Autocracy and the End of Tsardom
Catherine the Great was succeeded by her son Paul I, who made himself unpopular with eccentric behavior and misguided army reforms, and ended up murdered in 1801. He was succeeded by his son Alexander I, who dabbled in Enlightenment ideas early in his reign, withstood the French invasion of Russia in 1812, and joined the coalition that defeated Napoleon for good. He became ultra-conservative later in his reign, and after the Congress of Vienna that reorganized Europe after Napoleon’s defeat, Alexander set Russia upon a reactionary path that lasted until Tsardom fell in 1917.
Alexander’s successor, Nicholas I (reigned 1825 – 1855), was even more reactionary and uninterested in change, even while Europe and the West were trending towards greater liberty and enlightened government. Nicholas went for religious orthodoxy, Russian nationalism, and Tsarist absolutism and autocracy in a manner reminiscent of the pre-Enlightenment Divine Right of Kings mindset.
He also pursued an aggressive foreign policy that was successful when applied to Russia’s southern neighbors, seizing territories from the Persians and Ottoman Turks in the 1820s. However, his continued aggressions against the Ottomans eventually got him into the disastrous Crimean War (1853 – 1856), in which his armies were trounced by the British and French. Worse than a defeat, it was a humiliation that exposed Russia’s backwardness and how far it had fallen behind more modern powers such as Britain and France.
Nicholas’ son and successor Alexander II instituted reforms, greatest of which was to finally free Russia’s serfs. However, in practice the reforms were too shallow and their pace was too slow, and the freed serfs were shackled with disadvantageous conditions that kept them backwards and impoverished. Alexander II was blown up by revolutionary terrorists in 1881, and his successor Alexander III abandoned reforms and returned to autocracy and repression, transforming Russia into a police state.
By 1894, when Nicholas II became Tsar, the Tsarist system was visibly incapable of sustaining itself. A more capable ruler might have muddled through and kept it going for another generation, but Nicholas II was an inept Tsar and a weak-minded man who allowed his airhead wife, Tsarina Alexandra, to wield too much influence. A humiliating defeat in the 1904 – 1905 Russo-Japanese War was followed by the limited Russian Revolution of 1905 – a harbinger of greater events. The final straw was Russia’s disastrous involvement in WWI, which led to Tsardom getting swept away in the Russian Revolution of 1917.
