28 - The reign of Alexander II: a watershed?

Summary

The abolition of serfdom in 1861, under Alexander II, and the reforms which followed (local government reforms, the judicial reform, the abolition of corporal punishment, the reform of the military, public education, censorship and others), were a ‘watershed’, ‘a turning point’ in the history of Russia. This is the verdict of the reformers themselves and their opponents, people who lived at the time in Russia as well as beyond its borders, and many researchers. This theme remains crucial for historians. But in particular periods such as during the 1905 Revolution or Gorbachev’s perestroika, interest in the history of Alexander II’s reforms has acquired a particular topicality and political colouring. At such times instead of the already established term ‘the Great Reforms’, new terminology emerges particularly in the academic literature for wider audiences such as ‘revolution from above’, ‘a revolutionary break with the past’ and ‘coup d’etat’.

However, mainstream scholarship still accepts the more subtle term ‘the Great Reforms’. If the question of the suitability of the term for designating this epoch is unlikely to evoke serious doubts and disagreements, that is not true of the issues raised in the title of this chapter as well as others (including the personal role of Alexander II in the realisation of the reforms, the interconnection among them, their subsequent fate), on which there is no consensus in the academic literature. It is sufficient to refer to contemporary Western and Russian research whose authors consider the boundary between ‘the pre-reforms’ of Nicholas I, ‘the Great Reforms’ of Alexander II and the ‘counter-reforms’ of Alexander III relative and even artificial.