• Appointment of an heir
• Ascension to the throne
• The theory of official nationality
• Third branch
• Censorship and new school regulations
• Laws, finance, industry and transport
• The peasant question and the position of the nobility
• Bureaucracy
• Foreign policy until the early 1850s
• Crimean War and the death of the emperor

1. Appointment of an heir

Aloysius Rockstuhl. Portrait of Grand Duke Nikolai Pavlovich. Miniature from the original 1806. 1869 Wikimedia Commons

In a nutshell: Nicholas was the third son of Paul I and was not supposed to inherit the throne. But of all the sons of Paul, only he had a son, and during the reign of Alexander I, the family decided that Nicholas should be the heir.

Nikolai Pavlovich was the third son of Emperor Paul I, and, generally speaking, he should not have reigned.

He was never prepared for this. Like most Grand Dukes, Nicholas received primarily a military education. In addition, he was fond of the natural sciences and engineering, he drew very well, but he was not interested in the humanities. Philosophy and political economy generally passed him by, and from history he knew only the biographies of great rulers and generals, but had no idea about causal relationships or historical processes. Therefore, from the point of view of education, he was poorly prepared for state activity.

In the family, from childhood, they did not take him too seriously: there was a huge age difference between Nikolai and his older brothers (he was 19 years older than him, Konstantin - 17), and he was not attracted to state affairs.

In the country, almost only the guards knew Nikolai (since in 1817 he became the chief inspector of the Corps of Engineers and the chief of the Life Guards of the Sapper Battalion, and in 1818 - the commander of the 2nd brigade of the 1st infantry division, which included several guards units ), and knew from a bad side. The fact is that the guard returned from the foreign campaigns of the Russian army, according to Nikolai himself, loose-mouthed, unaccustomed to drill training and having heard enough freedom-loving conversations, and he began to discipline her. Since he was a stern and very quick-tempered man, this resulted in two big scandals: first, before the formation, Nikolai insulted one of the guards captains, and then the general, the favorite of the guards, Karl Bistrom, before whom he eventually had to publicly apologize.

But none of the sons of Paul, except Nicholas, had sons. Alexander and Mikhail (the youngest of the brothers) had only girls, and even they died early, and Konstantin had no children at all - and even if they had, they could not inherit the throne, since in 1820 Konstantin entered into morganatic marriage Morganatic marriage- an unequal marriage, the children from which did not receive the right to inherit. with the Polish Countess Grudzinskaya. And in 1818, Nikolai had a son, Alexander, and this largely predetermined the further course of events.

Portrait of Grand Duchess Alexandra Feodorovna with her children - Grand Duke Alexander Nikolaevich and Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna. Painting by George Doe. 1826 State Hermitage / Wikimedia Commons

In 1819, Alexander I, in a conversation with Nikolai and his wife Alexandra Fedorov, said that not Konstantin, but Nikolai would be his successor. But in a way, Alexander himself still hoped that he would have a son, there was no special decree on this matter, and the change of heir to the throne remained a family secret.

Even after this conversation, nothing changed in Nikolai's life: he remained the same as he was a brigadier general and chief engineer of the Russian army; Alexander did not allow him to any state affairs.

2. Accession to the throne

In a nutshell: In 1825, after the unexpected death of Alexander I, an interregnum began in the country. Almost no one knew that Alexander called Nikolai Pavlovich's heir, and immediately after Alexander's death, many, including Nikolai himself, took the oath to Konstantin. Meanwhile, Constantine was not going to rule; Nicholas did not want to see the guards on the throne. As a result, the reign of Nicholas began on December 14 with a rebellion and the shedding of blood of subjects.

In 1825, Alexander I suddenly died in Taganrog. In St. Petersburg, only members of the imperial family knew that the throne would be inherited not by Constantine, but by Nicholas. Both the leadership of the guard and the Governor-General of St. Petersburg, Mikhail Milo-radovich, did not like Nicholas and wanted to see Constantine on the throne: he was their comrade-in-arms, with whom they passed Napoleonic Wars and Foreign campaigns, and they considered him more prone to reforms (this did not correspond to reality: Constantine both externally and internally looked like his father Paul, and therefore it was not worth expecting changes from him).

As a result, Nicholas swore allegiance to Constantine. The family did not understand this at all. Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna reproached her son: “What did you do, Nikolai? Don't you know that there is an act that declares you heir?" Such an act actually existed. August 16, 1823 Alexander I, which stated that, since the emperor does not have a direct male heir, and Konstantin Pavlovich expressed a desire to renounce his rights to the throne (Constantine wrote about this to Alexander I in a letter back in early 1822), the successor - No one announces Grand Duke Nikolai Pavlovich. This manifesto was not made public: it existed in four copies, which were stored in sealed envelopes in the Assumption Cathedral of the Kremlin, the Holy Synod, the State Council and the Senate. On the envelope from the Assumption Cathedral, Alexander wrote that the envelope should be opened immediately after his death., but was kept secret, and Nikolai did not know its exact content, since no one had familiarized him with it in advance. In addition, this act had no legal force, because, according to the current Pavlovian law on succession to the throne, power could only be transferred from father to son or from brother to brother next in seniority. In order to make Nicholas heir, Alexander had to return the law on succession to the throne adopted by Peter I (according to which the reigning monarch had the right to appoint any successor to himself), but he did not.

Constantine himself was at that time in Warsaw (he was the commander-in-chief of the Polish armies and the de facto viceroy of the emperor in the kingdom of Poland) and flatly refused both to take the throne (he was afraid that in this case he would be killed like his father), and officially , on existing form, renounce something.

Silver ruble with the image of Constantine I. 1825 State Hermitage

Negotiations between St. Petersburg and Warsaw lasted about two weeks, during which there were two emperors in Russia - and at the same time not a single one. Busts of Konstantin have already begun to appear in institutions, and several copies of the ruble with his image have been printed.

Nicholas found himself in a very difficult situation, given how he was treated in the guard, but in the end he decided to declare himself heir to the throne. But since they had already sworn allegiance to Konstantin, now a re-swearing was to take place, and this has never happened in the history of Russia. From the point of view of even not so much the nobles as the guards soldiers, this was completely incomprehensible: one soldier said that gentlemen officers can re-swear if they have two honors, but I, he said, have one honor, and, having sworn in once, I'm not going to swear a second time. In addition, two weeks of interregnum provided an opportunity to gather their forces.

Upon learning of the impending rebellion, Nicholas decided to declare himself emperor and take the oath on December 14. On the same day, the Decembrists withdrew the Guards units from the barracks to the Senate Square - in order to allegedly protect the rights of Konstantin, from whom Nicholas takes the throne.

Through parliamentarians, Nikolai tried to persuade the rebels to disperse to the barracks, promising to pretend that nothing had happened, but they did not disperse. It was towards evening, in the dark the situation could develop unpredictably, and the performance had to be stopped. This decision was very difficult for Nikolai: firstly, when giving the order to open fire, he did not know whether his artillery soldiers would obey and how other regiments would react to it; secondly, in this way he ascended the throne, having shed the blood of his subjects - among other things, it was completely incomprehensible how they would look at this in Europe. Nevertheless, in the end, he gave the order to shoot the rebels with cannons. The square was swept away by several volleys. Nikolai himself did not look at this - he galloped off to the Winter Palace, to his family.

Nicholas I in front of the formation of the Life Guards of the Sapper Battalion in the courtyard of the Winter Palace on December 14, 1825. Painting by Vasily Maksutov. 1861 State Hermitage Museum

For Nicholas, this was a difficult test, which left a very strong imprint on his entire reign. He considered what had happened to be God's providence - and decided that he was called by the Lord to fight the revolutionary infection not only in his own country, but in Europe in general: he considered the Decembrist conspiracy to be part of a pan-European one.

3. The theory of official nationality

In a nutshell: The basis of the Russian state ideology under Nicholas I was the theory of official nationality, formulated by the Minister of National Education Uvarov. Uvarov believed that Russia, having joined the family of European peoples only in the 18th century, was too young a country to cope with the problems and diseases that struck other European states in the 19th century. ve-ke, so now it was necessary to delay her development for a while until she matured. To educate society, he formulated a triad, which, in his opinion, described the most important elements of the "folk spirit" - "Orthodoxy, autocracy, nationality." Nicholas I took this triad as universal, not temporary.

If in the second half of the 18th century many European monarchs, including Catherine II, were guided by the ideas of the Enlightenment (and the enlightened absolutism that grew on its basis), then by the 1820s, both in Europe and in Russia, the philosophy of the Enlightenment disappointed many. Ideas formulated by Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schelling, Georg Hegel and other authors began to come to the fore, later called German classical philosophy. The French Enlightenment spoke about the fact that there is one road to progress, laid out by laws, human reason and enlightenment, and all the peoples who follow it will eventually come to prosperity. The German classics came to the conclusion that there is no single road: each country has its own road, which is led by a higher spirit, or higher mind. Knowledge about what kind of road this is (that is, what is the “spirit of the people”, its “historical beginnings”), is revealed not to an individual people, but to a family of peoples connected by a single root. Since all European peoples come from the same root of Greco-Roman antiquity, these truths are revealed to them; these are "historical peoples".

