Why did alexander II emancipate the serfs?
I would say that there is one main reason – modernisation – and three main factors for the emancipation: 1) Russia had been undergoing a crisis, brought on by defeat in the Crimean War of the 1850s, when Britain and France were better able to re-supply their troops than were the Russians – and the war was fought on Russian soil. Alexander recognised that Russia was extremely backwards compared to the other European powers, and was in danger of becoming an impoverished backwater. 2) In order to modernise, Alexander realised that Russian agriculture was going to have to improve in order to sell surpluses abroad, to finance the modernisation. Serfdom was a hindrance to this, as peasant agriculture is low yield and labour intensive. 3) Serfdom tied people to the land, and to modernise Russia’s infrastructure, people needed to be free to move to the towns and cities where the new jobs would be created.
