Two hundred years ago - April 17 (29), 1818 - the future emperor Alexander II was born in the Nikolaev Palace of the Moscow Kremlin. Having become the head of the country at one of the most difficult stages of its history, he saw his task in correcting what, as the "best people" of his era believed, had already developed their resource, and eliminating those reasons that led his father's mechanism to a catastrophic failure during the Crimean War. Not being a transformer by nature, he treated what would later be called the Great Reforms as a forced necessity that he simply could not dismiss. And having become what he became - the Tsar-liberator, having carried out the main business of his reign - the liberation of the peasants, more than anything else he dreamed of the life of a private person. And he was looking for the slightest reason to hide from state worries and burdens inevitable for the "first person."