By the beginning of the reign of Nicholas, Russia found itself in a rather difficult situation. On the one hand, the ideas of the Enlightenment, on the basis of which government policy and reform projects were previously built, led to the failed reforms of Alexander I and the Decembrist uprising. On the other hand, within the framework of German classical philosophy, Russia turned out to be a “non-historical people”, since it did not have any Greco-Roman roots - which meant that, despite its thousand-year history, it all the same, destined to live on the side of the historical road.

Russian public figures managed to propose a solution, including the Minister of Public Education Sergei Uvarov, who, being a man of Alexander's time and a Westerner, shared the main provisions of German classical philosophy. He believed that until the 18th century, Russia was indeed a non-historical country, but, starting with Peter I, it joins the European family of peoples and thereby enters the general historical road. Thus, Russia turned out to be a “young” country, which by leaps and bounds is catching up with the European states that have gone ahead.

Portrait of Count Sergei Uvarov. Painting by Wilhelm August Golicke. 1833 State Historical Museum / Wikimedia Commons

In the early 1830s, looking at the next Belgian revolution Belgian revolution(1830) - an uprising of the southern (mostly Catholic) provinces of the Kingdom of the Netherlands against the dominant northern (Protestant), which led to the emergence of the Belgian kingdom. And, Uvarov decided that if Russia follows the European path, then it will inevitably have to face European problems. And since she is not yet ready to overcome them in her youth, now it is necessary to make sure that Russia does not step onto this disastrous path until it is able to resist the disease. Therefore, Uvarov considered the first task of the Ministry of Education to be “freezing Russia”: that is, not to completely stop its development, but to delay it for a while, until the Russians learned some guidelines that would allow them to avoid “bloody anxieties” in the future.

To this end, in 1832-1834, Uvarov formulated the so-called theory of official nationality. The theory was based on the triad "Orthodoxy, autocracy, nationality" (a paraphrase of the early XIX century of the military slogan "For the Faith, the Tsar and the Fatherland"), that is, three concepts in which, as he believed, the basis of the "national spirit" lies.

According to Uvarov, the diseases of Western society arose from the fact that European Christianity split into Catholicism and Protestantism: there is too much rational, individualistic, divisive people in Protestantism, and Catholicism, being too doctrinaire, cannot resist revolutionary ideas. The only tradition that has managed to remain faithful to true Christianity and ensure the unity of the people is Russian Orthodoxy.

It is clear that autocracy is the only form of government that can slowly and carefully manage the development of Russia, keeping it from fatal mistakes, especially since Russian people in any case, he did not know any other government, except for the monarchy. Therefore, autocracy is at the center of the formula: on the one hand, it is supported by the authority of the Orthodox Church, and, on the other hand, by the traditions of the people.

But what is nationality, Uvarov deliberately did not explain. He himself believed that if this concept was left ambiguous, a variety of social forces would be able to unite on its basis - the authorities and the enlightened elite would be able to find in folk traditions best solution contemporary problems Interestingly, if for Uvarov the concept of “nationality” in no way meant the participation of the people in the very administration of the state, then the Slavophiles, who generally accepted the formula he proposed, placed the emphasis differently: emphasizing the word "narodnost", they began to say that if Orthodoxy and autocracy do not meet the people's aspirations, then they must change. Therefore, it was the Slavophils, and not the Westerners, who very soon became the main enemies for the Winter Palace: the Westerners fought on another field - no one understood them anyway. The same forces that accepted the "theory of official nationality", but undertook to interpret it differently, were perceived as much more dangerous..

But if Uvarov himself considered this triad temporary, then Nicholas I perceived it as universal, since it was capacious, understandable and fully consistent with his ideas about how the empire that fell into his hands should develop.

4. Third branch

In a nutshell: The main instrument with which Nicholas I had to control everything that happened in different strata of society was the Third Branch of His Imperial Majesty's Own Chancellery.

So, Nicholas I was on the throne, being absolutely convinced that autocracy is the only form of government that can lead Russia to development and avoid shocks. The last years of his elder brother's reign seemed to him too flabby and unintelligible; the administration of the state, from his point of view, was loose, and therefore he first of all had to take all matters into his own hands.

To do this, the emperor needed a tool that would allow him to know exactly how the country lives and control everything that happens in it. Such an instrument, a kind of eyes and hands of the monarch, was His Imperial Majesty's Own Chancellery - and first of all its Third Department, which was headed by the cavalry general, a participant in the war of 1812, Alexander Benckendorff.

Portrait of Alexander Benckendorff. Painting by George Doe. 1822 State Hermitage

Initially, only 16 people worked in the Third Department, and by the end of the reign of Nicholas, their number did not increase much. This small number of people did many things. They controlled the work of state institutions, places of exile and imprisonment; conducted cases related to official and the most dangerous criminal offenses (which included forgery of state documents and counterfeiting); were engaged in charity work (mainly among the families of killed or maimed officers); observed the moods in all strata of society; they censored literature and journalism and followed everyone who could be suspected of unreliability, including Old Believers and foreigners. To do this, the Third Division was given a corps of gendarmes, who prepared reports (and very truthful) to the emperor about the mood of minds in different classes and about the state of affairs in the provinces. The third branch was also a kind of secret police, whose main task was to combat "subversive activities" (which was understood quite broadly). We do not know exact number secret agents, since their lists never existed, but the fear that existed in society that the Third Division sees, hears and knows everything, suggests that there were quite a lot of them.

5. Censorship and new school regulations

In a nutshell: In order to educate subjects of reliability and loyalty to the throne, Nicholas I significantly increased censorship, made it difficult for children from unprivileged classes to enter universities and severely limited university freedoms.

Another important activity of Nicholas was the education of subjects of loyalty and loyalty to the throne.

For this, the emperor immediately took it. In 1826, a new censorship charter was adopted, which is called "cast iron": it contained 230 prohibitory articles, and it turned out to be very difficult to follow it, because it was not clear what, in principle, could now be written about. Therefore, two years later, a new censorship statute was adopted - this time quite liberal, but it soon began to acquire explanations and additions, and as a result, from a very decent one, it turned into a document that once again forbade too many things for journalists and writers.

If initially censorship was under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Public Education and the Supreme Censorship Committee added by Nicholas (which included the ministers of public education, internal and foreign affairs), then over time, all ministries, the Holy Synod, the Free Economic Society received censorship rights , as well as the Second and Third offices of the Chancellery. Each author had to take into account all the comments that the censors from all these organizations wished to make. The third branch, in addition to other things, began to censor all the plays intended for staging on the stage: a special one had been known since the 18th century.

School teacher. Painting by Andrey Popov. 1854 State Tretyakov Gallery

In order to educate a new generation of Russians in the late 1820s and early 1830s, the statutes of the lower and secondary schools were adopted. The system created under Alexander I was preserved: one-class parish and three-class district schools continued to exist, in which children of unprivileged classes could study, as well as gymnasiums that prepared students for admission to universities. But if earlier it was possible to enter the gymnasium from the district school, now the connection between them was broken and it was forbidden to accept serf children in the gymnasium. Thus, education became even more class-based: admission to universities was difficult for non-noble children, and in principle closed for serfs. The children of the nobility were ordered to study in Russia until the age of eighteen - otherwise they were forbidden to enter the civil service.

Later, Nicholas also took up the universities: their autonomy was limited and much stricter procedures were introduced; the number of students who could study at one time at each university was limited to three hundred. True, several branch institutes were opened at the same time (Technological, Mining, Agricultural, Forestry and Technological School in Moscow), where graduates of district schools could enter. At that time, this was quite a lot, and yet by the end of the reign of Nicholas I, 2,900 students studied in all Russian universities - about the same number at that time were in Leipzig University alone.

6. Laws, finance, industry and transport

In a nutshell: Under Ni-ko-lai I, the government did a lot of useful things: the legislation was systematized, the financial system was reformed, and the transport revolution was carried out. In addition, industry was developing in Russia with the support of the government.

Since, until 1825, Nikolai Pavlovich was not allowed to govern the state, he ascended the throne without his own political team and without sufficient preparation to develop his own program of action. Paradoxical as it may seem, he borrowed a lot - at least at first - from the Decembrists. The fact is that during the investigation they talked a lot and frankly about Russian troubles and suggested own solutions urgent problems. By order of Nikolai, Alexander Borovkov, secretary of the investigative commission, compiled a set of recommendations from their testimony. It was a most interesting document, in which all the problems of the state were sorted out by points: “Laws”, “Trade”, “Control system” and so on. Until 1830-1831, both Nicholas I himself and the chairman of the State Council, Viktor Kochubey, constantly used this document.

Nicholas I awards Speransky for compiling a code of laws. Painting by Alexei Kivshenko. 1880 DIOMEDIA

One of the tasks formulated by the Decembrists, which Nicholas I tried to solve at the very beginning of his reign, was the systematization of legislation. The fact is that by 1825 the only set of Russian laws remained the Cathedral Code of 1649. All laws adopted later (including a huge body of laws from the times of Peter I and Catherine II) were published in scattered multi-volume publications of the Senate and were stored in archives of various departments. Moreover, many laws have disappeared altogether - about 70% have survived, and the rest have disappeared due to various circumstances, such as fires or careless storage. It was absolutely impossible to use all this in real court proceedings; laws had to be collected and streamlined. This was entrusted to the Second Department of the Imperial Chancellery, which was formally led by the jurist Mikhail Balugyansky, and in fact by Mikhail Mikhailovich Speransky, assistant to Alexander I, ideologist and inspirer of his reforms. As a result, a huge amount of work was done in just three years, and in 1830 Speransky reported to the monarch that 45 volumes of the Complete Collection of Laws of the Russian Empire were ready. Two years later, 15 volumes of the Code of Laws of the Russian Empire were prepared: laws that were subsequently canceled were removed from the Complete Collection, and contradictions and repetitions were eliminated. This was also not enough: Speransky suggested creating new codes of laws, but the emperor said that he would leave this to his heir.

