Different interpretations of Tsar Alexander II's reforms

'Tsar Liberator'

Emancipation of the Serfs and its positive consequences

Positive effects of military, legal, cultural, educational, economic and industrial, local government and church reform

Treatment of minorities

Boris Chicherin: "Alexander set out to remodel completely the enormous state which had been entrusted to his care"

Inefficient reformer

Negative effects of emancipation

Negative effects military, legal, economic and industrial, local government and church reform

Inconsistent leader

Hugh Seton-Watson judged the Tsar a failure for seeking an unrealistic compromise between autocracy an liberal modernisation.

Conservative reaction (1866); Reversed a lot of his earlier reforms

Crankshaw: "During all his 25 years as tsar, he was to display an alternation between enthusiasm and apathy, stubbornness and defeatism, vision and myopia".

David Saunders: "The laws which freed the serfs emerged from a process that the tsa barely understood and over which he had only partial control".

Autocrat

Refusal to create any form of National Representation

No change to the fundamental basis of tsardom and its powers

Any reform was motivated by preserving the autocracy

Practical reasons for emancipation

Alfred Rieber suggests that the emancipation and reforms were motivated solely by military considerations. Rieber believes that the reforms were linked to the desie to strengthen and protect the autocratic state by developing a stong and effieicnet army.