6 cannons, almost completely destroy the Siberian Regiment (1,700 people), but stop under the unbearable fire of hundreds of guns. Not retaining the attack of the reinforcements that have arrived, the Ottoman army is fleeing and capitulating. 43 thousand people fall into captivity.
Then 300 thousand Russian-Romanian army, almost without resistance, passes the Balkans, captures 30 thousand troops, disperses the remaining 150 thousand, captures the Turkish Adrianople. Seven days later, the fighting in this theater of operations is over.
In the Caucasus, the Turkish presence itself, as well as the active emissaries of the Porte, create unrest; rebel Dagestanis, Chechens and Abkhazians. Russian troops capture the cities of Kars, Arzurum, displacing the Turks from the Black Sea coast; after this, the excitement of the local tribes ceases.
The Tsar’s troops stop 100 kilometers from Constantinople. Demonstrating the undesirability of seizing the capital Ports of Russia, Britain and France send a combined fleet to the Straits. January 19, 1878, the San Stefan peace is signed, now celebrated in Bulgaria as Independence Day, but it proves to be only a preliminary agreement. Recently allied Romania, becomes in a position hostile to Russia, and in order to prevent possible excesses, Russian troops occupy Bucharest.
Further, Alexander II turns to the old secret treaties, gets mixed up in them, is nervous and, to a large extent, neutralizes the victories of Russian weapons. Perhaps the special gifts of Austria are due to the fact that the emperor himself is a representative of the Holstein-Gottorp dynasty, an ethnic German, like his wife. Union Bulgaria declines, in comparison with the territory indicated by the protocols of the San Stefan world three times. Its part – Macedonia, returns to Turkey without changes in status. Another province, Rumelia, becomes autonomous in the Porta. Not completely independent Bulgaria, continues to pay tribute to Turkey, although Ottoman troops and have no right to be on its territory (the next year the Bulgarians arbitrarily stop these payments).
After Turkey, Thrace and Albania remain.
Montenegro, Serbia and Romania receive independence.
Bosnia and Herzegovina is occupied by Austria.
As a result of the exchange of territories, Russia takes South Bessarabia from Romania.
Loss of 30 thousand people on each side killed in battle, not counting those who died from wounds and diseases.
In 1866, with the submission of the governor-general of Eastern Siberia, Count N. Muraviev-Amursky, whose portrait adorns the present five-thousandth note (the Motherland must know its «heroes»), the question of selling Alaska to the United States is being studied. In the end, on March 30, 1867, a territory of 1.5 million square kilometers, inhabited by 2,500 Russian and 60,000 Eskimos, is sold for $ 7,2 million (which is equal to the cost of a three-storey capital building). The money goes to the development of the network of railways (according to other sources, it comes to the personal property of the monarchical family).
In 1875, the St. Petersburg Treaty on the Territory Exchange was concluded with Japan (the Russian diplomat AM Gorchakov). The Land of the Rising Sun refuses territorial claims to Sakhalin, in exchange receives the entire chain of the Kuril Islands stretched out. Russia in fact is deprived of access to the Pacific Ocean. Japan has the opportunity at any time to begin the blockade of Sakhalin and the entire Far East (which it will use in 1905).
The government of Alexander II refuses to colonize Papua New Guinea, overseas territory goes to Austria and Australia.
The sparsely populated overseas colonies are an opportunity to create New Russia, in physical isolation from previous forms, to test effective methods of leadership and management, risky but necessary social projects. The Russian nobility rejected this possibility, and as a result left the stage.
The protest mood is growing in the country. Particularly active participants of underground organizations «Earth and Freedom», «Narodnaya Volya» («The will of the people») and (the left wing of the latter) «Black redistribution».
March 13, 1881 on the Ekaterininskaya Embankment of St. Petersburg, two explosions rumble – Alexander II, the bomber of the «Narodnaya Volya» Ignatiy Grinevitsky (an ethnic Pole), the Cossack of his Majesty’s Convoy and a 14-year-old boy from a nearby shopping mall.
The next day, the Russian throne is occupied by Alexander the Third, the second son of Alexander II from his first marriage. His elder brother, Nikolai, died suddenly of a spinal cord tuberculosis during his travels in Italy (21 years), and, in order to prepare for the succession of the throne, Alexander, in particular, studies an additional course of sciences, including. a series of lectures on Russian history S. Solovyov.
Alexander the Third is married to Maria Sophia Friederike Dagmar, the daughter of a prince, and then the King of Denmark Christian Ninth, in Orthodoxy she received the name of Maria Feodorovna (all foreign empresses are Fedorovna, in honor of the family icon). They have six children; the eldest is Nikolai, who later becomes the last (or, last but one) all-Russian emperor.
The first step of Alexander III as a monarch is the cancellation of the discussion of the «Constitution of Loris-Melikov». This Constitution (Minister of Internal Affairs, Count, ethnic Armenian) is the shadow of the Zemsky Sobor of the seventeenth century, a meeting of all estates to solve an epochal question. It could become the basis for the development of the ideas of the Constitutional Monarchy, maybe even the Republic. The authority of Alexander II during the last years of the reign was clearly unsteady, it is not known whether this project would be accepted by the conservative nobility. We know definitely only that under Alexander the Third the autocracy gained a second wind, so that the majority began to feel that there was absolutely no need to make any significant changes.
The dynasty is an attempt to concentrate important moral qualities in a certain circle, to carry out a certain selective work. Is it possible? Apparently, yes, although such delicate questions of genetics try not to sound. In the case of Russia, there is a dissonance: the bearer of the gene material, the mentality – from the dwarf princedom gets on Wednesday, where people are accustomed to think on other scales. Consciousness of the monarch, born in such a marriage, gives a break.
It’s another matter if Russia continued, as in the 11th (golden) century, to remain internally divided into large, legally independent but united by the mentality and economy of the kingdom states, always united in the face of an external threat. In a kindred spiritual environment, genetically divided dynasties, one could select princes and princesses for the common throne. The body consists of separate cells performing their symphony of reactions, but, they are a whole organism. Variety – in unity, this could be the slogan of Great Russia. Let’s notice, at that time Russian princedoms are so influential that the marriage union with representatives of dynasties of Novgorod, Kiev, is considered honorable in the countries of all Central Europe.
…The next step is the decree «On the reduction of gymnasium education» (circular about cook children). It recommends that principals of educational institutions accept only representatives of higher, well-to-do classes; thus «… gymnasiums and progymnasiums will be freed from the arrival of children of coachmen, lackeys, cooks, laundresses, small shopkeepers and the like, whose children… should not at all strive for secondary and higher education.»
On March 1, 1887, the emperor experiences an attempt on his person. Among the five participants of the terrorist act – Lenin’s elder brother, Alexander Ulyanov, a student of the Physics and Mathematics Faculty of St. Petersburg University. They are all hanged in the Shlisselburg Fortress.
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