How successful were the reforms carried out by Alexander II in the second half of the 19th Century?

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Alicia Fleming 12B        History        Mr Chapman

        Russian

How successful were the reforms carried out by Alexander II in the second half of the 19th Century?

Alexander II carried out many measures in order to achieve a more powerful Russia and to also prevent the threat of a revolution. He formulated many reforms to accomplish this. For example, the fundamental reform: the emancipation of the Serfs, the law, the establishment of local governments, improvements in education and censorship and the military reform. Furthermore, in my opinion, the most important reform: the economic policy. Personally, each of these reforms was successful to an extent. However, each one of the reforms had disadvantages.

Alexander II wanted to abolish Serfdom in order to modernise agriculture and to give the peasants an incentive to produce more. Through this method he hoped not just to gain the support of the majority of the population, but an increased food supply was needed in order for Russia to expand her industrial base and therefore overall become a more economically powerful country. This reform was successful to an extent, the Act created a class of landless peasants who moved to urban areas in search of employment in factories or mines. It began a social and economic revolution that was boost to Russia’s economic strength. To authenticate my statement above, the historian David Thomson quoted:  “The Act opened the door to a massive material westernisation of Russian life”. However, the disadvantages out-weighed the advantages of this reform. For example, the results were not those Alexander II had expected. The peasants received half the land than they had worked before and they could not afford to support themselves as a consequence. Furthermore, in order to prevent them from them from starving they had to rent more land from the owner and offer themselves as hire labour. This in my opinion strengthened the nobles and therefore the purpose of the Act did not prevail. Moreover, the disillusionment caused by the reform led to peasant revolts in Penza and Kazan, which were suppressed by the army’s at the cost of 500 lives, which therefore indicates that Alexander II’s expectations of preventing a revolution were minimal.

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In late 1861, Alexandre II established a committee of jurists to investigate the general principles of legal reforms. This reform was only successful to a small extent. The committee identified 25 defects in the existing system and proposed a number of radical solutions. This could be seen as an advantage as through the identification of the problems, solutions can be devised to make the new system fairer and therefore the Tsar would gain more support from the majority of the population and furthermore prevent a revolution. However, the new system suffered from numerous imperfections. For example, there was a ...

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