Alexander I

Alexander I of Russia

Alexander I was the czar of Russia from 1801 to 1825, a rule during which he not only instituted widespread reforms but later reversed many of them. As a child, he was raised by his grandmother Catherine the Great in a liberal and intellectual environment.

She died when he was a teenager in 1796, and his father died five years later, most likely with Alexander’s complicity as part of a conspiracy to put him on the throne.

Alexander was deeply committed to reform and sought to bring Russia up to speed with the rest of Enlightenment-era Europe. Attempts at drawing up a constitution that could find support failed, and his early legal code was never adopted.


In many cases, Alexander called for reform and micromanaged its adoption, making it impossible for the reform to take place. Other reforms were simply poorly conceived, lacked a practical transition from the status quo, or were unimplementable in light of the existing bureaucracy.

His European contemporaries saw him as enigmatic and inconsistent. When Russia acquired Poland, Alexander approved their constitution, which provided many of the same things he wanted for his own country.

Reform efforts dwindled in 1810 because of the Napoleonic wars that consumed Europe. Alexander was intimidated by Napoleon I, and perhaps by the scale of the wars themselves.

He believed that at stake in the wars in Europe were the rights of humanity and the fate of nations and that only a confederation of European states devoted to the preservation of peace could prevent the dangers of dictators and world conquerors. Napoleon claimed Russia had nothing to fear from France and that the distance between the two nations made them allies.

Any ambitions this may have stirred in Alexander were crushed by the summer of 1812, when Napoleon invaded Russia. The results startled everyone; in preparation for the invasion of Moscow, Alexander ordered the city evacuated and burned.

Anything that could help the invading French army was destroyed. More than three-quarters of the city was lost. Napoleon began his long retreat, and by the end of the campaign, the French forces of nearly 700,000 had been reduced to less than 25,000.

It was a turning point for both men: Napoleon would ultimately lose, and Alexander would ultimately abandon his quests for reform. He initiated few new programs, failed to see older programs through, and by the end of his reign had reversed many of his early reforms rather than repair them.

Alexander died of sudden illness in 1825, on a voyage in the south. The circumstances of his death inspired rumors claiming that he had been poisoned or he hadn’t died at all and had buried a soldier in his place.

Catherine the Great

Catherine the Great

When Czarina Elizabeth died in December 1761, her nephew Peter ascended the throne. He had already alienated his wife, Catherine (Sophia Augusta, the princess of Anhalt-Zerbst in the Holy Roman Empire), by his evident lack of affection for her.

Some historians believe that their son Paul was actually fathered by her lover Sergei Saltykov, a rumor believed at the time by Czarina Elizabeth prior to her death.

Catherine lived in fear that without the czarina’s protection, Peter might do away with her. He already had had at least one mistress, Elizabeth Vorontzov. Catherine decided to strike first, for she knew that if Peter killed her, he might have Paul killed too.


Besides his wife, Peter III had also alienated the most important political force in the capital of St. Petersburg, the regiments of the Russian Imperial Guard. Although Catherine was German by birth, she had successfully won over the Guards during the years since her first appearance at court.

To them, she was a Russian czarina, and Peter III a German usurper. Assured of the Guards’ support by her current lover, Gregori Orlov, himself an officer in the Ismailovski Regiment, his brother Alexei Orlov, and other officers, Catherine seized power from Peter III in a coup on June 28, 1762.

In her manifesto Catherine declared that Peter III had intended to “destroy us completely and to deprive us of life.” Peter was forced to abdicate and on July 6 was killed, apparently in a quarrel with one of those guarding him.

Whether Catherine was a party to his death, historians will never really know. But with Peter removed from the scene, she most likely slept more soundly than she had in years. On September 22, 1762, Catherine was crowned empress and autocrat of all the Russias.

Although the Imperial Guards regiments had supported her, some of them still felt a sovereign from the Romanov dynasty should rule them, not a Germanborn princess.

To tighten her control of the Guards, and the rest of society, Catherine reinstituted the secret police that Peter had abolished in one of his enlightened reforms. Catherine’s secret branch became the model for the Okhrana, the special police who would serve the czars until the very end.

Foreign affairs first claimed her attention as Russia struggled with the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War. In 1763 Augustus III of Poland died, and the Poles began the process of electing a new king in their Sejm, or parliament.

