Russia
Nicholas I - Russian Emperor: 1 December 1825 – 2 March 1855
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Crowned Imperial Monogram of Nicholas I.
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Nicholas  I (Николай I Павлович, r Nikolai I Pavlovich; 6 July [O.S.  25 June] 1796 – 2 March [O.S.  18 February] 1855) was the Emperor of Russia from 1825 until 1855. He was  also the King of Poland and Grand Duke of Finland . He is best known as a  political conservative whose reign was marked by geographical expansion,  repression of dissent, economic stagnation, poor administrative policies, a  corrupt bureaucracy, and frequent wars that culminated in Russia's disastrous  defeat in the Crimean War of 1853-56. His biographer Nicholas  Riasanovsky says that Nicholas displayed determination, singleness of purpose,  and an iron will, along with a powerful sense of duty and a dedication to very  hard work. He saw himself as a soldier – a junior officer totally consumed by  spit and polish. A handsome man, he was highly nervous and aggressive. Trained  as an engineer, he was a stickler for minute detail. His reign had an ideology  called "Official Nationality" that was proclaimed officially in 1833. It was a  reactionary policy based on orthodoxy in religion, autocracy in government, and  Russian nationalism.

He was the younger brother of his predecessor, Alexander I . Nicholas inherited his brother's  throne despite the failed Decembrist revolt against him and went on to  become the most reactionary of all Russian leaders. His aggressive foreign  policy involved many expensive wars, having a disastrous effect on the empire's  finances.

He was successful against Russia's neighbouring southern rivals as he seized  the last territories in the Caucasus held by Persia (comprising modern day Armenia and Azerbaijan ) by successfully ending the Russo-Persian War (1826-1828) . By now, Russia  had gained what is now Dagestan , Georgia , Azerbaijan and Armenia from Persia,  and had therefore at last gained the clear upper hand in the Caucasus, both  geo-politically as well as territorially. He ended the Russo-Turkish War (1828-1829) successfully as  well. Later on, however, he led Russia into the Crimean War (1853–56) with  disastrous results. Historians emphasize that his micromanagement of the armies  hindered his generals, as did his misguided strategy. Fuller notes that  historians have frequently concluded that "the reign of Nicholas I was a  catastrophic failure in both domestic and foreign policy."^[2]  On the eve of his death, the Russian Empire reached its geographical zenith,  spanning over 20 million square kilometers (7.7 million square miles), but in  desperate need of reform.

Early life and  road to power

 

Nicholas was born in Gatchina to Emperor Paul I and Empress Maria Feodorovna . He was a brother of Alexander I of Russia and of Grand Duke Constantine Pavlovich of Russia .

Nicholas was not brought up to become the Emperor of Russia; he had two elder  brothers. In 1825, when Alexander I died suddenly of typhus , Nicholas was caught between swearing  allegiance to his second-eldest brother, Constantine Pavlovich, and accepting  the throne for himself. The interregnum lasted until Constantine Pavlovich, who  was in  Warsaw at that time, confirmed his refusal.  Additionally, on 25 (13 Old Style ) December, Nicholas issued the  manifesto proclaiming his accession to the throne. That manifesto retroactively  named 1 December (19 November Old Style ), the date of Alexander I's death, as  the beginning of his reign. During this confusion, a plot was hatched by some  members of the military to overthrow Nicholas and to seize power. This led to  the Decembrist Revolt on 26 (14 Old Style ) December 1825, an uprising Nicholas  was successful in quickly suppressing.

Emperor and principles

 

Nicholas completely lacked his brother's spiritual and intellectual breadth;  he saw his role simply as that of a paternal autocrat ruling his people by whatever means  necessary.  Nicholas I began his reign on 14 December 1825,^[4]  which fell on a Monday; Russian superstition held that Mondays were unlucky  days.  This particular Monday dawned very cold, with temperatures of −8 degrees  Celsius.  This was regarded by the Russian people as a bad omen for the coming reign. The  accession of Nicholas I was marred by a demonstration of 3,000 young Imperial  Army officers and other liberal-minded citizens. This demonstration was an  attempt to force the government to accept a constitution and a representative  form of government. Nicolas ordered the army out to smash the demonstration. The  "uprising" was quickly put down and became known as the Decembrist Revolt . Having experienced the  trauma of the Decembrist Revolt on the very first day of his reign, Nicholas I  was determined to restrain Russian society. The Third Section of the Imperial Chancellery ran a huge network of  spies and informers with the help of Gendarmes . The government exercised censorship and other forms of control over  education, publishing, and all manifestations of public life.

