It was finally time to move the body. The funeral bells were tolling in the churches of St Petersburg. For nine days the corpse of the dead Emperor, Nicholas I of Russia, had remained within the red walls of the Winter Palace. On some of these days the odor of his decomposing body had been almost unbearable. But it was now Sunday, February 27th 1855, and the winter sun was shining brilliantly.

As the procession began to move, the new Tsar and “Emperor and Autocrat of all the Russias,” Alexander II, walked behind the coffin of his father. In his Cossack overcoat he was tall and regal, and his blue-gray eyes stared straight ahead. He was thirty-six years old, and the heavy responsibility of ruling a country at war was now his.

His father had also come to power under difficult circumstances: a group of conspirators opposed to autocracy and serfdom – they were later called Decembrists – had tried to prevent him from coming to the throne. And so his reign had begun with bloodshed and the arrest of these revolutionaries, among whom were a number of aristocratic young army officers.

But the difficulties now facing Alexander II were, if not as dramatic, more complex. Despite inferior equipment, shortages of supplies and diplomatic isolation, he somehow had to successfully conclude the present war in the Crimea. That, however, was just the first of his problems.