Alexander I

This welcome addition to Profiles in Power sets the career of Tsar Alexander I of Russia (1801-1825) in the domestic and international context of his times. Alexander spent much of his reign locked in a titanic struggle with Napoleon, which reached its climax in the 1812 invasion of Russia. After Napoleon's defeat, Alexander was the most powerful ruler on the continent, and promoted a new vision for Europe, which was ultimately embodied in the Holy Alliance.

At home, he was much engaged with plans for constitutions and reform. He is thus a dominant figure in both Russian and European history in the nineteenth century

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Yet for all the immediate triumphs of his reign, its long-term impact on Russia was largely negative; his personal achievements seem often directly at odds with his declared aims, and his personality is riddled with contradictions. More than once he professed an aversion to the exercise of power, asking only for a quiet life outside Russia; yet he acceded to the throne in a bloody coup which involved the murder of his own father, Paul I.

He claimed to 'love constitutions'; yet he failed to implement the constitutional programmes written in his reign for Russia. He frequently expressed his abhorrence of serfdom; yet he did little to challenge the institution of serfdom or ameliorate the condition of the peasants - indeed he consigned tens of thousands of them to the hated military colonies.

He asserted that his only ambition was to see Europe at peace; yet his wars, not only with Napoleonic France but also with Sweden and the Ottoman Empire, drove the borders of Russia deeper into the continent of Europe than in any previous reign.

Janet Hartley explores these contradictions and paradoxes. She establishes the main principles and considerations which governed Alexander's domestic and foreign policies, and argues that they did in fact remain broadly consistent throughout his reign. His actions, and their relation to his ultimate aims, can only be understood in the context of the internal and external pressures that he faced at different times.

There were many restrictions on his freedom of action in the early and middle parts of his reign; and though, at the zenith of his European influence after Napoleon's defeat, Alexander seemed ready to undertake fundamental political and social reforms at home, the domestic disturbances of the 1820s put an end to his plans.

In the last, sad, years of his rule, Alexander lost faith in his earlier convictions; at the same time many of his young, highly educated subjects lost faith in their tsar. And in this, Dr Hartley concludes, lies the ultimate significance of the reign.

For, while Russia's standing as a great power - achieved in the struggle against Napoleon - fluctuated throughout the following century, the alienation of the educated elite from the imperial regime which became so apparent under Alexander I remained to plague the tsars until the Revolution carried them away altogether.