bombs
Transcript
- Luna: So we've talked a lot about the Romanovs' secret police and the 1905 revolution, but I want to go back to the guy who freed the serfs. Alexander II. Lucas: Yeah, the Tsar-Liberator. We touched on the emancipation in episode 75, but his whole reign is this incredible tightrope walk between reform and repression. He starts off as the most progressive tsar since Peter the Great, and he ends up blown apart by a bomb on the Catherine Canal. And the really tragic part is that the bomb came because of the reforms themselves. Luna: So the reforms created the revolutionaries? Lucas: In a way, yes. The Emancipation Edict of 1861 freed over 23 million serfs — that's a staggering number. But the way it was done left many peasants worse off: they had to pay redemption payments to the state for land they thought was theirs by right. And along with emancipation, Alexander II unleashed a whole package of reforms — the Great Reforms, they're called. Local self-government through zemstvos, an independent judiciary, trial by jury, relaxed censorship, and a complete overhaul of the military under Dmitry Miliutin. For a few years, Russia felt like it was becoming a modern state. Luna: But that must have scared the old guard, right? Lucas: Absolutely. The nobility hated losing control over the peasants. The conservatives saw the zemstvos as a step toward constitutional government. And the radicals — well, they saw the reforms as too little, too late. They wanted a republic, not a tinkered autocracy. And that's where the trouble starts. In 1866, a young man named Dmitry Karakozov walked up to the tsar's carriage in St. Petersburg and fired a pistol. He missed — someone pushed his arm — but it was the first direct attempt on a tsar's life in decades. Luna: And that changed everything. Lucas: It really did. The tsar's reaction was to pull back. He appointed Count Shuvalov to head the Third Section — the secret police — and they started cracking down. But here's the irony: the crackdown didn't stop the radicals, it radicalised them further. By the 1870s, you have the Narodnaya Volya — the People's Will — a dedicated group of revolutionaries who believed that targeted assassination would bring down the autocracy. And they were incredibly disciplined. Luna: Were they mostly students and intellectuals? Lucas: Many were. But some came from noble families too. The most famous is Sofia Perovskaya — she was the daughter of a former governor-general of St. Petersburg. She became the first woman executed for a political crime in Russia. The People's Will set up a network of safe houses, bomb-making cells, and surveillance teams. They tried to blow up the tsar's train in 1879 — they mined the tracks near Moscow but the wrong train went over it. Then in 1880, a carpenter named Stepan Khalturin got a job in the Winter Palace and smuggled dynamite into the basement. He blew up the dining room, but the tsar was late for dinner. Eleven guards died, but Alexander II survived. Luna: He must have felt like he was living under siege. Lucas: Yeah, and his response was to set up a Supreme Executive Commission under General Loris-Melikov, who tried a mix of repression and conciliation. Loris-Melikov actually proposed a kind of consultative assembly — a step toward a parliament. Alexander II agreed to it. He signed the decree on the morning of March 1, 1881. That afternoon, he was dead. Luna: He signed his own reform, and then the radicals killed him for it? Lucas: Exactly. The People's Will had planned the assassination for months. They had bomb-throwers positioned along his usual route from the Mikhailovsky Palace to the Winter Palace. When the tsar's carriage passed, a young man named Nikolai Rysakov threw a bomb that wounded some of the escort and shattered the carriage. Alexander II got out, against all protocol, to check on the wounded. That's when Ignacy Hryniewiecki threw a second bomb at his feet. The explosion blew off both the tsar's legs. He died a few hours later in the Winter Palace. Luna: And the reform decree never went through. Lucas: It was killed by his son, Alexander III. He used his father's assassination as the excuse to roll back almost every reform. The zemstvos were gutted, the judiciary lost independence, censorship returned. The idea of a consultative assembly was shelved for a generation. And that set the stage for the 1905 revolution and everything that came after. Luna: It's almost like the tsar was caught between two worlds — he wanted to reform but he couldn't let go of autocracy, and the radicals wouldn't accept anything less than revolution. Lucas: That's exactly the tragedy. He freed millions of people, but he couldn't free the system from its own rigid logic. And the People's Will — they thought they could kill the tyrant and liberty would bloom. Instead, they got a repressive reaction that lasted decades. It's a cautionary tale about how violence in the name of change often backfires. Luna: You know, speaking of the complexity of reform and its costs — it makes me think about what keeps a show like this going. It's a lot of research to dig into these stories episode after episode. Lucas: Yeah, it really is. And honestly, the reason we can keep doing deep dives like this without ads is because a small number of listeners chip in through buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. It's not a big thing — just a way to cover research time and hosting costs. But it makes a huge difference. Luna: It's nice that people who care about history can support it directly. Keeps the whole thing independent. Lucas: Exactly. Anyway, back to Alexander II — there's one more assassination attempt I want to mention, because it's so bizarre. Luna: Oh, there's another? Lucas: Yeah, in 1879, a revolutionary named Alexander Solovyov decided to take matters into his own hands. He walked up to the tsar in the Winter Palace gardens and fired five shots with a revolver. He missed every single time. The tsar actually ran zigzagging across the lawn. Solovyov was captured, tried, and hanged. But it shows how persistent the threat was — and how the tsar's luck was running out, one bullet at a time. Luna: Five shots and he missed? That's either terrible aim or divine intervention, depending on your perspective. Lucas: Probably a bit of both. But after that, the security got tighter — and still it wasn't enough. The People's Will had a motto: 'Terror is the only language the tsar understands.' In the end, they were wrong. The tsar they killed was actually the one who had started to listen. His son didn't listen at all. Luna: So the assassination didn't just kill one tsar — it killed the reform movement. Lucas: Exactly. And that's why Alexander II is such a fascinating figure. He's the reformer who ended serfdom but couldn't escape the logic of autocracy. He gave Russia a glimpse of something better, and then the backlash — from above and below — destroyed it. The rest of the Romanov story is basically a long, slow decline from that moment. Luna: It's like the turning point that didn't turn. Lucas: Yeah. And there's a strange coda. The Church later venerated Alexander II as a 'Tsar-Martyr' — not officially canonized, but in folk memory, he became a kind of saintly figure who died for his people. Of course, the people who killed him saw him as a tyrant. History is never simple. Luna: I guess that's why we keep coming back to it.