Nicholas I

Emperor of Russia (1825-1855)

• Born: July 6, 1796
• Birthplace: Tsarskoye Selo (now Pushkin), Russia
• Died: March 2, 1855
• Place of death: St. Petersburg, Russia

As ruler of the Russian Empire, Czar Nicholas I partially succeeded in restoring the historic power and position of the autocracy in Russian life and European affairs. His reign marks the high point of Russian conservative reaction to the French Revolution, Napoleonic Europe, and the Decembrist Revolt.

Early Life

Czar Nicholas I was born Nikolay Pavlovich. He was the third surviving son of Russia’s Emperor Paul I and Empress Maria Fyodorovna, a former princess of Württemberg. Being the third son, Nicholas was not expected to rule in his own right but rather to serve one of his elder brothers, the future czar Alexander I or the Grand Duke Constantine Pavlovich. Consequently, Nicholas was not initially prepared to rule but rather was given a traditional, conservative, military education. What liberal training Nicholas did receive probably came from one of his tutors, the German economist Heinrich Storch. Nicholas proved to have no mind for abstraction; he was interested in science and technology and was especially talented in mathematics. Like his father before him, he took a strong interest in military affairs.

Nicholas’s natural conservatism was profoundly deepened during the last years of Alexander’s reign, after 1812-1814, and as a result of the Decembrist Revolt in 1825. After he returned from the Congress of Vienna, Alexander—and Russia through him—came under the sway of conservative German mystical Romanticism from the West. Opposition arose from young reform-minded noble military officers and civil servants, who staged demonstrations in St. Petersburg to influence the new czar, Constantine, upon the somewhat sudden death of the childless Alexander in 1825. Unbeknown to the Decembrists, however, Constantine secretly had renounced his right to succeed in 1822, in favor of Nicholas, when he had married a Roman Catholic Polish aristocrat. When they realized that Nicholas was the new emperor, the Decembrists went into rebellion in St. Petersburg and Kiev. The Decembrist Revolt was thoroughly crushed, and Nicholas I saw it as a manifestation of the liberal treason of much of the nobility, an attitude that set the tone for his entire reign at home and abroad.

Life’s Work

Not only did the Decembrist Revolt strengthen Nicholas’s conservative resolve, but also it forced him to rebuild the historic power of the Russian autocracy and concentrate on internal affairs over foreign relations throughout most of his reign. To do this he surrounded himself with reasonably talented conservative and reactionary advisers in key positions, many of whom came from military backgrounds. Together they created and enforced the state ideology of official nationalism, with its four-pronged attack: autocracy, orthodoxy, nationality, and legitimacy. Autocracy meant the historic direct, divine-right absolutism of the czar; orthodoxy reaffirmed Russian Orthodoxy as the one true faith and condoned the persecution of all dissenters, especially Roman Catholics, Muslims, and Jews; nationality called for the protection of the unique Russian character from the decadence of the West; and legitimacy was a guide for foreign policy, allowing for intervention abroad to preserve the antirevolutionary status quo.

To create a degree of bureaucratic efficiency, Nicholas did not reform the bureaucracy as such; rather, he added yet another layer, His Majesty’s Own Imperial Chancery, which was more directly responsible to him. It contained six sections: Sections 1 and 6 dealt with charity and welfare, respectively. Section 2, under Count Michael Speransky, successfully carried out the codification and some modernization of Russian law from 1833 to 1835, a prelude to the judicial reforms to come under the reign of Alexander II in 1864. Section 4 managed the conquest of the Caucasus Mountains region, which began under Nicholas and continued in the reigns that followed.

Part of Armenia was secured in a war with Persia in 1826-1828 and the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea in a war with Turkey in 1828-1829. Section 5, under General Paul Kiselyov, considered the reform of serfdom. Nicholas wanted to do something about this pressing problem, which had kept Russia economically and socially backward, had in large part precipitated the Decembrist Revolt, and had constantly fueled debate and dissent in the Russian Empire. As with so many important matters, however, he never committed himself to doing anything about it.

The most infamous of these sections, though, was the third, the secret police, under General Alexander Benckendorff. Based on French Revolutionary and Napoleonic models, it was a modern, professional police establishment through which Nicholas controlled dissent, monitored public opinion, propagandized his people, and otherwise enforced his will. Through the third section, censorship was maintained, and famous troublesome intellectuals such as Peter Chaadayev, Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Vissarion Belinsky, and Aleksandr Herzen were hounded and controlled. Nevertheless, under Nicholas, dissent (especially that dissent inspired by the West) continued to grow.

Nicholas did not see art as propaganda but believed that it was able to portray attitudes; he was therefore determined that the attitudes portrayed be the correct ones. He fancied himself as an artist and an architect, and he played a personal role in the rebuilding of the Winter Palace and the completion of St. Isaac’s Cathedral in St. Petersburg.

Section 3 acted and reacted efficiently and helped Russia to suppress the Polish uprisings of 1830-1831 and move against Russian dissidents to prevent trouble in 1848; Russia and Great Britain were the only two major European countries not to experience upheavals in 1848. Nicholas’s Russia even sent troops abroad to quell a rebellion in Hungary in 1848. With section 3, Nicholas laid the basis for the modern Russian and Soviet police states. In this regard, Nicholas eventually came to be known as the “gendarme of Europe.”

