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Period: to
Russia
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Alexander I
He was born in Saint Petersburg to Grand Duke Paul Petrovich, later Emperor Paul I, and Maria Feodorovna, daughter of the Duke of Württemberg. Alexander was the eldest of four brothers. He succeeded to the throne after his father was murdered, and ruled Russia during the chaotic period of the Napoleonic Wars. -
Alexander II
Alexander II succeeded to the throne upon the death of his father in 1855. The first year of his reign was devoted to the prosecution of the Crimean War and, after the fall of Sevastopol, to negotiations for peace, led by his trusted counsellor Prince Gorchakov. The country had been exhausted and humiliated by the war. Bribe-taking, theft and corruption were everywhere. -
Decembrist Revolt
Russian army officers led about 3,000 soldiers in a protest against Nicholas I's assumption of the throne after his elder brother Constantine removed himself from the line of succession. Because these events occurred in December, the rebels were called the Decembrists. This uprising, which was suppressed by Nicholas I, took place in the Senate Square in Saint Petersburg. In 1925, to mark the centenary of the event, it was renamed as Decembrist Square. -
Alexander III
Alexander became heir apparent with the sudden death of his elder brother in 1865.
It was then that he began to study the principles of law and administration under Konstantin Pobedonostsev, then a professor of civil law at Moscow State University and later (from 1880) chief procurator of the Holy Synod.
Pobedonostsev awakened in his pupil very little love of abstract studies or prolonged intellectual exertion, -
Emancipation of serfs
Emancipating the serfs in 1861 was an extraordinarily key event which catapulted Russia into the 20th century. At the time Alexander II obtained the position of Tsar, during the Crimean war conflict in 1855, fifty million of the sixty million legal occupants of Russia were serfs. Inhumane treatment, rape and torture topped the long list of how serfs were treated daily. -
Peter Stolypin
His tenure was marked by efforts to repress revolutionary groups, as well as for the institution of noteworthy agrarian reforms. Stolypin hoped, through his reforms, to stem peasant unrest by creating a class of market-oriented smallholding landowners. He is often cited as one of the last major statesmen of Imperial Russia with a clearly defined political programme and determination to undertake major reforms. -
Nicolas II
Nicholas II ruled from 1894 until his abdication on 15 March 1917. His reign saw Imperial Russia go from being one of the foremost great powers of the world to economic and military collapse. Critics nicknamed him Bloody Nicholas because of the Khodynka Tragedy, Bloody Sunday, the anti-Semitic pogroms, his execution of political opponents, and his pursuit of military campaigns of a hitherto unprecendented scale. -
Pogroms
The term was originally used to denote extensive violence against Jews in the Russian Empire and a series of anti-German pogroms in Russia in 1915. Pogroms often affect members of middlemen minorities. This can, in extreme cases, result in total or partial genocide, such as that of Armenians, or Jews. -
War With Japan
Nicolas II called on his people to fight for ''the faith'',czar and the father's land'' but the russians suffered defeat after another after another. News of the disasters unleashed discontent created by years of cruelty. Liberals called for a constitution and reforms to overhaul the goverment. A priest made a march thinking that the czar would help. -
Bloody Sunday
One hundred people where dead and hurt. As a result the people lost faith and trust in the Czar. -
Vladimir Ulyanov
Lenin was born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov on 22 April 1870 in the town of Simbirsk in the Russian Empire. Simbirsk, a rural town on the River Volga nearly 1,500 miles from the capital Saint Petersburg, would be renamed upon Ulyanov's death fifty-four years later as "Ulyanovsk" in his honour. That same year, Saint Petersburg itself would be renamed Leningrad after Ulyanov's better-known cadre name.