In 1839-1841, the Minister of Finance Yegor Kankrin carried out a very important financial reform. The fact is that there were no firmly established relations between different money that circulated in Russia: silver rubles, paper banknotes, as well as gold and copper coins, plus coins minted in Europe called “efimki” exchanged for each other. ha at rather arbitrary rates, the number of which reached six. In addition, by the 1830s, the value of banknotes had fallen sharply. Kankrin recognized the silver ruble as the main monetary unit and rigidly tied banknotes to it: now 1 silver ruble could be obtained for exactly 3 rubles 50 kopecks in banknotes. The population rushed to buy silver, and in the end, bank notes were completely replaced by new credit notes, partially backed by silver. Thus, a fairly stable monetary circulation was established in Russia.

Under Nicholas, the number of industrial enterprises increased significantly. Of course, this was connected not so much with the actions of the government, but with the industrial revolution that had begun, but without the permission of the government in Russia, in any case, it was impossible to open a factory, plant, or workshop. Under Nicholas, 18% of enterprises were equipped with steam engines - and it was they who produced almost half of all industrial output. In addition, during this period, the first (albeit very vague) laws appeared that regulated the relations between workers and entrepreneurs. Russia also became the first country in the world to adopt a decree on the formation of joint-stock companies.

Railway employees at Tver station. From the album "Views of the Nikolaev railway". Between 1855 and 1864

Railroad bridge. From the album "Views of the Nikolaev railway". Between 1855 and 1864 DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University

Bologoe station. From the album "Views of the Nikolaev railway". Between 1855 and 1864 DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University

Wagons on the tracks. From the album "Views of the Nikolaev railway". Between 1855 and 1864 DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University

Station Khimka. From the album "Views of the Nikolaev railway". Between 1855 and 1864 DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University

Depot. From the album "Views of the Nikolaev railway". Between 1855 and 1864 DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University

Finally, Nicholas I actually made a transport revolution in Russia. Since he tried to control everything that was happening, he was forced to constantly travel around the country, and thanks to this, the highways (which began to be laid under Alexander I) began to take shape in the road network. In addition, it was through the efforts of Nicholas that the first railways in Russia were built. To do this, the emperor had to overcome serious resistance: Grand Duke Mikhail Pavlovich, Kankrin, and many others were against the new mode of transport for Russia. They feared that all forests would burn in the furnaces of locomotives, that in winter the rails would be covered with ice and trains would not be able to take even small rises, that the railway would lead to an increase in vagrancy - and, finally, would undermine the very social foundations of the empire, since the nobles , merchants and peasants will travel, albeit in different wagons, but in the same train. Nevertheless, in 1837, a movement from St. Petersburg to Tsarskoe Selo was opened, and in 1851 Nikolai arrived by train from St. Petersburg to Moscow - for the celebrations in honor of the 25th anniversary of his coronation.

7. The peasant question and the position of the nobility

In a nutshell: The position of the nobility and peasantry was extremely difficult: the landlords were ruined, discontent was ripening among the peasantry, serfdom hindered the development of the economy. Nicholas I understood this and tried to take measures, but he did not dare to abolish serfdom.

Like his predecessors, Nicholas I was seriously concerned about the state of the two main pillars of the throne and the main Russian social forces - the nobility and the peasantry. The position of both was extremely difficult. The third department annually issued reports that began with reports of landlords killed during the year, refusals to go to corvée, felling of landowners' forests, complaints from peasants against landowners - and, most importantly, rumors spreading about the will, which made the situation explosive. Nikolai (like his predecessors, by the way) saw that the problem was becoming more and more acute, and he understood that if a social explosion was possible in Russia at all, it would be a peasant one, not an urban one. At the same time, in the 1830s, two-thirds of the noble estates were mortgaged: the landowners went bankrupt, and this proved that Russian agricultural production could no longer be based on their farms. Finally, serfdom hindered the development of industry, trade and other sectors of the economy. On the other hand, Nicholas was afraid of the discontent of the nobles, and in general he was not sure that the one-time abolition of serfdom would be useful to Russia at that moment.

Peasant family before dinner. Painting by Fyodor Solntsev. 1824 State Tretyakov Gallery / DIOMEDIA

From 1826 to 1849, nine secret committees worked on peasant affairs and more than 550 various decrees were adopted regarding the relationship of landlords and nobles - for example, it was forbidden to sell peasants without land, and peasants from estates put up for auction were allowed to before the end of the auction to be redeemed at will. Nikolay could not abolish serfdom, but, firstly, by making such decisions, the Winter Palace pushed society to discuss an acute problem, and secondly, the secret committees collected a lot of material that came in handy later, in the second half of the 1850s, when the Winter Palace moved to a specific discussion of the abolition of serfdom.

In order to slow down the ruin of the nobles, in 1845 Nikolai allowed the creation of majorates - that is, indivisible estates that were transferred only to the eldest son, and were not split up between heirs. But by 1861, only 17 of them were introduced, and this situation did not save: in Russia, the majority of landowners remained small landowners, that is, they owned 16-18 serfs.

In addition, he tried to slow the erosion of the old well-born nobility by issuing a decree according to which hereditary nobility could be obtained by rising to the fifth grade of the Table of Ranks, and not the eighth, as before. Getting hereditary nobility has become much more difficult.

8. Bureaucracy

In a nutshell: The desire of Nicholas I to keep all control of the country in his own hands led to the fact that the administration was formalized, the number of officials increased and the society was forbidden to evaluate the work of officials. As a result, the entire management system stalled, and the scale of treasury theft and bribery became enormous.

Portrait of Emperor Nicholas I. Painting by Horace Vernet. 1830s Wikimedia Commons

So, Nicholas I tried to do everything necessary to with my own hands gradually, without shocks, to lead society to prosperity. Since he perceived the state as a family, where the emperor is the father of the nation, senior officials and officers are older relatives, and all the rest are foolish children who need constant supervision, he was not ready to accept any help from society at all. . The management was to be exclusively under the jurisdiction of the emperor and his ministers, who acted through officials who impeccably fulfill the monarch's will. This led to the formalization of the government of the country and a sharp increase in the number of officials; The movement of papers became the basis for managing the empire: orders went from top to bottom, reports from bottom to top. By the 1840s, the governor was signing about 270 documents a day and spending up to five hours doing it—even skimming through the papers.

The most serious mistake of Nicholas I was that he forbade society to evaluate the work of bureaucracy. No one, except for the immediate superiors, could not only criticize, but even praise the officials.

As a result, the bureaucracy itself became a powerful socio-political force, turned into a kind of third estate - and began to protect its own interests. Since the well-being of a bureaucrat depends on whether his superiors are pleased with him, wonderful reports went up from the very bottom, starting from the clerks: everything is fine, everything is done, the achievements are huge. With each step, these reports only became more radiant, and papers came up that had very little in common with reality. This led to the fact that the entire administration of the empire stalled: already in the early 1840s, the Minister of Justice reported to Nicholas I that 33 million cases had not been resolved in Russia, set out on at least 33 million sheets of paper. And, of course, the situation was developing in this way not only in justice.

Terrible embezzlement began in the country and. The loudest was the case of the Fund for the Disabled, from which 1,200,000 silver rubles were stolen in a few years; they brought 150,000 rubles to the chairman of one of the deanery councils to put them in a safe, but he took the money for himself and put newspapers in the safe; one county treasurer stole 80 thousand rubles, leaving a note that in this way he decided to reward himself for twenty years of impeccable service. And things like this happened all the time.

The emperor tried to personally monitor everything, adopted the most stringent laws and made the most detailed orders, but officials at absolutely all levels found ways to get around them.

9. Foreign policy until the early 1850s

In a nutshell: Until the beginning of the 1850s, the foreign policy of Nicholas I was quite successful: the government managed to protect the borders from Persians and Turks and prevent a revolution in Russia.

In foreign policy, Nicholas I had two main tasks. Firstly, he had to protect the borders of the Russian Empire in the Caucasus, in the Crimea and in Bessarabia from the most warlike neighbors, that is, the Persians and Turks. For this purpose, two wars were carried out - the Russian-Persian 1826-1828 In 1829, after the end of the Russian-Persian war, an attack was made on the Russian representative office in Tehran, during which all the employees of the embassy, ​​except for the secretary, were killed - including the plenipotentiary ambassador of Russia Alexander Griboyedov, who played a big role in the peace negotiations with the Shah, which ended in a favorable treaty for Russia. and Russian-Turkish 1828-1829, and both of them led to remarkable results: Russia not only strengthened the borders, but also significantly increased its influence in the Balkans. Moreover, for some time (albeit a short one - from 1833 to 1841), the Unkar-Iskelesi agreement was in force between Russia and Turkey, according to which the latter had to close the Bosporus and Dardanelles straits if necessary (that is, the passage from the Mediterranean Sea to Chernoye) for the warships of the opponents of Russia, which made Black Sea, in fact, inland sea Russia and the Ottoman Empire.