As the elector of Saxony in the Holy Roman Empire, Augustus’s son Frederick Christian automatically became the elector, but there was dissension over who would succeed him as king of Poland.

Catherine favored Stanislas Poniatowski to succeed Augustus as king, partly became Stanislas had once been her lover, and she wanted a friendly Poland. With the weight of the huge Russian army tilting the scales now in his favor, Stanislas was duly elected the next king by the Polish Sejm as Stanislas II Augustus in 1764.

Ironically, Poland would become the means of finally making peace among the belligerent nations of the Seven Years’ War. Prussia, supported by England, had fought against the Austrian Empire, France, and Russia during the conflict.

In an attempt to make peace among them, the three eastern powers, Prussia, Austria, and Russia, decided to partition Poland. The first partition took place in 1772, to be followed by subsequent partitions in 1793 and 1795.

By the Third Partition of Poland in 1795, Poland no longer existed as a state, and Stanislas II, without a kingdom to rule, abdicated his no-longer-existing throne. It would not be until the aftermath of World War I that Poland would rise again as an independent nation.

With Russia’s western front secured, Catherine now moved against Russia’s traditional enemies to the south and east, the Ottoman Empire and its vassals, the khans of the Crimea, the Gerei dynasty. In 1768 Catherine began war against the Ottoman Empire, now in its decline under the sultan Mustafa III.

On July 10, 1774, the Russians under Field Marshal Peter Rumiantsev and the Turks signed a peace at the village of Kuchuk-Kainardji in the Balkans. Russia gained full access to the Sea of Azov and the Caspian Sea and the independence of the Crimean khanate from Ottoman rule.

In return, Russia returned much of the lands in the Balkans and along the Danube that it had conquered from the Turks. But it was evident that the Russians reserved the right to intervene at any time in the region.

This became the bedrock of the Pan-Slav movement of the 19th century, when the Russians felt themselves to be the particular protectors of the Slavs who still lived under Turkish rule in the Balkans.

In 1778 the Turks launched a fleet on the Black Sea to send an expeditionary force to help the foundering Crimean khanate, but the Turkish fleet sailed aimlessly in the Black Sea until foul weather forced it to seek refuge at the Ottoman naval base at Sinope.

In 1783 Catherine II’s new favorite, Prince Grigori Potemkin, threatened the khanate with a Russian invasion. Bahadur II Gerei, the last of his dynasty, abdicated to be pensioned off by Catherine II, now becoming known as Catherine the Great.

The great campaigns, however, had thrust an intolerable burden onto the peasants, the vast majority of the Russian population. The policy of serfdom, reducing peasants to virtual slaves on the great landownings of the nobility, had by now reached most of Russia. The need for weapons for the wars had put inhuman demands on the workers in the Ural mines, and often soldiers had to be sent in to quell labor disputes.

In 1773 a Yaik Cossack by the name of Emilian Pugachev proclaimed that he was Peter III, who had come back to save the Russians from the tyranny of “the German woman.”

With her forces largely committed to the war with the Turks, Catherine’s military resources were limited. Pugachev seized the great city of Kazan, and Nizhni-Novgorod, the third city of her empire, was destroyed when the serfs there rose in support of Czar Peter.

When she saw that Pugachev might reach Moscow, and perhaps St. Petersburg, Catherine brought her troops home. With the return of thousands of her veteran troops, the tide turned rapidly against Pugachev. On January 10, 1775, he was beheaded in Moscow.

The experience with the Pugachev rebellion did not deter Catherine from her desire to modernize Russia. A self-educated woman, she corresponded regularly with the leaders of the Enlightenment, like Voltaire and Denis Diderot in France.

Among Catherine’s initiatives to modernize Russia were the abolition of torture (even with Pugachev) and the encouragement of industrial and agricultural growth. She also extended equal rights to the empire’s Muslim population, which had grown greatly with the annexation of the Crimea after 1783.

They were given the right to build mosques, although, as with all religions, Islam was kept under scrutiny by the state, and the Russian Orthodox Church remained paramount in the empire.

By the late 1770s Catherine had become to see herself as a peacemaker in Europe. On December 30, 1777, Maximilian Joseph, the elector of Bavaria, died. Frederick II of Prussia was pitted against the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, who ruled jointly with her son, Emperor Joseph ii. Although Frederick began the War of the Bavarian Succession in April 1778, neither side was anxious for another bloody war like the Seven Years’ War of 1756 to 1763.

