On December 26, 1825, officers leading 3,000 men marched on St. The reform-minded officer class were displeased with this shift as Nicholas was known as a strict military disciplinarian. The eldest of his three younger brothers, Constantine, was married to a Polish commoner and secretly renounced the throne in favor of the next brother, and father to Alexander, Nicholas. The late Czar did not have any surviving legitimate children. When Alexander I died suddenly in 1825, it was not immediately clear who would succeed to the throne.

And the limits of liberty are the principles of order.” Reform would have to wait until a subsequent reign. Alarmed by news of revolutionary disorder in Naples and Piedmont, Alexander I declared, “Liberty should be confined within just limits. Priorities, however, began to change around the same time his nephew was born. Among Russia’s elites, there were hopes that the victorious Czar would shepherd a transition from feudal autocracy to constitutional monarchy. His officer class had been exposed to Western ideas, occupying Paris after the defeat of Napoleon at the Battle of Paris in 1814. The reigning Czar, Alexander I, uncle to the infant, had received an Enlightenment education from his grandmother, Catherine the Great.

At the time of Alexander’s birth, Russia was at a crossroads. The future Czar Alexander II was born in Moscow’s Kremlin on April 17, 1818, during Easter Week, a good omen to the Russian Orthodox.

The Circassians and the other inhabitants of the Caucasus region did not fit into the Czar’s reform program, because he viewed them as an inherent risk to the security of Russia’s southern frontier and the nation is still coming to terms with the consequences of the czar’s expulsion of the Circassian people today. History has largely been kind to Alexander II, the Russian czar who freed the serfs in 1861, just two years before Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 (the two world leaders even corresponded about their plans.)Modern historians refer to him as the “Czar-Liberator” and compare him to Mikhail Gorbachev for his willingness to engage with the West and reform Russia.īut on the occasion of the 2014 Winter Olympics being held in Sochi and the surrounding areas, it’s helpful to look back and remember that 600,000 locals died from starvation, exposure, drowning and massacres in a concerted campaign by the Russian Empire to expel the Circassian people, as they were called, from the region.

Court of the red czar