Battle of Boelesti on September 26, 1828. German engraving. 1828 Brown University Library

The second goal that Nicholas I set for himself was not to let the revolution pass through the European borders of the Russian Empire. In addition, since 1825, he considered it his sacred duty to fight the revolution in Europe. In 1830, the Russian emperor was ready to send an expedition to suppress the revolution in Belgium, but neither the army nor the treasury were ready for this, and the European powers did not support the intentions of the Winter Palace. In 1831, the Russian army severely suppressed; Poland became part of the Russian Empire, the Polish constitution was destroyed, and martial law was introduced on its territory, which remained until the end of the reign of Nicholas I. When France began again in 1848, which soon spread to other countries, Nicholas I was not on jokingly alarmed: he proposed to push the army to the French borders and thought about how to suppress the revolution in Prussia on his own. Finally, Franz Joseph, head of the Austrian imperial house, asked him for help against the rebels. Nicholas I understood that this event was not very beneficial for Russia, but he saw in the Hungarian revolutionaries “not only enemies of Austria, but enemies of world order and tranquility ... who must be exterminated for our own peace of mind”, and in 1849 the Russian the army joined the Austrian troops and saved the Austrian monarchy from disintegration. One way or another, the revolution never crossed the borders of the Russian Empire.

In parallel, since the time of Alexander I, Russia has been at war with the highlanders of the North Caucasus. This war went on with varying success and dragged on for many years.

In general, the foreign policy actions of the government during the reign of Nicholas I can be called rational: it made decisions based on the goals that it set for itself, and real opportunities, which the country possessed.

10. Crimean War and the death of the emperor

In a nutshell: In the early 1850s, Nicholas I made a series of catastrophic miscalculations and went to war with the Ottoman Empire. England and France sided with Turkey, Russia began to suffer defeat. This exacerbated many internal problems. In 1855, when the situation was already very difficult, Nicholas I died unexpectedly, leaving his heir Alexander the country in an extremely difficult situation.

From the beginning of the 1850s, sobriety in assessing one's own strength in the Russian leadership suddenly disappeared. The emperor considered that the time had come to finally deal with the Ottoman Empire (which he called the “sick man of Europe”), dividing its “non-indigenous” possessions (the Balkans, Egypt, the Mediterranean islands) between Russia and other great powers -you, first of all Great Britain. And here Nikolai made several catastrophic miscalculations.

First, he offered Great Britain a deal: Russia, as a result of the division of the Ottoman Empire, would receive the Orthodox territories of the Balkans that remained under Turkish rule (that is, Moldavia, Wallachia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Montenegro and Macedonia), and Egypt and Crete would go to Great Britain. But for England, this proposal was completely unacceptable: the strengthening of Russia, which became possible with the capture of the Bosporus and the Dardanelles, would be too dangerous for her, and the British agreed with the Sultan that they would receive Egypt and Crete for helping Turkey against Russia .

France was his second miscalculation. In 1851, it happened there, as a result of which President Louis Napoleon Bonaparte (Napoleon's nephew) became Emperor Napoleon III. Nicholas I decided that Napoleon was too busy with internal problems to intervene in the war, without thinking at all that the best way to strengthen power was to take part in a small victorious and just war (and the reputation of Russia, the "gendarme of Europe" , was extremely unattractive at that moment). Apart from other things, an alliance between France and England, old enemies, seemed completely impossible to Nicholas, and in this he again miscalculated.

Finally, the Russian emperor believed that Austria, out of gratitude for her help with Hungary, would take the side of Russia, or at least remain neutral. But the Habsburgs had their own interests in the Balkans, and a weak Turkey was more profitable for them than a strong Russia.

Siege of Sevastopol. Lithograph by Thomas Sinclair. 1855 DIOMEDIA

In June 1853, Russia sent troops to the Danube Principalities. In October, the Ottoman Empire officially declared war. At the beginning of 1854, France and Great Britain joined it (on the side of Turkey). The allies began actions in several directions at once, but most importantly, they forced Russia to withdraw its troops from the Danube principalities, after which the allied expeditionary force landed in the Crimea: its goal was to take Sevastopol, the main base of the Russian Black Sea Fleet. The siege of Sevastopol began in the autumn of 1854 and lasted almost a year.

The Crimean War showed all the problems associated with the control system built by Nicholas I: neither the supply of the army, nor the transport routes worked; The army was short of ammunition. In Sevastopol, the Russian army answered ten shots of the allies with one artillery shot - because there was no gunpowder. By the end of the Crimean War, only a few dozen guns remained in the Russian arsenals.

The military failures were followed by internal problems. Russia fell into an absolute diplomatic void: all the countries of Europe broke off diplomatic relations with it, except for the Vatican and the Kingdom of Naples, which meant the end of international trade, without which the Russian Empire could not exist. Public opinion in Russia began to change dramatically: many even conservative-minded people believed that defeat in the war would be more useful for Russia than victory, believing that it would not be Russia that would be defeated, but the Nikolaev regime.

In July 1854, the new Russian ambassador in Vienna, Alexander Gorchakov, found out under what conditions England and France were ready to conclude a truce with Russia and start negotiations, and advised the emperor to accept them. Nikolai hesitated, but in the autumn he was forced to agree. In early December, Austria joined the alliance of England and France. And in January 1855, Nicholas I caught a cold - and on February 18 he died unexpectedly.

Nicholas I on his deathbed. Drawing by Vladimir Gau. 1855 State Hermitage

Rumors of suicide began to spread in St. Petersburg: allegedly, the emperor demanded that his doctor give him poison. It is impossible to refute this version, but the evidence confirming it seems doubtful, especially since for a sincerely believing person, such as Nikolai Pavlovich undoubtedly was, suicide is a terrible sin. Rather, it was that the failures - both in the war and in the state as a whole - seriously undermined his health.

According to legend, talking before his death with his son Alexander, Nicholas I said: “I hand over my team to you, unfortunately, not in the order I wanted, leaving a lot of trouble and worries.” These troubles included not only the difficult and humiliating end of the Crimean War, but also the liberation of the Balkan peoples from the Ottoman Empire, the solution of the peasant question and many other problems that Alexander II had to deal with.

Nikolai Pavlovich Romanov, the future Emperor Nicholas I, was born on July 6 (June 25, O.S.) 1796 in Tsarskoye Selo. He became the third son of Emperor Paul I and Empress Maria Feodorovna. Nicholas was not the eldest son and therefore did not claim the throne. He was supposed to devote himself to a military career. At the age of six months, the boy received the rank of colonel, and at the age of three he already flaunted in the uniform of the Life Guards Horse Regiment.

Responsibility for the upbringing of Nikolai and his younger brother Mikhail was assigned to General Lamzdorf. Home education consisted of the study of economics, history, geography, law, engineering and fortification. Particular emphasis was placed on the study foreign languages: French, German and Latin. The humanities did not give Nikolai much pleasure, but everything that was connected with engineering and military affairs attracted his attention. As a child, Nikolai mastered the flute and took drawing lessons, and this familiarity with art allowed him to be considered a connoisseur of opera and ballet in the future.

In July 1817, the wedding of Nikolai Pavlovich took place with Princess Friederike Louise Charlotte Wilhelmina of Prussia, who after baptism took the name Alexandra Feodorovna. And from that time on, the Grand Duke began to take an active part in the arrangement of the Russian army. He was in charge of the engineering units, under his leadership educational institutions were created in companies and battalions. In 1819, with his assistance, the Main Engineering School and schools for guards ensigns were opened. Nevertheless, he was disliked in the army for his excessive pedantry and pickiness to trifles.

In 1820, a turning point occurred in the biography of the future Emperor Nicholas I: his elder brother Alexander I announced that in connection with the refusal of the heir to the throne, Constantine, the right to reign was transferred to Nicholas. For Nikolai Pavlovich, the news came as a shock, he was not ready for this. Despite the protests of his younger brother, Alexander I secured this right with a special manifesto.

However, on December 1 (November 19, O.S.), 1825, Emperor Alexander I suddenly died. Nicholas again tried to give up his reign and shift the burden of power to Constantine. Only after the publication of the royal manifesto, indicating the heir of Nikolai Pavlovich, did he have to agree with the will of Alexander I.

The date of the oath before the troops on Senate Square was December 26 (December 14 according to the old style). It was this date that became decisive in the speech of the participants in various secret societies, which went down in history as the Decembrist uprising.

The plan of the revolutionaries was not implemented, the army did not support the rebels, and the uprising was suppressed. After the trial, five leaders of the uprising were executed, and a large number of participants and sympathizers went into exile. The reign of Nicholas I began very dramatically, but there were no other executions during his reign.

The crowning of the kingdom took place on August 22, 1826 in the Assumption Cathedral of the Kremlin, and in May 1829 the new emperor assumed the rights of autocrat of the Polish kingdom.

The first steps of Nicholas I in politics were quite liberal: A. S. Pushkin returned from exile, V. A. Zhukovsky became the mentor of the heir; Nicholas's liberal views are also indicated by the fact that the Ministry of State Property was headed by P. D. Kiselev, who was not a supporter of serfdom.