Although Catherine favored Frederick, both sides accepted her mediation, and the war came to an end at the Peace of Teschen in April 1779. Both Austria and Prussia received Bavarian territory in compensation, but the new elector ruled a free Bavaria as Charles Theodore.

By this time, Catherine had to face a threat from an unexpected quarter. For nearly 60 years, the thoughts of the French Enlightenment, enlivened by her friends Voltaire and Diderot, had undermined popular support for the Bourbon dynasty in France. In July 1789 revolution broke out in France, sending shock waves throughout the monarchies of Europe.

Even worse was to come when, during the Turkish War, King Louis XVI of France was beheaded in Paris in January 1793 by the revolutionary Committee of Public Safety. The shock to Catherine was severe—the ideas of the very men she had supported and felt were her allies had led to the death of a king.

In 1793, with the countries that had invaded France thrown back, the armies of revolutionary France began to spread the ideas of liberty, equality, and fraternity throughout Europe against the forces of the First Coaliton, of which Russia was a member.

Nobody will ever be fully able to gauge the result of the revolutionary upheaval upon Catherine the Great, but her beliefs in progress and enlightened rule were totally shaken by the upheavals upsetting the Old Order in Europe.

On November 6, 1796, following a massive stroke, Catherine died, having ruled Russia for 34 years. Whatever the results of the French Revolution, neither Europe nor Russia would ever be the same again after the reign of Czarina Ekaterina, Empress Catherine the Great.

Lobanov-Yamagata Agreement (1896)

The Lobanov-Yamagata Agreement was a pact between Russia and Japan concerning their respective interests in Korea, signed in 1896. During the early 1890s, Russian and Japanese involvement in Northeast Asia in general and in Korea in particular intensified. In 1891 Russia announced the laying of the Trans-Siberian Railway from St. Petersburg to the Pacific coast, a distance of about 5,700 miles.

Although this project had political and economic ends it was also defined as a cultural mission to bring civilization and Christianity to the peoples of Asia. Three years later in 1894 the Japanese and Chinese struggle for hegemony over the weak kingdom of Korea led to the outbreak of the first Sino-Japanese War.

After the Chinese defeat, Russia became Japan’s main rival because of its pressure, together with Germany and France, to force Japan to relinquish its gains in south Manchuria (the “Three Power Intervention”), but also by reason of its expansionist ambitions in East Asia.


Japan was concerned about the repercussions of the Trans-Siberian Railway, but the main focus of Russo-Japanese rivalry was on Korea, whose king viewed the Russians as his saviors from Japan.

Russia filled the political vacuum left by the defeated China in Korea and challenged Japanese ambitions to control the kingdom. Together with the United States, Russia induced the other powers to demand Korean concessions in the peninsula, such as a franchise for mining and for railway tracks.

Japan’s position began to deteriorate in the summer of 1895 as its agents attempted to turn the country into a Japanese protectorate. In October 1895 members of the Japanese legation in Seoul entered the palace and stabbed Queen Min, the most vehement opponent of Japanese presence in Korea, to death.

In February 1896 Japanese troops landed near Seoul to assist in a revolt but King Kojong found sanctuary in the Russian legation in Seoul. Many Koreans interpreted the internal exile of their monarch as an uprising against the Japanese presence and began to act accordingly. Japanese advisors were expelled, collaborators were executed, and the new cabinet was constituted of persons deemed pro-Russian.

In this manner, a year after the First Sino-Japan War had ended, Russian involvement in Korea was greater than before, while Japan suffered setbacks. Prominent figures in Tokyo such as army minister Yamagata Aritomo argued that Japan had to come to terms with Russian hegemony in Korea for the time being and thus avoid having to confront all the Western nations on this issue.

Consequently, in May 1896, the representatives of Russia and Japan signed a memorandum in which the latter recognized the new Korean cabinet. A month later Yamagata visited Russia for the coronation of Czar Nicholas II, and on June 9, 1896, ratified the memorandum together with Russian foreign minister Aleksei Lobanov-Rostovskii.

The resulting Lobanov-Yamagata Agreement contained slight amendments to the original memorandum. Facing unfavorable conditions in Korea, Japan made considerable concessions in this agreement, which had two secret provisions. First, the two countries agreed to send additional troops to Korea in the event of major disturbances.

