Did Alexander II’s reforms make revolution more likely?

The short answer

• Defeat on home soil. Sevastopol fell in September 1855 after an eleven-month siege. Britain and France could supply their forces by sea, while Russia had to rely on carts: there was no railway south of Moscow. Losing on Russian soil damaged the prestige won when Russia drove Napoleon out in 1812 and pursued him to Paris. Modern military power required railways, rifles, money and trained reserves; the defeat showed Alexander how much his empire needed them.
• Serfdom as a military and financial brake. Serfdom restricted the soldiers and money needed by a great power. Completing military service freed a serf, so releasing trained men into a reserve also meant releasing them from landlords’ control. Landowners had pledged about two-thirds of their serfs as security for state-bank loans. When the banks ran short of cash in 1857–59, the treasury could no longer support lending on that basis.
• Fear of the village. The Pugachev rising of 1773–75 remained a warning: peasants and Cossacks, free frontier horsemen of the south, had burned estates across the Volga region. Disturbances increased again in the late 1850s as rumors of freedom spread. Alexander’s 1856 warning to Moscow’s nobles gave that fear a practical conclusion. If the throne decreed emancipation before peasants seized it, the state could determine its terms.
• An autocrat and his reformers. Most landlords preferred delay or freedom without land. Alexander II supported a different settlement, and his authority could overcome resistance in a system without a parliament. Nikolai Milyutin and officials who had studied the problem for years drafted statutes in the Editing Commissions of 1859–60 under Yakov Rostovtsev. The concentrated power that made emancipation possible remained untouched by it.

What it changed

A free peasantry in debt. Peasants became free while owing redemption payments, annual installments repaying the state for land. Arrears accumulated in many provinces until the government canceled the payments during the 1905 revolution. Communes made members responsible for one another’s taxes and could restrict departures, slowing movement to towns. Land hunger—the conviction that a household had too little land to live on—became a deep grievance and a question every party had to answer in 1917.

A public with institutions and no voice. Zemstvos, courts, universities and a freer press helped form an educated public that expected to be consulted. Teachers, doctors, lawyers and statisticians were called the third element, alongside elected members and government officials. They could work in local institutions, but had no national assembly through which to press national demands. That frustration helped turn them toward opposition.

Revolution as a profession. Students who went to villages in 1874 to rouse peasants found little welcome; more than a thousand were arrested. Some who remained free concluded that killing officials to frighten the government into concessions—terror—was the way to break autocracy. In 1879 they founded the secret People’s Will and repeatedly attempted to kill Alexander. They succeeded in 1881, killing the Tsar who had freed the serfs.

An empire of many peoples. Expansion brought the Amur and Ussuri lands, roughly a million square kilometers, and Central Asian cities and oases with millions of Muslim subjects. Military governors ruled some territories; protectorates such as Bukhara and Khiva kept their own rulers but obeyed Russia. Alaska went the other way: too distant to defend after Crimea, it was sold to the United States for $7.2 million in 1867. The Polish rising and Circassian expulsion revealed the reforming state’s treatment of resistance. Borderlands held by force and never consulted were among the first to rebel or break away as the empire collapsed in 1917.