It's little use to wonder or debate whether the peasants "loved the Tsar". My impression is that the Russian peasants, most of whom were illiterate untill the Revolution, revered the Tsar as God's representative on earth. (With all the superstition that involved.) They regarded the Tsar as their батьушка, bat'ushka, little father, el papi, supposed to protect them against their landlords, which they regarded as cruel, unjust, greedy and corrupt. The Tsar represented their hope of justice in this world. When the peasants suffered injustice or cruelty from their landlords, the authorities or capitalists they usually blamed the landlords / nobility, the Tsars corrupt underlings, the Jews (often employed as agents of the landlords or grain merchants) etc., believing / hoping that "if only the Tsar knew" he would correct these injustices and punish his corrupt servants.
With more and more peasants commuting between industrial work in the cities and seasonal work in their rural villages more and more radical ideas and a more nuanced picture of the true role played by the Tsar in the increasingly capitalist and less and less feudal society of Russia spread to the peasants.
The peasants had always believed that all the land was theirs, but that the landlords had stolen it together with the imposition of serfdom in the 16th and 17th centuries. The Tsar represented their hope that the land one day would revert back to them. When serfdom was abolished without all the land being redistributed and peasants were allowed to quit the village commune (the mir), those peasants who came out unfavourably with no or little land would probably regard the Tsar as having broken his promise.