Second, they might station the same number of troops in Korea until the emergence of a trained Korean force. When Yamagata offered Lobanov the draft of the agreement he was unaware that a few days earlier the Russians had signed with China’s Li-Lobanov Agreement.

The Russians had invited to the czar’s coronation ceremony the Chinese statesman Li Hongzhang, who was bribed to sign the Li-Lobanov Agreement. The core of the agreement, whose content was revealed only in 1922, was mutual aid in the event of Japanese aggression.

One clause in the agreement was implemented at once—Li’s consent to grant Russia the concession to build a significant shortcut for the Trans-Siberian Railway across Manchuria, which led immediately to a substantial increase in Russian involvement in the region. Because of the changing circumstances, the Yamagata-Lobanov Agreement was replaced two years later by the Nishi-Rosen Agreement.

The new accord specified that both sides would refrain from political intervention in Korea and would seek each other’s approval in providing military or financial advisors as requested by the Korean government.

Russia also explicitly acknowledged Japan’s special position in Korea, allowing it free commercial and industrial activity in the area in return for implicit Japanese acknowledgment of Russian influence in Manchuria.

These two Russo-Japanese agreements did not prevent the struggle between the two nations over Korea. Japan increasingly regarded Russian involvement in Korea as a threat to its vital interests, especially as Russian involvement in neighboring Manchuria intensified and the Trans-Siberian Railway project was about to be completed.

After 1901 Japan insisted on the formula of Manchuria-Korea exchange, namely that Manchuria would go to Russia and Korea to Japan. Failing to persuade Russia to relinquish Korea, Japan began to attack Russian bases in Korea and Manchuria on February 8, 1904, opening a 19-month campaign that would become known as the Russo-Japanese War.

Romanov Dynasty

Romanov Dynasty in 1892

Probably the most famous Romanovs besides Peter and Catherine the Great were Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra, and their five children, whom the Bolsheviks murdered in 1917. The legend of the survival of Anastasia, the youngest daughter of Nicholas and Alexandra, lingered into the 21st century, strengthened by the fact that her remains and those of her brother Alexei were still missing from the mass grave that covered her sisters, parents, servants, and pet spaniel, Jimmy.

The Romanov dynasty began in turmoil, which matched its end. Evil days followed each other in dreary succession in the Grand Duchy of Moscow after the death of Ivan the Terrible in 1584. Many arguments raged over the succession and ushered in a Time of Troubles and ultimately the accession of the Romanovs, who would rule Russia from 1613 to 1917.

The House of Romanov ruled Muscovy and the Russian Empire for five generations from 1613 to 1762, then combined with the House of Oldenburg, known as Holstein-Gottorp-Romanov, to rule Russia from 1762 to 1917. The Romanovs descended from two dozen Russian noble (boyar) families, with Andrei Kobyla, attested as a boyar in the service of Semyon I of Moscow, as a common ancestor.


A giant increase in the family fortunes occurred when a Romanov daughter, Anastasia Zakharyina, married Ivan IV of Muscovy in February 1547. When her husband became czar, she became the very first czarina. Her untimely and mysterious death prompted her husband to start a reign of terror against the boyars, whom he suspected of poisoning her. He became known as Ivan the Terrible.

The fortunes of the Romanov family rose and fell during the years of the Godunov dynasty, a branch of the Romanov line, until finally the Godunov dynasty collapsed in 1606 and the Russian Assembly of the Land offered 17-year-old Mikhail Romanov the crown of Russia.

After receiving the offer, Mikhail burst into tears of fear and despair, but his mother finally persuaded him to accept the throne and blessed him with the holy image of Our Lady of Saint Fyodor. Never feeling secure on his throne, Mikhail asked the advice of the Assembly of the Land on important issues. This strategy proved successful, and the Russian population accepted the early Romanovs as relatives of Ivan the Terrible.

At first, the Romanovs did little to strengthen the Russian state. In the 1650s a reforming patriarch of the Orthodox Church nearly started a revolution when he ordered that the ritual and liturgy be revised to bring them closer to the original Greek text of the Bible.

Lesser Coat of Arms of Romanov dynasty

This order exasperated hundreds of uneducated people who believed the Slavonic texts were sacred. For many years after that, Old Believers (Russian Orthodox) resisted the government religious policy despite executions and exile.

