Russia in the nineteenth century: Alexander I and Nicholas I

Alexander I of Russia,
by George Dawe
Public domain.

The extent of the country 

At the beginning of the nineteenth century Russia was geographically the world’s most extensive country and its empire was expanding: Finland in 1809, the Grand Duchy of Warsaw in 1815. In 1800 Georgia was annexed. In 1859 the rest of the Caucasus was conquered and the Chechen hero Imam Shamil captured. In 1860 the Amur and Maritime provinces were acquired from China, and Turkestan from Persia in 1875. Turkmenistan was annexed in 1881. The Pacific port of Vladivostok was founded in 1860. The only territory lost was Alaska, which was sold to the United States in 1867 for $8 million.

The economy 

This vast area was sparsely populated with only two major cities, St Petersburg and Moscow, but the population grew from 68 million in 1850 to 124 million in 1897 and nearly 170 million in 1914 (compare with just under 146 million in 2019). An estimated 45 per cent of the male population were serfs.

Agriculture remained primitive with the three-field system still the norm, though Russia was exporting grain to pay for the manufactures she needed. The Russian iron-smelting industry dated from the eighteenth century. The second major industry was cotton-spinning.

Autocracy and repression 

Russia was officially an autocracy headed by a tsar who ruled by divine right. There was no tradition of opposition or protest. 

Alexander I (1801-25)

Alexander came to the throne following his father's murder, and he could never rid himself of his guilt by association. His reign was beset by a contradiction he never resolved. He had imbibed his grandmother's Enlightenment principles, and carried on her educational reforms. He believed in liberty for all social classes, but he was never clear how this could work in a country with such a huge serf population. In order to carry out any reforms and over-ride vested interests, he needed to retain his autocratic powers. 

Alexander and Napoleon: His reign was dominated by the figure of Napoleon. The two men were similar in age and came to power at about the same time. Both combined the language of Enlightenment rationalism, while ruling autocratically. Alexander was to prove Napoleon’s nemesis. He saw the French emperor as both ‘the transcendent talent’ and ‘the infernal genius of his time’. 


From 1800, Napoleon’s domination of Germany came to be seen as a challenge to Russian interests. When Napoleon made overtures to the Ottomans, Alexander became convinced that he was a tyrant who needed to be defeated. In 1805 Russia, Austria and Britain signed the Third Coalition against France, and in September Alexander travelled to Berlin to seal an alliance with Prussia over the tomb of Frederick the Great.

However, on 2 December [NS] 1805 a combined Russian and Austrian force was defeated at Austerlitz. 

Battle of Austerlitz, 2nd December 1805 
by Joseph Swebach-Desfontaines
Public domain.

On 14 June 1807 the French again defeated Russia at Friedland in what was then East Prussia. Alexander now saw an alliance with France as inevitable. In July 1807 the two men met on a raft on the River Nieman and signed the Treaty of Tilsit. They cemented their friendship by a meeting at Erfurt in the following year.

The Treaty of Tilsit. The two emperors
met on a raft in the middle of the River Nieman
Public domain.

But already there were tensions, caused in part by the Continental System, Napoleon’s blockade of British trade. He came to believe that Russia, which had strong trading links with Britain, was infringing the sanctions. When Napoleon married Marie-Louise of Austria, in preference to Alexander’s sister, the Romanovs took this as an insult. By 1811 both sides were preparing for war.

On 24 June Napoleon’s Grande Armée of nearly 700,000 crossed the Niemen into Russian Poland. In August, the army occupied Smolensk, but found it in ruins. As the Russian army retreated, it destroyed towns and villages on the way. 

The speed of the French advance caused Alexander to appoint Prince Kutuzov as his commander-in-chief. Kutuzov established the defence of Moscow in the village of Borodino, where the two armies confronted each other on 26 August (7 September NS). It was a narrow French victory, though the French lost 35,000 men and the Russians 44,000. Again the Russian army withdrew and the French advanced towards Moscow. A week later the French entered the city, only to find it abandoned and burned. Napoleon stayed there a month and then began his retreat. On the return, the Grande Armée was harassed by Kutuzov. On 5 December Napoleon abandoned the army and hurried back to France to forestall a coup.

Alexander then made a momentous decision. He told his soldiers, ‘You have saved not just Russia but all of Europe’. In January 1813 he and his army crossed the Niemen into Napoleon’s empire. He formed an alliance with Prussia and with the help of the British Foreign Secretary, Castlereagh, brought Austria into his anti-French alliance.  In October 1813 the combined armies of Austria, Russia and Prussia defeated the French at Leipzig. On 31 March 1814 he led his army into Paris, accompanied by King Frederick William III of Prussia. His army had travelled nearly 3,000 kilometres from Moscow, and his vast empire was now a key player in the diplomacy of the western powers. 

Alexander played a key role in the Congress of Vienna, held after Napoleon’s defeat. Two thirds of the former Grand Duchy of Warsaw became the ‘Congress Kingdom of Poland’, ruled by Russia. Russia’s conquest of Finland in 1809 was confirmed. In September 1815 (after Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo), Alexander, the Austrian Emperor and the King of Prussia signed a ‘Holy Alliance’ to deal with each other on the basis of Christianity. Castlereagh was privately sceptical, but Alexander had now come under the influence of the mystical baroness, Barbara Juliane von Krüdener, and, inspired by her, he was beginning to reject his grandmother's secular legacy.

Liberal disappointment: At the beginning of his reign, Alexander was a reforming tsar. He founded a state school system, expanded the universities, granted a constitution to Poland, abolished torture and lessened censorship. In 1814 idealistic Europeans had seen Alexander as the saviour of Europe. But in the last years of his reign he drifted towards reaction and revoked many of his previous reforms. Discharged soldiers were transported to military colonies, and the universities were purged.

He died suddenly on 19 November [OS, 1 December NS] 1825, leaving a disputed succession and a memory of disappointment.

The Decembrist revolt

In Alexander's last years, as disillusionment set in among the nobility, a group of young reformers set up secret societies and began plotting a military rising for 1826. Alexander's sudden death in 1825 plunged their plans into crisis. On 14 December they drew up regiments on Senate Square and declared for Alexander’s brother, Grand Duke Constantine, though he had previously been disinherited in favour of his younger, brother, Grand Duke Nicholas. However, Constantine's refusal to take the throne wrecked the plans of the Decembrists, who were dispersed with artillery.

Uprising on Senate Square, by Karl Kolman
Public domain.

After a series of trials, the conspirators were exiled to Siberia. Though they were later pardoned, many of them chose to remain there.

Nicholas I (1825-55)

Alexander was succeeded by his younger brother, Nicholas I, who having savagely put down the Decembrist revolt, and exiled its leaders to Siberia. He ruthlessly quashed the  Polish uprising of 1830. He increased the powers of the police and tightened censorship. Liberal dissidents risked execution. the great novelist, Fyodor Dostoevsky was subjected to a mock execution before being deported to Siberia. 

However, he was not a total reactionary. He wished to reform serfdom and he alleviated some of the conditions of the serfs by prohibiting their sale without land. His long-term plan was to abolish serfdom altogether.

His foreign policy brought him into conflict with Britain and France. He wished to take advantage of the declining Ottoman Empire and famously described Turkey as ‘the sick man’ of Europe, but this aroused fears in western Europe that he aimed at taking control of the key waterways, the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles. In 1853-4 a dispute ostensibly about who controlled the Holy Places in Palestine led to the disastrous Crimean War. Nicholas died in the middle of the war, and was succeeded by his son, Alexander II.