Nevertheless, history has shown that the new emperor was an ardent supporter of the monarchy. Its main slogan, which determined state policy, was expressed in three postulates: autocracy, Orthodoxy and nationality. The main thing that Nicholas I strove for and achieved with his policy was not to create something new and better, but to preserve and improve the existing order.

The emperor's desire for conservatism and blind adherence to the letter of the law led to the development of an even greater bureaucracy in the country. In fact, a whole bureaucratic state was created, the ideas of which continue to live to this day. The most severe censorship was introduced, a division of the Secret Chancellery was created, headed by Benckendorff, which conducted a political investigation. A very close observation of the printing business was established.

During the reign of Nicholas I, some changes also affected the existing serfdom. Uncultivated lands in Siberia and the Urals began to be developed, peasants were sent to their rise, regardless of desire. Infrastructure was created on the new lands, the peasants were supplied with new agricultural equipment.

Under Nicholas I, the first railway was built. The gauge of Russian roads was wider than European, which contributed to the development of domestic technology.

The financial reform began, which was supposed to introduce single system calculation of silver coins and banknotes.

Special place the policy of the tsar was concerned about the penetration of liberal ideas into Russia. Nicholas I sought to destroy any dissent not only in Russia, but throughout Europe. Without the Russian tsar, the suppression of all kinds of uprisings and revolutionary riots was not complete. As a result, he received the well-deserved nickname "the gendarme of Europe."

All the years of the reign of Nicholas I are filled with military operations abroad. 1826-1828 - Russian-Persian war, 1828-1829 - Russian-Turkish war, 1830 - suppression of the Polish uprising by Russian troops. In 1833, the Unkar-Iskelesi Treaty was signed, which became the highest point of Russian influence on Constantinople. Russia received the right to block the passage of foreign ships to the Black Sea. True, this right was soon lost as a result of the conclusion of the Second London Convention in 1841. 1849 - Russia is an active participant in the suppression of the uprising in Hungary.

The culmination of the reign of Nicholas I was the Crimean War. It was she who was the collapse political career emperor. He did not expect that Great Britain and France would come to the aid of Turkey. The policy of Austria also aroused fear, the unfriendliness of which forced the Russian Empire to keep an entire army on the western borders.

As a result, Russia lost its influence in the Black Sea, lost the opportunity to build and use military fortresses on the coast.

In 1855, Nicholas I fell ill with the flu, but, despite being unwell, in February he went to a military parade without outerwear... The emperor died on March 2, 1855.

Nicholas I (short biography)

The future Russian Emperor Nicholas I was born on June 25, 1796. Nicholas was the third son of Maria Feodorovna and Paul the First. He was able to get a pretty good education, but denied the humanities. At the same time, he was well-versed in fortification and military art. Nikolai also owned and engineering. But despite all this, the ruler was not a favorite of soldiers and officers. His coldness and cruel corporal punishment led him to be nicknamed "Nikolai Palkin" in the army environment.

In 1817 Nicholas married the Prussian princess Frederica Louise Charlotte Wilhelmine.

Nicholas I comes to the throne after the death of his elder brother Alexander. The second pretender to the Russian throne, Konstantin renounces the rights to rule during the life of his brother. At the same time, Nicholas did not know this and at first gave the oath to Constantine. Historians call this time the Interregnum.

Although the manifesto on the accession to the throne of Nicholas I was issued on December 13, 1825, his actual administration of the country began on November 19. On the very first day of the reign, the Decembrist uprising took place, the leaders of which were executed a year later.

The domestic policy of this ruler was characterized by extreme conservatism. The smallest manifestations of free thought were immediately suppressed, and the autocracy of Nicholas was defended with all his might. The secret office, which was led by Benckendorff, carried out a political investigation. After the release in 1826 of a special censorship charter, all printed publications that had at least some political overtones were banned.

At the same time, the reforms of Nicholas I were distinguished by their limitations. Legislation was streamlined and the publication of the Complete Collection of Laws began. In addition, Kiselev is reforming the management of state peasants, introducing new agricultural techniques, building first-aid posts, etc.

In 1839 - 1843, a financial reform was carried out, which established the ratio between the banknote and the silver ruble, but the issue of serfdom remained unresolved.

Nikolaev's foreign policy had the same goals as the domestic one. The constant struggle against the revolutionary moods of the people did not stop.

Eventually Russian-Iranian war Armenia joins the state territory, the ruler condemns the revolution in Europe and even sends an army in 1849 to suppress it in Hungary. In 1853 Russia enters the Crimean War.

Nicholas died on March 2, 1855.

Nicholas I Pavlovich
Coronation:
Predecessor:	Alexander I
Successor:	Alexander II
Coronation:
Predecessor:	Alexander I
Successor:	Alexander II
Predecessor:	Alexander I
Successor:	Alexander II
Religion:	Orthodoxy
Birth:
Buried:	Peter and Paul Cathedral
Dynasty:	Romanovs
	Maria Fedorovna
	Charlotte of Prussia (Alexandra Feodorovna)
Monogram:

Biography

Childhood and adolescence

The most important milestones of the reign

Domestic politics

Peasant question

Nicholas and the problem of corruption

Foreign policy

Emperor Engineer

Culture, censorship and writers

Nicknames

Family and personal life

Monuments

Nicholas I Pavlovich Unforgettable (June 25 (July 6), 1796, Tsarskoye Selo - February 18 (March 2), 1855, St. Petersburg) - Emperor of All Russia from December 14 (December 26), 1825 to February 18 (March 2), 1855, Tsar of Poland and Grand Duke of Finland . From the imperial house of the Romanovs, Holstein-Gottorp-Romanov dynasty.

Biography

Childhood and adolescence

Nicholas was the third son of Emperor Paul I and Empress Maria Feodorovna. He was born on June 25, 1796 - a few months before the accession of Grand Duke Pavel Petrovich to the throne. Thus, he was the last of the grandchildren of Catherine II, born during her lifetime.

The birth of Grand Duke Nikolai Pavlovich was announced in Tsarskoye Selo by cannon fire and bell ringing, and news was sent to St. Petersburg by courier.

Odes were written for the birth of the Grand Duke, the author of one of them was G. R. Derzhavin. Before him, in the imperial house of the Romanovs, the Holstein-Gottorp-Romanov dynasty, children were not named after Nikolai. Name day - December 6 according to the Julian calendar (Nicholas the Wonderworker).

According to the order established under Empress Catherine, Grand Duke Nikolai from birth entered into the care of the royal grandmother, but the death of the Empress that followed soon cut off her influence on the course of the upbringing of the Grand Duke. His nanny was Scottish Lyon. She was for the first seven years the only leader of Nicholas. The boy, with all the strength of his soul, became attached to his first teacher, and one cannot but agree that during the period of tender childhood, “the heroic, chivalrous, noble, strong and open character of Nanny Lyon” left an imprint on the character of her pupil.

Since November 1800, General M. I. Lamzdorf became the tutor of Nikolai and Mikhail. The choice of General Lamzdorf for the post of educator of the Grand Duke was made by Emperor Paul. Paul I pointed out: “Just don’t make such rake of my sons as German princes” (German. Solche Schlingel wie die deutschen Prinzen). In the highest order of November 23, 1800, it was announced:

"Lieutenant-General Lamzdorf has been appointed to be under His Imperial Highness Grand Duke Nikolai Pavlovich." The general stayed with his pupil for 17 years. Obviously, Lamzdorf fully satisfied the pedagogical requirements of Maria Feodorovna. Thus, in a parting letter of 1814, Maria Fedorovna called General Lamzdorf the “second father” of Grand Dukes Nikolai and Mikhail.

The death of his father, Paul I, in March 1801, could not but be imprinted in the memory of the four-year-old Nicholas. He later described what happened in his memoirs:

The events of that sad day are preserved in my memory like a vague dream; I was awakened and saw Countess Lieven before me. When I was dressed, we noticed through the window, on the drawbridge under the church, the guards, which were not there the day before; there was the entire Semyonovsky regiment in an extremely careless form. None of us suspected that we had lost our father; we were taken downstairs to my mother, and soon from there we went with her, sisters, Mikhail and Countess Liven to the Winter Palace. The guard went out into the courtyard of the Mikhailovsky Palace and saluted. My mother immediately silenced him. My mother was lying in the back of the room when Emperor Alexander entered, accompanied by Konstantin and Prince Nikolai Ivanovich Saltykov; he threw himself on his knees before his mother, and I can still hear his sobs. They brought him water, and they took us away. We were happy to see our rooms again and, I must tell you the truth, our wooden horses which we have forgotten.

This was the first blow of fate dealt to him during the period of his most tender age, a blow. Since then, concern for his upbringing and education has been concentrated entirely and exclusively in the jurisdiction of the widowed Empress Maria Feodorovna, out of a sense of delicacy towards which Emperor Alexander I refrained from any influence on the upbringing of his younger brothers.

Empress Maria Feodorovna's greatest concern in the education of Nikolai Pavlovich was to try to turn him away from the passion for military exercises, which was found in him from early childhood. Passion for the technical side of military affairs, instilled in Russia by Paul I, let royal family deep and strong roots - Alexander I, despite his liberalism, was an ardent supporter of the watch parade and all its subtleties, Grand Duke Konstantin Pavlovich experienced complete happiness only on the parade ground, among the drilled teams. The younger brothers were not inferior in this passion to the older ones. From early childhood, Nikolai began to show a special passion for military toys and stories about military operations. The best reward for him was permission to go to a parade or a divorce, where he watched everything that happened with special attention, dwelling on even the smallest details.