Besides Old Believers, the Cossacks also revolted against the czar. Cossack comes from a Turkish word meaning “free men” and is used to designate a group of people who lived in wheat-growing communities around the Danube River. The Don Cossacks were the largest group and led colonizing expeditions to Siberia.

As the czars extended their rule over Russia in the 16th and 17th centuries, they tried to integrate the Cossacks into Russia. Cossack men became eligible for military service, and the czars used them in wars against the Tartars in Crimea and the Caucasus.

The Cossacks jealously guarded their freedom and often rebelled against the czars. Revolts occurred in 1648 and 1662, but the 1670 to 1671 revolt gained the most notoriety. A Don Cossack named Stenka Razin, who became a hero of the common people, led this revolt. Eventually he was executed, but the Cossack rebellions helped Russia by leading the expansion into Siberia.

Throughout most of the 17th century, Russia often could not defend its frontiers against invading Swedes, Poles, and Turks. It did not have access to either the Baltic or Black Seas, although English merchants had contacted Moscow in the 1550s through the White Sea, and German merchants were active in Moscow.

Russia absorbed some Western technology, especially military technology, but cultural changes in the rest of Europe left it relatively untouched. The Renaissance, reformation, and scientific revolution brought ferment to the West but scarcely touched the peoples east of Poland.

Peter the Great

Peter the Great

In 1689 Peter the Great, one of the most remarkable Romanov rulers, assumed the throne at the age of 17. For the next 36 years, until 1725, he transformed Russia from a feudal country into a power in Europe. He strengthened the Russian throne, expanded Russia’s borders, and Westernized Russia.

He reformed the military, political, and social institutions of his country, borrowing ideas and techniques from France, England, the Dutch Republic, Brandenburg, and Sweden. His methods were often more casual, informal, brutal, and ruthless than those of his Western counterparts, but they worked in Russia. During his reign Russia became an empire, with Peter as its first emperor.

The Russian Church became strictly subordinated to the state under a civilian official. Peter compelled the ancient hereditary nobility to serve the state, creating a “service nobility,” and he tightened the bondage of the serfs so that more than a century would pass before they would gain their freedom.

In 1707 Peter moved his government to a new city that he had built on conquered territory at the eastern end of the Gulf of Finland. He named his new city in honor of his patron saint, Saint Peter, and Saint Petersburg symbolized his work in Russia. Unlike Moscow, it did not have roots in Russia’s past, since it had been built by forced labor on Neva River marshlands.

Peter the Great’s influence proved paradoxical for Russia. On one hand he linked Russia with Europe and the rest of the world, and from his time forward Russia was crucial in the European balance of power.

On the other hand Peter’s Westernizing policy stimulated a strong nationalistic and orthodox reaction in people, leaving the Russian psyche teetering between deep suspicions of everything foreign and ardent admiration of Western technology and power. Peter’s methods are as important as his accomplishments because they created a tradition of dynamic autocracy. His reign exemplified what a ruthless and determined czar could accomplish.

Catherine the Great

Catherine the Great

Catherine the Great ruled Russia from 1762 to 1796 and came to the throne with specific goals in mind. She sought to minimize Russian connections to Europe, but she also wanted to continue Westernizing Russia in the manner of Peter the Great.

She wanted to bring the Enlightenment to Russia and read authors like Voltaire, Diderot, and Montesquieu, incorporating their theories into her ruling methods. She encouraged the publication of numerous books and periodicals and embraced the arts.

During her reign Catherine the Great worked to increase education in Russia by creating elementary and secondary schools and universities. In 1763 she established a medical commission to improve medical conditions in Russia and led the way by being the first person in Russia to be vaccinated. She helped Russian expansion through two Russo-Turkish wars, one from 1768 to 1774, and the other from 1787 to 1792.

She added Ukraine to Russia after a 1781 to 1786 war and gained portions of Poland through partition. She also gained the Crimea and most of the northern shore of the Black Sea for Russia. Catherine improved the lives of the nobility while decreasing the status and rights of the peasants and serfs.

The centuries after Catherine the Great saw several Romanov czars named Nicholas and Alexander ruling Russia. During the reign of Alexander I, Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812. The Russian winter and supply line problems forced Napoleon’s armies to depart along the same route they had used to enter Russia.