Tsar Nicholas abolished several areas of local autonomy. Bessarabia's autonomy was removed in 1828,  Poland's in 1830 and the Jewish Qahal was abolished in 1843. As an exception to  this trend,  Finland was able to keep its autonomy partly  due to Finnish soldiers' loyal participation in crushing the November Uprising in Poland.

Russia's first railway was opened in 1838, a 16-mile line between St. Petersburg and the suburban residence of Tsarskoye Selo . The second was the Moscow – Saint Petersburg Railway , built in  1842–51. Nevertheless, by 1855 there were only 570 miles of Russian railways.

In 1833, the Ministry of National Education , Sergey Uvarov , devised a program of "Orthodoxy,  Autocracy and Nationality" as the guiding principle of the regime.  The people were to show loyalty to the unrestricted authority of the tsar, to the traditions of the Russian Orthodox Church , and to the Russian language . These romantic and  conservative principles outlined by Uvarov were also espoused by Vasily Zhukovsky , one of the tutors of the  Grand Duke Alexander.  The results of these Slavophile principles led, broadly speaking, to  increasing repression of all classes, excessive censorship and surveillance of  independent minded intellectuals like Pushkin and Lermontov and to the persecution of non-Russian  languages and non-Orthodox religions. Taras Shevchenko , later to become known as the national poet of Ukraine , was exiled to Siberia by a direct order of Tsar Nicholas  after composing a poem that mocked the Tsar, his wife, and his domestic  policies. By order of the Tsar, Shevchenko was kept under strict surveillance  and prevented from writing or painting.

From 1839, Tsar Nicholas also used a former Byzantine Catholic priest named Joseph Semashko as his agent to force Orthodoxy  upon the Eastern Rite Catholics of Ukraine , Belarus , and Lithuania . This caused Tsar Nicholas to be  condemned by a succession of Roman Pontiffs , the Marquis de Custine , Charles Dickens ,  and many Western governments. See also Cantonists .

Nicholas disliked serfdom and toyed with the idea of abolishing  it in Russia, but declined to do so for reasons of state. He feared the  aristocracy and believed they might turn against him if he abolished serfdom.  However, he did make some efforts to improve the lot of the Crown Serfs (serfs  owned by the government) with the help of his minister Pavel Kiselev . During most of his reign he  tried to increase his control over the landowners and other influential groups  in Russia. In 1831, Nicholas restricted the votes in the Noble Assembly to those  with over 100 serfs, leaving 21,916 voters.  In 1841, landless nobles were banned from selling serfs separate from the land.  From 1845, attainment of the 5th highest rank (out of 14) in the Table of Ranks was required to be ennobled,  previously it had been the 8th rank.

Culture

The official emphasis on Russian nationalism fueled a debate on Russia's  place in the world, the meaning of Russian history, and the future of Russia.  One group, the westernizers , believed that Russia remained  backward and primitive and could progress only through more Europeanization.  Another group, the Slavophiles , enthusiastically favored the Slavs and their culture and customs, and had a  distaste for westerners and their culture and customs.

The Slavophiles viewed Slavic philosophy as a source of wholeness in  Russia and were sceptical of Western rationalism and materialism. Some of them  believed that the Russian peasant commune, or Mir , offered an attractive alternative to  Western capitalism and could make Russia a potential social and moral savior,  thus representing a form of Russian messianism . However the ministry of education  had a policy of closing philosophy faculties because of possible harmful  effects.

In the wake of the Decembrist revolt, the tsar moved to protect the status  quo by centralizing the educational system. He wanted to neutralize the threat  of foreign ideas and what he ridiculed as "pseudo-knowledge." However, his  minister of education, Sergei Uvarov , quietly promoted academic  freedom and autonomy, raised academic standards, improved facilities, and opened  higher education to the middle classes. By 1848 the tsar, fearing the political  upheavals in the West might uprisings in Europe, ended Uvarov's innovations.  The universities were small and closely monitored, especially the potentially  dangerous philosophy departments. Their main mission was to train a loyal,  athletic, masculinized senior bureaucracy that avoided the effeminacy of office  work.

Despite the repressions of this period, Russia experienced a flowering of  literature and the arts. Through the works of Aleksandr Pushkin , Nikolai Gogol , Ivan Turgenev and numerous others, Russian  literature gained international stature and recognition. Ballet took root in Russia after its  importation from France, and classical music became firmly established with  the compositions of Mikhail Glinka (1804–1857).