Grand Duke Nikolai Pavlovich was educated at home - teachers were assigned to him and his brother Mikhail. But Nikolai did not show much zeal for study. He did not recognize the humanities, but he was well versed in the art of war, was fond of fortification, and was familiar with engineering.

According to V. A. Mukhanov, Nikolai Pavlovich, having completed his education, was himself horrified by his ignorance and after the wedding he tried to fill this gap, but the conditions of a scattered life, the predominance of military occupations and the bright joys of family life distracted him from constant office work. “His mind was not processed, his upbringing was careless,” Queen Victoria wrote about Emperor Nikolai Pavlovich in 1844.

It is known that the future emperor was fond of painting, which he studied in childhood under the guidance of the painter I. A. Akimov and the author of religious and historical compositions, Professor V. K. Shebuev

During Patriotic War In 1812 and the subsequent military campaigns of the Russian army in Europe, Nikolai was eager to go to war, but met with a decisive refusal from the Empress Mother. In 1813, the 17-year-old Grand Duke was taught strategy. At this time, from his sister Anna Pavlovna, with whom he was very friendly, Nicholas accidentally learned that Alexander I had visited Silesia, where he had seen the family of the Prussian king, that Alexander liked his eldest daughter, Princess Charlotte, and that his intention was that Nicholas somehow met her.

Only at the beginning of 1814 did Emperor Alexander allow his younger brothers to join the army abroad. On February 5 (17), 1814, Nikolai and Mikhail left Petersburg. On this journey they were accompanied by General Lamzdorf, gentlemen: I.F. Savrasov, A.P. Aledinsky and P.I. Arseniev, Colonel Gianotti and Dr. Rühl. After 17 days, they reached Berlin, where the 17-year-old Nicholas saw the 16-year-old daughter of the King of Prussia, Frederick William III, Charlotte.

After spending one day in Berlin, the travelers proceeded through Leipzig, Weimar, where they saw their sister Maria Pavlovna, Frankfurt am Main, Bruchsal, where Empress Elizaveta Alekseevna then lived, Rastatt, Freiburg and Basel. Near Basel, they first heard enemy shots, as the Austrians and Bavarians were besieging the nearby fortress of Güningen. Then through Altkirch they entered France and reached the tail of the army at Vesoul. However, Alexander I ordered the brothers to return to Basel. Only when the news came that Paris had been taken and Napoleon had been banished to the island of Elba, did the grand dukes receive orders to come to Paris.

On November 4, 1815, in Berlin, during an official dinner, the engagement of Princess Charlotte and Tsarevich and Grand Duke Nikolai Pavlovich was announced.

After the military campaigns of the Russian army in Europe, professors were invited to the Grand Duke, who were supposed to "read the military sciences as fully as possible." For this purpose, the well-known engineering general Karl Opperman and, to help him, colonels Gianotti and Markevich were chosen.

Since 1815, military conversations between Nikolai Pavlovich and General Opperman began.

On his return from his second campaign, beginning in December 1815, Grand Duke Nicholas again began to study with some of his former professors. Balugyansky read "the science of finance", Akhverdov read Russian history (from the reign of Ivan the Terrible to the Time of Troubles). With Markevich, the Grand Duke was engaged in "military translations", and with Gianotti - reading the works of Giraud and Lloyd about various campaigns of the wars of 1814 and 1815, as well as analyzing the project "on the expulsion of the Turks from Europe under certain given conditions."

Youth

In March 1816, three months before his twentieth birthday, fate brought Nicholas together with the Grand Duchy of Finland. At the beginning of 1816, the University of Åbo, following the example of the universities of Sweden, most humbly interceded whether Alexander I would honor him with royal grace to grant him a chancellor in the person of His Imperial Highness Grand Duke Nikolai Pavlovich. According to the historian M. M. Borodkin, this “thought belongs entirely to Tengström, the bishop of the Abo diocese, a supporter of Russia. Alexander I granted the request and Grand Duke Nikolai Pavlovich was appointed chancellor of the university. His task was to maintain the status of the university and the conformity of university life with the spirit and traditions. In memory of this event, the St. Petersburg Mint minted a bronze medal.

Also in 1816 he was appointed chief of the cavalry chasseurs.

In the summer of 1816, Nikolai Pavlovich was to complete his education by taking a trip around Russia to get acquainted with his fatherland in administrative, commercial and industrial terms. Upon returning from this trip, it was also planned to make a trip abroad to get acquainted with England. On this occasion, on behalf of Empress Maria Feodorovna, a special note was drawn up, which summarized the main foundations of the administrative system of provincial Russia, described the areas that the Grand Duke had to pass through, in historical, everyday, industrial and geographical terms, it was indicated what exactly could be the subject of conversations between the Grand Duke and representatives of the provincial authorities, what should be paid attention to, and so on.

Thanks to a trip to some provinces of Russia, Nikolai got a visual idea of ​​the internal state and problems of his country, and in England he got acquainted with the experience of developing one of the most advanced socio-political systems of his time. However, Nicholas's emerging political system of views was distinguished by a pronounced conservative, anti-liberal orientation.

On July 13, 1817, Grand Duke Nicholas married Princess Charlotte of Prussia. The wedding took place on the birthday of the young princess - July 13, 1817 in the church of the Winter Palace. Charlotte of Prussia converted to Orthodoxy and was given a new name - Alexandra Feodorovna. This marriage strengthened the political union of Russia and Prussia.

The question of succession. Interregnum

In 1820, Emperor Alexander I informed his brother Nikolai Pavlovich and his wife that the heir to the throne, their brother Grand Duke Konstantin Pavlovich, intended to renounce his right, so Nikolai would become the heir as the next brother in seniority.

In 1823, Konstantin formally renounced his rights to the throne, as he had no children, was divorced and married in a second morganatic marriage to the Polish Countess Grudzinska. On August 16, 1823, Alexander I signed a secretly drawn up manifesto, which approved the abdication of the Tsesarevich and Grand Duke Konstantin Pavlovich and approved Grand Duke Nikolai Pavlovich as the Heir to the Throne. On all packages with the text of the manifesto, Alexander I himself wrote: "Keep until my demand, and in the event of my death, open before any other action."

On November 19, 1825, while in Taganrog, Emperor Alexander I died suddenly. In St. Petersburg, the news of Alexander's death was received only on the morning of November 27 during a prayer service for the emperor's health. Nicholas, the first of those present, swore allegiance to "Emperor Constantine I" and began to swear in the troops. Constantine himself was in Warsaw at that moment, being the de facto governor of the Kingdom of Poland. On the same day, the State Council met, at which the contents of the Manifesto of 1823 were heard. Finding themselves in a dual position, when the Manifesto pointed to one heir, and the oath was taken to another, the members of the Council turned to Nicholas. He refused to recognize the manifesto of Alexander I and refused to proclaim himself emperor until the final expression of the will of his elder brother. Despite the content of the Manifesto handed over to him, Nicholas called on the Council to take an oath to Constantine "for the peace of the State." Following this call, the State Council, the Senate and the Synod took an oath of allegiance to "Konstantin I".

The next day, a decree was issued on the universal oath to the new emperor. On November 30, the nobles of Moscow swore allegiance to Konstantin. In St. Petersburg, the oath was postponed until December 14.

Nevertheless, Konstantin refused to come to St. Petersburg and confirmed his renunciation in private letters to Nikolai Pavlovich, and then sent rescripts to the Chairman of the State Council (December 3 (15), 1825) and the Minister of Justice (December 8 (20), 1825). Constantine did not accept the throne, and at the same time did not want to formally renounce him as emperor, to whom the oath had already been taken. An ambiguous and extremely tense situation of the interregnum was created.

Accession to the throne. Decembrist revolt

Unable to convince his brother to take the throne and having received his final refusal (albeit without a formal act of renunciation), Grand Duke Nikolai Pavlovich decided to accept the throne in accordance with the will of Alexander I.

On the evening of December 12 (24), M. M. Speransky compiled Manifesto on the accession to the throne of Emperor Nicholas I. Nikolai signed it on December 13 in the morning. Attached to the Manifesto was a letter from Constantine to Alexander I dated January 14, 1822 on the refusal to inherit and the manifesto of Alexander I dated August 16, 1823.

The manifesto on accession to the throne was announced by Nicholas at a meeting of the State Council at about 22:30 on December 13 (25). A separate clause in the Manifesto stipulated that November 19, the day of the death of Alexander I, would be considered the time of accession to the throne, which was an attempt to legally close the gap in the continuity of autocratic power.

A second oath was appointed, or, as they said in the troops, “re-oath”, this time to Nicholas I. The re-oath in St. Petersburg was scheduled for December 14th. On this day, a group of officers - members of a secret society appointed an uprising in order to prevent the troops and the Senate from taking the oath to the new tsar and prevent Nicholas I from taking the throne. The main goal of the rebels was the liberalization of the Russian socio-political system: the establishment of a provisional government, the abolition of serfdom, the equality of all before the law, democratic freedoms (press, confession, labor), the introduction of a jury, the introduction of compulsory military service for all classes, the election of officials, abolishing the poll tax and changing the form of government to constitutional monarchy or a republic.

