Did Catherine the Great free the Russian serfs?

Answer 1

No, she did not. Tsar Alexander II did in 1861.

**expanded**

Alexander II 1819-1882 known as 'Tsar Liberator" for his emancipation of Russia's serf (indentured servants) population in 1861, eighteen months before President Abraham Lincoln made his famous "emancipation proclamation" in the United States. Alexander II's reign was characterized by his egalitarian ideals and many of his reforms literally brought Russia into the industrialized Nineteenth Century and on par with Western Europe both culturally and economically.

Russia alternately thrived and chafed under Alexanders reforms. In true Brother's Grimm fashion these great socio-political reforms became weapons of regicide. Russia in the mid nineteenth century is said to have undergone a "second renaissance" of her own through the artistic and social climate of the age. Some of histories greatest works of literature such as the novels of Tolstoy; War and Peace, Anna Karenina, or the symphonies of Peter Tchaikovsky; Swan Lake. Playwright Anton Chekov, with his emphasis on his characters emotional complexity radically altering the stage forever. Serov known not only for his work as a portraitist but his impressionistic pieces as well, all came from Russia during the mid to early-late 1800's. Enlightened thought and theory along with a "less censorious" press flourished in Moscow and even Kiev, it was in Peter the Great's artificial capital of St. Petersburg where they came to life both magnificently and scurrilously.

Flourishing concurrently yet discreetly beneath the majority of enlightened society resided the Revolutionary. Not to be confused with those of the American or French revolutionaries of the eighteenth century, these for the most part were semi-educated, disenfranchised, children and grandchildren of the previously enslaved "serfs". Stuck somewhere between the aristocratic establishment and the impoverished and illiterate "serfdom class" that flooded the larger cities in the empire upon being freed much like the American south during the years of reconstruction which followed the American civil war. Author; Edvard Radzinsky, in his book, The Last Tsar compares the age to the last days of the fabled Atlantis in which the greatest achievements of a civilization turn upon herself while her inhabitants cast a blind eye and "danced upon the precipice." The gruesome beauty of a Russian Fairy Tale.

By the 1870's society had become mainly complacent and in the more radical salons of Petersburg: indolent and mean. Tsar Alexander II's reign was in its third decade while Alexander found himself at the nucleus of not his empire but as husband and father to a second "imperial family". Romanov Tsars and Tsaritsa' for that matter were well known for their public philandering but in the case of Alexander Nicholaievich Romanov, guided by idealism and sentiment throughout his life: had fallen deeply in love with one mistress in particular: a young, orphaned aristocrat called Catherine Dolgorukaya. The Tsar fathered three children with Dolgorukaya and moved his illegitimate family into the Winter Palace right alongside the Empress and the Imperial nursery. To the delight of scandalized society who watched in an unprecedented de-mystification of the Imperial family much like characters in a Chekov one act. The Tsar, by all accounts a more than effective governor had become complacent alongside his subjects and simply wanted to live happily with his new wife and family, of whom he made no secret, was the obvious target for radical revolutionaries who failed or rather because of their class, lacked the education to discern the ambiguities that exist within any cause.

Alexander the II the Tsar Liberator who much like his ancestor Peter the Great forced Russia onto the Western European diplomatic and cultural stage with his great intellect and high ideals was blown to bits by an assassin's makeshift bomb hurled at his carriage as he drove along the Nevsky Prospect on a brilliant, winter morning the first of March 1881. Unhurt by a first assassin's bomb which splintered his carriage and dismembered one of his Cossacks and his mount riding alongside; Alexander ministering to the wounded and dying when another revolutionary hurtled himself and the bomb he was armed with pell mell at the Tsar screaming "It is the will of God". This time after seven failed assassination attempts the Bolshevik revolutionaries struck an ugly yet monumental victory in favor of their cause. Meanwhile, the Tsar mangled from any recognition, unmercifully alive managed to make the sign of the cross as he whispered to his coachman: "to the palace to die." Summoning Herculean strength to be driven a half mile to the Winter Palace, carelessly drug across the Olympian forecourt to his private apartments, un-dressed and dressed again in the Uniform of an Imperial General, medals and honors in place, clung to life still longer as he waited for all members of both Imperial families to assemble blessing his children and calling for his beloved "Katya" known now as Princess Sergievskaya the Tsar's last imperial decree just weeks prior was to legitimatize his mistress in what surely must have been a moment of foreboding much like a darkly, idealistic page torn from the Brothers Grimm.