Nicholas I came to the throne in November 1825, with an agenda of Russian Orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationalism. He and others working with him published a Complete Collection of Laws of the Russian Empire, meant to make rulings more uniform throughout Russia.

One of the departments he created he put in charge of monitoring subversive groups. This was a precursor to the modern FSB (Federal Security Service). During the reigns of Nicholas I and Alexander II some of the most important Russian writers, artists, and composers enhanced the arts.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote Crime and Punishment and other works. Alexander Pushkin produced his great novels; Tolstoi wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina. The composer Tchaikovsky wrote his scores for ballets and the 1812 Overture.

The Crimean War, a military conflict between Russia and a coalition of Great Britain, France, the Kingdom of Sardinia, and the Ottoman Empire, fought from 1853 to 1856 at the end of the reign of Nicholas I, made it obvious that Russia needed reform.

Alexander II

The next czar, Alexander II, the son of Nicholas I, helped Russia reform. Alexander ruled from 1855 to 1881 and became known as the czar liberator because he freed the serfs. Alexander II realized that forcing labor from the serfs was not an economical way for Russia to operate, and many nobles were also beginning to think that serfdom should be ended.

Just before the American Civil War began, Alexander II freed the serfs with the Emancipation Act of February 18, 1861. The Emancipation Act freed 52 million serfs, or about 45 percent of Russia’s population, but it did not solve Russia’s problem of peasant unrest.

Only serfs who had been farmers were given land, excluding house serfs. Serfs had to continue working for estate owners for two years after being freed and had to pay over a 49-year period for the land that they had been given.

Alexander II also instituted other reforms. He changed the military and shortened the required time of service for peasants from 25 to six years. He created the legal profession, opening trials and instituting equal treatment under the law.

Beginning in 1864 he instructed the Ministry of Education to create a national system of primary schools. As people, especially university students, became better educated they became more critical of the government.

University students and the populace at large began to demand changes. On March 13, 1881, an agitator threw a hand-made bomb at Alexander’s carriage. He got out of the carriage to see what had happened, and a second bomb exploded. The czar and his assassin, Ignacy Hryniewiecki, were killed.

Alexander III succeeded his father, and, fearful of his father’s murderers, he tightened the autocratic rule in Russia, reversing many of the reforms that the more liberal Alexander II had pushed through. He renewed the policy of Russian Orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationalism. Marxism began to grow during his reign, with Bolshevik and Menshevik groups forming, and leaders like Lenin, Plekhanov, and Pavel Martov emerging as revolutionaries.

Alexander’s son Nicholas II began ruling Russia in 1894, after Alexander unexpectedly died of kidney disease at age 49. Industrialism had finally reached Russia, and a working middle class was emerging. Nicholas II did not want to allow workers to unite and form unions, as they were doing all over the world.

After the czar created state-approved unions, he refused to meet a striking group from one of these and ordered his soldiers to fire upon it. The resulting massacre of hundreds of people, which came to be known as Bloody Sunday, set off a revolt in 1905 that motivated Nicholas II to endorse the October Manifest, which gave people civil liberties and created the Duma.

Russia went to war in 1914 to defend the Serbs when Austria declared war on Serbia, but the Russian armies had inadequate weapons and suffered from poor leadership. Nicholas II himself went to the lines to lead his armies, but the problems increased and many soldiers deserted.

These soldiers were instrumental in the February Revolution in 1917, which ended the Romanov dynasty. Nicholas II and his family were put under house arrest and taken to Yekaterinburg. Bolsheviks killed the last Romanov czar, Nicholas II, and his family in the cellar of Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg, Russia, on July 17, 1918.

In a historical irony, the Ipatiev House had the same name as the Ipatiev Monastery in Kostroma where the Russian Assembly of the Land had offered Mikhail Romanov the Russian crown in 1613.

In June 1991 the bodies of Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra, and three of their five children were exhumed from their 70-year-old graves, and the exhumers discovered that two of the family were missing. The other two graves were found in 2007.

After the bodies were exhumed, they languished for years in laboratories while Russians fought over whether they should be buried in Yekaterinburg or Saint Petersburg. Finally, a Russian commission chose Saint Petersburg, and the last Romanovs were buried with their ancestors.

