Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"Tsar Alexander II was a man of contradictions. Best remembered for his sweeping reforms--primarily the evolution of the feudal system of serfdom--his determination to cling to his autocratic power resulted in the bloody suppression of the 1863-1864 uprising in Poland, and culminated in his own assassination by revolutionaries.…The other side of his mercurial personality, though, was seen two years later in his iron-fisted crushing of a Polish uprising aimed at national liberation from Russian rule, after which thousands of Poles were exiled to Siberia.… His son Alexander III, who witnessed his father's painfully protracted death, resolved that iron reaction and repression were the only ways to deal with the revolutionary threat." [Furtado: 1001 Days] "Peter the Great’s census of 1723 showed that 56 per cent of serfs were owned by nobles, 21 per cent by the state, 14 per cent by the Church and 9 per cent by the Tsar." [Blanning: Pursuit of Glory, p. 165]