The rebels decided to block the Senate, send a revolutionary delegation there consisting of Ryleev and Pushchin and present the Senate with a demand not to swear allegiance to Nicholas I, declare the tsarist government deposed and issue a revolutionary manifesto to the Russian people. However, the uprising was brutally suppressed on the same day. Despite the efforts of the Decembrists to stage a coup d'état, troops and government offices were sworn in to the new emperor. Later, the surviving participants in the uprising were exiled, and five leaders were executed.

My dear Konstantin! Your will is done: I am the emperor, but at what cost, my God! At the cost of the blood of my subjects! From a letter to his brother Grand Duke Konstantin Pavlovich, December 14. No one is able to understand the burning pain that I feel and will experience all my life when I remember this day. Letter to the Ambassador of France, Count Le Ferrone No one feels a greater need than I do to be judged with leniency. But let those who judge me consider the extraordinary manner in which I have risen from the post of newly appointed chief of division to the post I currently hold, and under what circumstances. And then I will have to admit that if it were not for the obvious patronage of Divine Providence, it would not only be impossible for me to act properly, but even to cope with what the ordinary circle of my real duties requires of me ... Letter to the Tsarevich.

The highest manifesto, given on January 28, 1826, with reference to the “Institution of the Imperial Family” on April 5, 1797, decreed: “First, as the days of our life are in the hands of God: then in case of OUR death, until the legal age of the Heir, the Grand Duke ALEXANDER NIKOLAEVICH, we determine the Ruler of the State and the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Finland, inseparable from him, OUR FAMILY BROTHER, Grand Duke MIKHAIL PAVLOVICH. »

He was crowned on August 22 (September 3), 1826 in Moscow - instead of June of the same year, as originally planned - due to mourning for the Dowager Empress Elizaveta Alekseevna, who died on May 4 in Belev. The coronation of Nicholas I and Empress Alexandra took place in the Assumption Cathedral of the Kremlin.

Archbishop Filaret (Drozdov) of Moscow, who served during the coronation of Metropolitan Seraphim (Glagolevsky) of Novgorod, as is clear from his track record, was the person who presented Nicholas "a description of the opening of the act of Emperor Alexander Pavlovich stored in the Assumption Cathedral."

In 1827, the Coronation Album of Nicholas I was published in Paris.

The most important milestones of the reign

• 1826 - Establishment of the Third Branch of the Imperial Chancellery - a secret police to monitor the state of minds in the state.
• 1826-1828 - War with Persia.
• 1828-1829 - War with Turkey.
• 1828 - Foundation of the Technological Institute in St. Petersburg.
• 1830-1831 - Uprising in Poland.
• 1832 - Approval of the new status of the Kingdom of Poland within the Russian Empire.
• 1834 - The Imperial University of St. Vladimir in Kyiv was founded (the University was founded by decree of Nicholas I on November 8, 1833 as the Kyiv Imperial University of St. Vladimir, on the basis of the Vilna University and the Kremenets Lyceum closed after the Polish uprising of 1830-1831.).
• 1837 - Opening of the first Russian railway St. Petersburg - Tsarskoye Selo.
• 1839-1841 - Eastern crisis, in which Russia acted together with England against the France-Egypt coalition.
• 1849 - Participation of Russian troops in the suppression of the Hungarian uprising.
• 1851 - Completion of the construction of the Nikolaev railway, which connected St. Petersburg with Moscow. Opening of the New Hermitage.
• 1853-1856 - Crimean War. Nikolai does not live to see its end. In winter, he catches a cold and dies in 1855.

Domestic politics

His very first steps after his coronation were very liberal. The poet A. S. Pushkin was returned from exile, and V. A. Zhukovsky, whose liberal views could not be known to the emperor, was appointed the main teacher (“mentor”) of the heir. (However, Zhukovsky wrote about the events of December 14, 1825: “Providence saved Russia. By the will of Providence, this day was the day of purification. Providence was from the side of our fatherland and the throne.”)

The emperor closely followed the process of the participants in the December speech and instructed to draw up a summary of their criticisms of the state administration. Despite the fact that attempts on the life of the king, according to existing laws, were punishable by quartering, he replaced this execution by hanging.

The Ministry of State Property was headed by the hero of 1812, Count P. D. Kiselev, a monarchist by conviction, but an opponent of serfdom. The future Decembrists Pestel, Basargin and Burtsov served under him. The name of Kiselyov was presented to Nikolai in the list of conspirators in connection with the putsch case. But, despite this, Kiselev, known for the impeccability of his moral rules and talent as an organizer, made a successful career under Nicholas as the governor of Moldavia and Wallachia and took an active part in preparing the abolition of serfdom.

Deeply sincere in his convictions, often heroic and great in his devotion to the cause in which he saw the mission entrusted to him by providence, it can be said that Nicholas I was a donquixote of autocracy, a terrible and malicious donquixote, because he possessed omnipotence, which allowed him to subjugate all his fanatical and outdated theory and trample underfoot the most legitimate aspirations and rights of his age. That is why this man, who combined with the soul of a generous and chivalrous character of rare nobility and honesty, a warm and tender heart and an exalted and enlightened mind, although devoid of breadth, that is why this man could be a tyrant and despot for Russia during his 30-year reign who systematically stifled any manifestation of initiative and life in the country he ruled. A. F. Tyutcheva.

At the same time, this opinion of the court lady-in-waiting, which corresponded to the mood of representatives of the highest noble society, contradicts a number of facts indicating that it was in the era of Nicholas I that Russian literature flourished (Pushkin, Lermontov, Nekrasov, Gogol, Belinsky, Turgenev), which never happened before. was not there before, Russian industry developed extraordinarily rapidly, which for the first time began to take shape as a technically advanced and competitive one, serfdom changed its character, ceasing to be serf slavery (see below). These changes were appreciated by the most prominent contemporaries. “No, I’m not a flatterer when I compose free praise to the tsar,” A. S. Pushkin wrote about Nicholas I. Pushkin also wrote: “There is no law in Russia, but a pillar - and a crown on a pillar.” By the end of his reign, N.V. Gogol sharply changed his views on autocracy, which he began to praise, and even in serfdom he almost did not see any evil.

The following facts do not correspond to the ideas about Nicholas I as a "tyrant", which existed in the noble high society and in the liberal press. As historians point out, the execution of 5 Decembrists was the only execution in all 30 years of the reign of Nicholas I, while, for example, under Peter I and Catherine II, executions were in the thousands, and under Alexander II - in the hundreds. The situation was no better in Western Europe: for example, in Paris, 11,000 participants in the Parisian uprising in June 1848 were shot within 3 days.

Torture and beatings of prisoners in prisons, which were widely practiced in the 18th century, became a thing of the past under Nicholas I (in particular, they were not applied to the Decembrists and Petrashevists), and under Alexander II, beatings of prisoners resumed again (the trial of populists).

Its main direction domestic policy was the centralization of power. To carry out the tasks of political investigation in July 1826, a permanent body was created - the Third Branch of the Personal Office - a secret service with significant powers, the head of which (since 1827) was also the chief of the gendarmes. The third department was headed by A. Kh. Benkendorf, who became one of the symbols of the era, and after his death (1844) - A. F. Orlov.

On December 8, 1826, the first of the secret committees was created, whose task was, firstly, to consider the papers sealed in the office of Alexander I after his death, and, secondly, to consider the issue of possible transformations of the state apparatus.

On May 12 (24), 1829, in the Senate Hall in the Warsaw Palace, in the presence of senators, nuncios and deputies of the Kingdom, he was crowned as King (Tsar) of Poland. Under Nicholas, the Polish uprising of 1830-1831 was suppressed, during which Nicholas was declared deprived of the throne by the rebels (Decree on the dethronement of Nicholas I). After the suppression of the uprising, the Kingdom of Poland lost its independence, the Sejm and the army and was divided into provinces.

Some authors call Nicholas I the "knight of autocracy": he firmly defended its foundations and stopped attempts to change the existing system - despite the revolutions in Europe. After the suppression of the Decembrist uprising, he launched large-scale measures in the country to eradicate the "revolutionary infection". During the reign of Nicholas I, the persecution of the Old Believers resumed; The Uniates of Belarus and Volhynia were reunited with Orthodoxy (1839).

As for the army, to which the emperor paid much attention, D. A. Milyutin, the future Minister of War in the reign of Alexander II, writes in his notes: “... Even in military affairs, which the emperor was engaged in with such passion, the same concern for order, about discipline, they were chasing not for the essential improvement of the army, not for adapting it to a combat mission, but only for external harmony, for a brilliant view at parades, pedantic observance of countless petty formalities that dull the human mind and kill the true military spirit.

In 1834, Lieutenant General N. N. Muravyov compiled a note “On the causes of escapes and means to correct the shortcomings of the army.” “I drew up a note in which I outlined the sad state in which the troops are morally,” he wrote. - This note showed the reasons for the decline in morale in the army, flight, weakness of people, which consisted mostly in the exorbitant demands of the authorities in frequent reviews, the haste with which they tried to educate young soldiers, and, finally, in the indifference of the closest commanders to the well-being of people, they entrusted. I immediately expressed my opinion on the measures that I would consider necessary to correct this matter, which is ruining the troops year by year. I proposed not to make reviews, by which troops are not formed, not to change commanders often, not to transfer (as is now done) people hourly from one part to another, and to give the troops some peace.