The Romanov family still exists in the 21st century, with Grand Duchess Maria Vladimirovna of Russia having the strongest claim to the Russian throne. Despite the dissolution of the Soviet Union and zealous campaigns by her supporters to recognize her as the constitutional monarch, it is not likely that she will gain the throne because there is little popular support for the resurrection of a Russian monarchy.

Russo-Turkish War and Near Eastern Crisis

Russo-Turkish War

The Balkans had been effectively under the rule of the Ottoman Turks since 1389, when the medieval Serbian kingdom was crushed at the Battle of Kosovo. However, beginning in the 17th century with the Turkish defeat at Vienna in 1683, the Turks were in almost a constant retreat. Wars with Russia that had ended in 1774 with the Treaty of Kuchuk-Kainardji and in 1792 at Jassy had established Russia as a diplomatic presence in the Balkans and determined to make its presence felt.

Moreover, German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck had inaugurated the League of Three Emperors with Russia and Austria in 1872–73, as a way of making palatable the sudden rise to prominence in Central Europe of a united Germany after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71.

The League of Three Emperors was a de facto diplomatic understanding, or demarche, that the future of the Balkans could be settled by Austria and Russia. Bismarck felt that Germany had no real interests in the Balkans, which, in his famous phrase, were “not worth the bones of a Pomeranian [part of Germany] grenadier.”


It turned out that the League of Three Emperors could not have come at a better time for Czar Alexander II of Russia. Freed from a concern over Austria and Germany as a source of danger, Alexander was able to modernize both his army and navy.

Coincidentally, Alexander’s modernization of the Russian juggernaut came at the perfect time. In its years of decline since 1683, Turkish rule had veered from incompetent to brutal and back again, with a few efforts at enlightened reform that never lasted.

In June 1875 the Slavic Christians in Bosnia and Herzegovina revolted against Turkey, and the Ottoman Turks retaliated in force. In spite of these reprisals, the rebellion against Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II spread in April 1876 to Bulgaria. Soon the entire Balkans had risen up against Abdul Hamid II, whom many of Ottoman subjects called Abdul the Damned.

In 1876 Prince Milosh Obrenovich, although a vassal of Turkey, also declared war on the Ottomans. Like Alexander II of Russia, he had recently modernized his armed forces. With the Serbs, the Montenegrians rose up against the Turks, turning the original Bosnia-Herzegovina revolt into an all out Balkan rebellion against Abdul Hamid II.

At the same time, the doctrine of Pan-Slavism animated the Russian people to come to the aid of the South Slavs in the Balkans. Pan-Slavism had its origin in the outburst of nationalism against Napoleon I of France and held that mystical, ancient bonds united all Slavs.

Because Russia was the most powerful Slavic state, it meant that it had an obligation to help the “little Slavic brothers” in the Balkans. Since this philosophy also provided a rationale for Russian expansion into the Balkans, it received the encouragement of the czarist government. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, author of Crime and Punishment, was also a great propagandist for PanSlavism. On April 12, 1877, Alexander II declared war on the Ottoman Empire.

In one of the great defensive battles of the 19th century, the Turkish general Osman Pasha managed to hold the Russians and their new Romanian allies for five months at Plevna (Pleven), but eventually the superior Russian force compelled him to surrender. As a mark of his heroism, he was treated with great courtesy by the Russian commanders.

Once the siege of Plevna was won, the Russians and their allies kept up the impetus of their drive to the south. It appeared that they were determined to go all the way to Constantinople, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, and end the Ottoman power once and for all.

However, although the British public had been aroused by the Turkish atrocities in the Balkans, the British prime minister did not want to see the Russian Bear swimming in the Dardanelles, the gateway to the Mediterranean, which had been a British lake since the victory of Lord Horatio Nelson at Trafalgar in 1805. For the same reason, the British had intervened in the Crimean War from 1854–56 on the side of the Ottoman Empire, to keep the Russians from conquering the empire and gaining access to the Mediterranean.

In February 1878 the British Mediterranean fleet was put on a war footing and sailed to a position off Constantinople, a potent reminder that the Russians had advanced as far as the British were going to allow them to. Queen victoria herself announced that “she would rather abdicate than allow the Russians to enter Istanbul [Constantinople].”

Alexander II was conscious that if a peace were not made with the Turks, the British, and also Austria, might intervene on the side of his enemy. Therefore, in March 1878, Turkey and Russia concluded the Treaty of San Stefano. The Russians sought to take full advantage of the Turks in their defeated state.

