All about Alexander the great

During the last years in which Alexander I was the Tsar, he changed his earlier ideas and came to dislike democracy and to feel that the common man should have no freedom. He died in 1825, although there are some people who think he did not die in that year but disappeared to turn to a religious life and let someone else be the Tsar.

At least, when they opened his tomb a hundred years later, it was empty. Alexander II was the grandson of Alexander I. He was born in 1818, and became Tsar in 1855, when he was 37 years old. He is most famous because he is given credit for setting the Russian serfs free. The serfs were Russian farmers who were not much better off than slaves. They could be bought and sold along with the farms on which they worked. Alexander II signed a document in 1861, setting the serfs free and giving them ownership of small pieces of land on which they could grow their own food.

There are many, however, who say he did this only because there would have been a revolution of the serfs if he had not. In any case, the revolutionists hated him, and in 1881 he was assassinated by one of them in St. Petersburg, which was then the capital of Russia and which is now called Leningrad.