Nicholas reenergized the pattern of “defensive modernization” for the Russian Empire first set by Czar Alexei Mikhailov and his son Peter the Great during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Russia did not have an original industrial revolution, and Nicholas believed it necessary for Russia to modernize cautiously to protect itself from the aggressive tendencies of the West and to avoid coming under the sway of Western decadence. Western expertise and capital therefore were allowed to come into Russia only slowly and selectively. For example, under Nicholas the first railroad in Russia was completed in 1838, not primarily to foster internal economic development but to move troops more efficiently between Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Kiev to control possible social disorder.

Meanwhile, intellectuals of opposing Slavophile and Westernizer groupings debated the past, present, and future of Russia and sought to influence the czar and his policies. Slavophiles such as Sergei Khomyakov and the Aksakovs usually were supportive, while Westernizers such as Belinsky were much more critical. Through its control of government spending, it was really the Ministry of Finance under the reactionary Count Yegor Kankrin that was in charge of modernization and reform during much of Nicholas’s reign.

A haphazard commitment to improve education also was made. A heavy emphasis was placed on science and technology. New schools and curricula were established and the older ones expanded by Minister of Public Instruction Sergei Uvarov in the years 1833-1848, marking the end of the period of reaction to the Decembrist Revolt. Soon, however, the educational system, especially as manifested by the universities, was seen as responsible for stimulating the development of a radical intelligentsia. The universities came to be distrusted, greater centralized control was instigated, and the period of post-1848 reaction ensued.

Despite the efforts at reform and modernization, the Russian defeat in the Russian-provoked Crimean War (1854-1856) at the end of Nicholas’s reign showed how far the Russian Empire had declined from great power status and how backward it was. The defeat spurred Nicholas’s son and successor, Alexander II, to initiate a major era of reform, beginning with the emancipation of the serfs in 1861.

Significance

Nicholas I was the last Russian czar to embody the historical definition of the autocrat. Through the strength of his conservative character and the power of his will, he reconstructed the autocracy of Ivan the Great, Ivan the Terrible, and Peter the Great in his own image. However, in the process of this atavistic quest he retarded and often hurt Russia and its people. His stifling of progressive development, furthering of bureaucratic absolutism, expensive militarism and foreign adventurism, and general lack of progressive accomplishment left those who followed in his footsteps with a growing number of aggravated problems with which to cope.

However, while Nicholas did not stop Russia’s slide from greatness, he did prepare the way for some of the accomplishments of his successors. The addressing of the problems of serfdom and the codification of law facilitated the later reforms of Alexander II. He furthered the march of the Russian Empire across Eurasia and into China. Defensive modernization helped bring on the Russian Revolution, and modernization continued through the Soviet period of Russian history to the present. Nicholas was a strong ruler but not a positive one, and his antireform reactionary conservatism was out of step with the needs of his country, the times in which it existed, and the modern world. In trying to strengthen the Russian Empire, Nicholas actually weakened it severely.

Bibliography

Blackwell, William L. The Beginnings of Russian Industrialization, 1800-1860. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1968. Largely a study of the important period under Nicholas in the history of Russian industrialization prior to the actual Russian industrial revolution. Very good on the role of the state in stimulating Russian industrialization and modernization.

Golovin, Ivan. Russia Under the Autocrat Nicholas the First. London: H. Colburn, 1846. A critical account of the first two decades of Nicholas’s reign written by a member of one of Russia’s more important aristocratic families. A valuable primary source on the life and times of Nicholas and his Russia.

Grunwald, Constantin de. Tsar Nicholas I. Translated by Brigid Patmore. New York: Macmillan, 1955. Somewhat romanticized and very traditional, but for years the standard biography of Nicholas. Stresses foreign affairs.

Ingle, Harold N. Nesselrode and the Russia Rapprochement with Britain, 1836-1844. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. Centering on the activity of Nicholas’s principal foreign minister, Count Karl Nesselrode, this work addresses the cold war relationship that developed between Russian and Great Britain in the nineteenth century. A good study of Nicholas’s unsuccessful attempt to transfer his conservative values to European affairs.

Kagan, Frederick W. The Military Reforms of Nicholas I: The Origins of the Modern Russian Army. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Thorough, scholarly study of Nicholas’s reign and reorganization of the Russian army during the 1830’s, written by a professor at the U.S. Military Academy. Aimed at scholars and serious students of Russian history.

Kohn, Hans, ed. The Mind of Modern Russia: Historical and Political Thought in Russia’s Great Age. New York: Harper & Row, 1955. Commentary and documents on Russian intellectual history in the nineteenth century. The first seven chapters deal with the reign of Nicholas. A classic text.

Lincoln, W. Bruce. Nicholas I: Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978. Largely synthetic, but very good and readable. A definitive and up-to-date standard biography of Nicholas.

Monas, Sidney. The Third Section: Police and Society Under Nicholas I. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961. Excellent on the third section and its various activities and on the early modern Russian police state of Nicholas. An unmatched standard.

Pinter, Walter McKenzie. Russian Economic Policy Under Nicholas I. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1967. A study of Russian “defensive modernization” under Nicholas I. Especially good on the philosophy and activities of Nicholas’s minister of finance, Count Kankrin.

Riasanovsky, Nicholas V. Nicholas I and Official Nationality in Russia, 1825-1855. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959. An excellent study that concentrates on the construction of the conservative Russian state ideology of official nationality by Nicholas and his advisers. Reveals in part the complex personality of Nicholas I.