Military and  foreign policy

 

Nicholas lavished attention on his very large army; with a population of  60-70 million people, the army included a million men. They had outdated  equipment and tactics, but the tsar, who dressed like a soldier and surrounded  himself with officers, gloried in the victory over Napoleon in 1812 and took  enormous pride in its smartness on parade. The cavalry horses, for example, were  only trained in parade formations, and did poorly in battle. The glitter and  braid masked profound weaknesses that he did not see. He put generals in charge  of most of his civilian agencies regardless of their qualifications. An agnostic  who won fame in cavalry charges was made supervisor of Church affairs. The Army  became the vehicle of upward social mobility for noble youths from non-Russian  areas, such as Poland, the Baltic, Finland and Georgia. On the other hand, many  miscreants, petty criminals and undesirables were punished by local officials by  enlisting them for life in the Army. The conscription system was highly  unpopular with people, as was the practice of forcing peasants to house the  soldiers for six months of the year. Curtiss finds that "The pedantry of  Nicholas' military system, which stressed unthinking obedience and parade ground  evolutions rather than combat training, produced ineffective commanders in time  of war." His commanders in the Crimean War were old and incompetent, and indeed  so were his muskets as the colonels sold the best equipment and the best food.

For much of Nicholas's reign, Russia was seen as a major military power, with  considerable strength. At last the Crimean war at the end of his reign  demonstrated to the world what no one had previously realized: Russia was  militarily weak, technologically backward, and administratively incompetent.  Despite his grand ambitions toward the south and Turkey, Russia had not built  its railroad network in that direction, and communications were bad. The  bureaucracy was riddled with graft, corruption and inefficiency and was  unprepared for war. The Navy was weak and technologically backward; the Army,  although very large, was good only for parades, suffered from colonels who  pocketed their men's pay, poor morale, and was even more out of touch with the  latest technology as developed by Britain and France. By wars' end, the Russian  leadership was determined to reform the Army and the society. As Fuller notes,  "Russia had been beaten on the Crimean peninsula, and the military feared that  it would inevitably be beaten again unless steps were taken to surmount its  military weakness."

In foreign policy, Nicholas I acted as the protector of ruling legitimism and  as guardian against revolution. It has often been noticed that such policies  were linked with the Metternich counter-revolutionary system ;  indeed, Austrian special ambassador Count Karl Ludwig von Ficquelmont was well  known for his extensive influence over the tsar of whom he was a close  friend. Nicholas's offers to suppress revolution on  the European continent, trying to follow the pattern set by his eldest brother,  Tsar Alexander I, earned him the label of gendarme of Europe. Immediately  on his succession Nicholas began to limit the liberties that existed under the constitutional monarchy in Congress Poland . In return, after the November Uprising broke out, in 1831 the Polish parliament deposed Nicholas as king of Poland in response to  his repeated curtailment of its constitutional rights. The Tsar reacted by  sending Russian troops into Poland. Nicholas crushed the rebellion, abrogated  the Polish constitution, reduced Poland to the status of a province, Privislinsky Krai , and embarked on a policy of  repression towards Catholics.  In the 1840s Nicholas reduced 64,000 Polish nobles to commoner status.

In 1848, when a series of revolutions convulsed Europe,  Nicholas was in the forefront of reaction. In 1849, he helped the Habsburgs to suppress the uprising in Hungary , and he also urged Prussia not to adopt a liberal constitution.

While Nicholas was attempting to maintain the status quo in Europe, he  adopted an aggressive policy toward the Ottoman Empire . Nicholas I was following the  traditional Russian policy of resolving the so-called Eastern Question by seeking to partition the  Ottoman Empire and establish a protectorate over the Orthodox population of the Balkans , still largely under Ottoman control in  the 1820s. This move proved to be both costly and largely futile.

Russia fought a successful war against the Ottomans in 1828-29, but it did  little to increase its power in Europe. Only a small Greek state became  independent in the Balkans, with limited Russian influence. In the Caucacus, the  Russians did not fare much better. It fought long, costly wars for some small  territories that would not be pacified until the reign of Akexander II . In  1833, Russia negotiated the Treaty of Unkiar-Skelessi with the Ottoman  Empire. The major European parties mistakenly believed that the treaty contained  a secret clause granting Russia the right to send warships through the Bosporus and Dardanelles straits. By the London Straits Convention of 1841, they  affirmed Ottoman control over the straits and forbade any power, including  Russia, to send warships through the straits. Buoyed up by his role in  suppressing the revolutions of 1848 and his mistaken belief that he had British  diplomatic support, Nicholas moved against the Ottomans, who declared war on  Russia on 8 October 1853. On 30 November 1853, Russian Admiral Nakhimov caught the Turkish  fleet in the harbor at Sinope and destroyed it.