The treaty immediately aroused the envy and concern of Austria, which had its own plans for expansion into the Balkans, ultimately to the disadvantage of the Serbians. Bismarck began to realize that his League of Three Emperors was in a deep crisis as a result of the San Stefano treaty. Consequently, he invited the great powers of Europe to the Congress of Berlin from June to July in 1878.

Great Britain was reassured by the fact that the territorial integrity of the Ottomans in Europe was maintained, and the great harbor at Constantinople would not become a Russian naval base. Austria was allowed to occupy Bosnia and Herzegovina, which it would later annex to its empire in 1908, causing great hatred among the Serbs, who also desired the territory.

Russia lost most of its conquests won in the war, although the Congress of Berlin did regain for Russia much of the territory given up at the Peace of Paris, which had brought the Crimean War to an end in 1856. However, because much of Bulgaria had had to be relinquished to the Ottomans, and Great Britain and Austria had coerced Russian into doing so, the Pan-Slavs considered the Treaty of Berlin as having robbed Russia of what it justly gained by right of conquest in the war.

The Treaty of Berlin, although it attempted to avert a European war, only tragically succeeded in sewing the seeds for World War I 26 years later. In June 1914, precisely 26 years after the opening of the Congress of Berlin, the Serb terrorist Gavrilo Princip would kill the heir to the Austrian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, in the streets of Sarajevo in Bosnia.

Treaty of St. Petersburg (1881)

The rapidly expanding Russian Empire in Central Asia had reached the northwestern borders of the Qing (Ch’ing) Empire of China by the mid-19th century. Xinjiang (Sinkiang), as northwestern China is called, was mainly inhabited by Turkic speaking Muslims, who chafed under Manchu banner troops stationed in the region. A Muslim revolt broke out in Xinjiang in 1864, led by an adventurer from Khokand named Yakub Beg, who proclaimed himself ruler of Kashgaria and part of northern Xinjiang.

This revolt gave Russia the opportunity to intervene. Fearful of Russian ambitions and anxious to protect its interests in India, Great Britain also became involved. This struggle for mastery of Central Asia and northwestern China was called the “Great Game.” Both powers saw Yakub Beg as a useful tool.

First the governor-general of Russian Turkestan, General K. P. von Kaufman, sent troops that occupied the Ili Valley, Ili city, and the main Chinese fort in Xinjiang and signed a treaty with Yakub Beg that granted Russia many privileges in the region. Not to be outdone, Britain also recognized Yakub Beg’s power in Xinjiang and gave him assistance.

The Chinese government could do nothing in Xinjiang until it had suppressed the other rebellions in the country. In 1875 it appointed Zho Zongtang (Tso Tsung-t’ang), the great general-statesman who had played a major role in putting down the other revolts, commander of a force against the Xinjiang rebels. By 1877 Yakub Beg had been soundly defeated and driven to suicide; the rebellion soon collapsed.

Ili, however, remained under Russian occupation. The Qing court appointed a Manchu nobleman Chonghou (Chung-hou) special ambassador to Russia to negotiate its restoration to China. Inexperienced and unprepared, Chonghou signed the Treaty of Livadia without authorization that ceded 70 percent of the Ili region, including strategic mountain passes, to Russia, agreed to pay Russia a huge indemnity, and other concessions.

The Qing government refused to accept this disastrous treaty and sentenced Chonghou to death (due to strong protests by Western government the sentence was left pending the outcome of the renewed negotiations). China then appointed Zeng Jize (Tseng Chi-tse, known as Marquis Zeng in the West), son of the great statesman Zeng Guofan (Tseng Kuofan) and then minister to Britain and France, special ambassador to Russia to renegotiate the treaty.

An able and well-prepared diplomat, Zeng secured the secret assistance of Great Britain before embarking on the difficult negotiations with the Russians, which culminated in the Treaty of St. Petersburg in 1881. By its terms, almost all the Ili Valley, including the strategic passes, were returned to China, and the number of Russian consulates in the region was reduced, but China did pay an indemnity to Russia.

The Treaty of St. Petersburg reversed the disastrous Treaty of Livadia. The reconquest of Xinjiang and the treaty of St. Petersburg were rare instances of Chinese victory during the late Qing dynasty and were principally due to two men, Zho Zongtang and Zeng Jize. Xinjiang was made into a province in 1884.