In 1854, fearing the results of an Ottoman defeat by Russia, Britain, France , the Kingdom of Sardinia and the Ottoman Empire joined forces in the conflict  known as the Crimean War to the Ottomans and Western  Europeans, but often known in Russia as the Eastern War, Russian:  Восточная война, Vostochnaya Vojna (March 1854 – February 1856). In April 1854,  Austria signed a defensive pact with Prussia.  Thus, Russia found herself in a war with the whole of Europe allied against her.

Austria offered the Ottomans diplomatic support, and Prussia remained neutral, thus leaving Russia  without any allies on the continent. The European allies landed in Crimea and laid siege to the well-fortified  Russian base at Sebastopol . The Russians lost battles at Alma  in September 1854.  This failure was followed by lost battles at Balaklava and Inkerman.  After the prolonged Siege of Sevastopol (1854–1855) the base fell,  exposing Russia's inability to defend a major fortification on its own soil. On  the death of Nicholas I, Alexander II became Tsar. On 15 January 1856, the new  tsar took Russia out of the war on very unfavorable terms which included the  loss of a naval fleet on the Black Sea.

Death

Nicholas died on 2 March 1855, during the Crimean War. He caught a chill and  refused medical treatment and died of pneumonia,  although there were rumors he committed suicide.

Legacy

There have been many damning verdicts on Nicholas's rule and legacy. At the  end of his life, one of his most devoted civil servants, A.V. Nikitenko , opined, "The main failing of  the reign of Nicholas Pavlovich was that it was all a mistake."  However, from time to time, efforts are made to revive Nicholas's reputation.  Historian Barbara Jelavich points to many failures, including the "catastrophic  state of Russian finances," the badly equipped army, the inadequate  transportation system, and a bureaucracy "which was characterized by graft,  corruption, and inefficiency."

Kiev University was founded in 1834 by  Nicholas. In 1854, there were 3600 university students in Russia, 1000 fewer  than in 1848. Censorship was omnipresent; Historian Hugh Seton-Watson says, "The  intellectual atmosphere remained oppressive until the end of the reign."

As a traveler in Spain, Italy and Russia, the Frenchman Marquis de Custine said in his widely read book Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia that, inside,  Nicholas was a good person, and behaved as he did only because he believed he  had to. "If the Emperor, has no more of mercy in his heart than he reveals in  his policies, then I pity Russia; if, on the other hand, his true sentiments are  really superior to his acts, then I pity the Emperor."

Nicholas figures in an urban legend about the railroad from Moscow to Saint Petersburg . When it was planned  in 1842, he supposedly demanded the shortest path be used despite major  obstacles in the way. The story says he used a ruler to draw the straight line  itself. However the false story became popular in Russia and Britain as an  explanation of how badly the country was governed. By the 1870s, however,  Russians were telling a different version, claiming the tsar was wise to  overcome local interests that wanted the railway diverted this way and that.  Actually what happened was that the road was laid out by engineers and he  endorsed their advice to build in a straight line.

Ancestors

Titles and styles

• 6 July 1796 – 1 December 1825: His Imperial Highness Grand  Duke Nicholas Pavlovich of Russia
• 1 December 1825 – 2 March 1855: His Imperial Majesty The  Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias

Issue

On 13 July 1817, Nicholas married Charlotte of Prussia (1798–1860), who  thereafter went by the name Alexandra Feodorovna. Charlotte's parents were Frederick William III of Prussia and Louise of Mecklenburg-Strelitz . Nicholas and  Charlotte were third cousins, as they were both great-great-grandchildren of Frederick William I of Prussia .

 

Illegitimate issue

Many sources  state that Nicholas did not have an extramarital affair until after 25 years of  marriage, in 1842, when the Empress's doctors prohibited her from having sexual  intercourse, due to her poor health and recurring heart attacks. Many facts dispute this claim. Nicholas  fathered three known children with mistresses prior to 1842, including one with  his most famous and well documented mistress, Varvara Nelidova .

With Anna-Maria Charlota de Rutenskiold (1791–1856)

• Youzia Koberwein (12 May 1825 – 23 February 1923)

With Varvara Yakovleva (1803–1831):

• Olga Carlovna Albrecht (10 July 1828 – 20 January 1898)

With Varvara Nelidova (d. 1897):

• Alexis Pashkine (17 April 1831 – 20 June 1863)

See also

Russian Empire portal

• History of Russia
• Imperial Russia
• Tsars of Russia family tree
• The Third Section
• La Russie en 1839