In many ways, these shortcomings were associated with the existence of a recruiting system for the formation of the army, which was inherently inhumane, representing a lifelong compulsory service in the army. At the same time, the facts show that, in general, the accusations of Nicholas I in the inefficient organization of the army are unfounded. Wars with Persia and Turkey in 1826-1829. ended in the rapid defeat of both opponents, although the very duration of these wars puts this thesis into serious doubt. It must also be taken into account that neither Turkey nor Persia were among the first-class military powers in those days. During the Crimean War, the Russian army, which was significantly inferior in terms of the quality of its weapons and technical equipment to the armies of Great Britain and France, showed miracles of courage, high morale and military skills. The Crimean War is one of the rare examples of Russia's participation in the war with a Western European enemy over the past 300-400 years, in which the losses in the Russian army were lower (or at least not higher) than the losses of the enemy. The defeat of Russia in the Crimean War was associated with the political miscalculation of Nicholas I and with the lag in the development of Russia from Western Europe, where the Industrial Revolution had already taken place, but was not associated with the fighting qualities and organization of the Russian army.

Peasant question

In his reign, meetings of commissions were held to alleviate the situation of the serfs; Thus, a ban was introduced to exile peasants to hard labor, to sell them one by one and without land, the peasants received the right to redeem themselves from the estates being sold. A reform of the management of the state village was carried out and a “decree on obligated peasants” was signed, which became the foundation for the abolition of serfdom. However, the complete liberation of the peasants during the life of the emperor did not take place.

At the same time, historians - specialists in the Russian agrarian and peasant issue: N. Rozhkov, the American historian D. Blum and V. O. Klyuchevsky pointed to three significant changes in this area that occurred during the reign of Nicholas I:

1) For the first time there was a sharp decrease in the number of serfs - their share in the population of Russia, according to various estimates, decreased from 57-58% in 1811-1817. up to 35-45% in 1857-1858 and they ceased to make up the majority of the population. Obviously, a significant role was played by the cessation of the practice of "distributing" state peasants to the landlords along with the lands, which flourished under the former tsars, and the spontaneous liberation of the peasants that began.

2) The situation of the state peasants improved greatly, the number of which by the second half of the 1850s. reached about 50% of the population. This improvement was mainly due to the measures taken by Count P. D. Kiselev, who was in charge of managing state property. Thus, all state peasants were allocated their own plots of land and forest plots, and auxiliary cash desks and bread shops were established everywhere, which provided assistance to the peasants with cash loans and grain in case of crop failure. As a result of these measures, the well-being of the state peasants not only increased, but also the treasury income from them increased by 15-20%, tax arrears were halved, and by the mid-1850s there were practically no landless laborers who eked out a beggarly and dependent existence, all received land from the state.

3) The position of the serfs improved significantly. On the one hand, a number of laws were adopted to improve their situation; on the other hand, for the first time the state began to systematically ensure that the rights of the peasants were not violated by the landowners (this was one of the functions of the Third Section), and to punish the landowners for these violations. As a result of the application of punishments in relation to the landlords, by the end of the reign of Nicholas I, about 200 landowners' estates were under arrest, which greatly affected the position of the peasants and the landowner's psychology. As V. Klyuchevsky wrote, two completely new conclusions followed from the laws adopted under Nicholas I: firstly, that the peasants are not the property of the landowner, but, first of all, subjects of the state, which protects their rights; secondly, that the personality of the peasant is not the private property of the landowner, that they are bound together by their relationship to the landlords' land, from which the peasants cannot be driven away. Thus, according to the conclusions of historians, serfdom under Nicholas changed its character - from the institution of slavery, it turned into an institution that to some extent protected the rights of the peasants.

These changes in the position of the peasants caused discontent on the part of large landowners and nobles, who saw them as a threat to the established order. Particular indignation was caused by the proposals of P. D. Kiselev in relation to the serfs, which boiled down to bringing their status closer to state peasants and strengthening control over the landowners. As the great nobleman Count Nesselrode declared in 1843, Kiselev's plans for the peasants would lead to the death of the nobility, while the peasants themselves would become more impudent and rebel.

For the first time, a program of mass peasant education was launched. The number of peasant schools in the country increased from only 60 schools with 1,500 students in 1838 to 2,551 schools with 111,000 students in 1856. In the same period, many technical schools and universities were opened - in fact, A system of vocational primary and secondary education was created in the country.

Development of industry and transport

The state of affairs in industry at the beginning of the reign of Nicholas I was the worst in the history of the Russian Empire. An industry capable of competing with the West, where the Industrial Revolution was already coming to an end at that time, actually did not exist (for more details, see Industrialization in the Russian Empire). Russia's exports included only raw materials, almost all types of industrial products needed by the country were purchased abroad.

By the end of the reign of Nicholas I, the situation had changed dramatically. For the first time in the history of the Russian Empire, a technically advanced and competitive industry began to form in the country, in particular, textile and sugar, the production of metal products, clothing, wood, glass, porcelain, leather and other products developed, and their own machine tools, tools and even steam locomotives began to be produced. . According to economic historians, this was facilitated by the protectionist policy pursued throughout the reign of Nicholas I. As I. Wallerstein points out, it was precisely as a result of the protectionist industrial policy pursued by Nicholas I that the further development of Russia did not follow the path that the majority of countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America, and on a different path - the path of industrial development.

For the first time in the history of Russia, under Nicholas I, intensive construction of paved highways began: the Moscow-Petersburg, Moscow-Irkutsk, Moscow-Warsaw routes were built. Of the 7700 miles of highways built in Russia by 1893, 5300 miles (about 70%) were built in the period 1825-1860. The construction of railways was also begun and about 1,000 versts of railroad tracks were built, which gave impetus to the development of their own mechanical engineering.

The rapid development of industry led to a sharp increase in the urban population and the growth of cities. The share of the urban population during the reign of Nicholas I more than doubled - from 4.5% in 1825 to 9.2% in 1858.

Nicholas and the problem of corruption

In the reign of Nicholas I in Russia, the "era of favoritism" ended - a euphemism often used by historians, which essentially means large-scale corruption, that is, the usurpation of public positions, honors and awards by the favorites of the tsar and his entourage. Examples of "favoritism" and related corruption and large-scale embezzlement of state property can be found in in large numbers in relation to almost all the reigns in the period from the beginning of the XVII century. and up to Alexander I. But in relation to the reign of Nicholas I, there are no such examples - in general, there is not a single example of a large-scale plunder of state property that would be mentioned by historians.

Nicholas I introduced an extremely moderate incentive system for officials (in the form of renting estates / property and cash bonuses), which he himself controlled to a large extent. Unlike previous reigns, historians have not recorded large gifts in the form of palaces or thousands of serfs granted to any nobleman or royal relative. Even V. Nelidova, with whom Nicholas I had a long relationship and who had children from him, he did not give a single truly large gift comparable to what the kings of the previous era gave to their favorites.

To fight corruption on average and lower level officials for the first time under Nicholas I were introduced regular audits at all levels. Previously, such a practice practically did not exist, its introduction was dictated by the need not only to fight corruption, but also to restore elementary order in public affairs. (However, this fact is also known: the patriotic residents of Tula and the Tula province, by subscription, collected a lot of money for those times - 380 thousand rubles to install a monument on the Kulikovo field in honor of the victory over the Tatars, for almost five hundred years have passed, and the monument And they sent this money, collected with such difficulty, to St. Petersburg, to Nicholas I. As a result, A.P. Bryullov in 1847 composed a draft of the monument, iron castings were made in St. Petersburg, transported to the Tula province, and in 1849 This cast-iron pillar was erected on the Kulikovo field, its cost was 60,000 rubles, and it remains unknown where the other 320,000 went. Perhaps they went to restore elementary order).

In general, one can state a sharp reduction in large-scale corruption and the fight against medium and petty corruption has begun. For the first time the problem of corruption was raised to the state level and widely discussed. Gogol's Inspector General, which flaunted examples of bribery and theft, was shown in theaters (while earlier discussion similar topics was strictly prohibited). However, critics of the tsar regarded the fight against corruption initiated by him as an increase in corruption itself. In addition, officials came up with new methods of theft, bypassing the measures taken by Nicholas I, as evidenced by the following statement:

Nicholas I himself was critical of the successes in this area, saying that only he and the heir did not steal in his entourage.

Foreign policy

An important aspect of foreign policy was the return to the principles of the Holy Alliance. The role of Russia in the fight against any manifestations of the "spirit of change" in European life has increased. It was during the reign of Nicholas I that Russia received the unflattering nickname of the "gendarme of Europe." So, at the request of the Austrian Empire, Russia took part in the suppression of the Hungarian revolution, sending a 140,000-strong corps to Hungary, which was trying to free itself from oppression by Austria; as a result, the throne of Franz Joseph was saved. The latter circumstance did not prevent the Austrian emperor, who was afraid of an excessive strengthening of Russia's positions in the Balkans, soon taking a position unfriendly to Nicholas during the Crimean War and even threatening her with entering the war on the side of a coalition hostile to Russia, which Nicholas I regarded as ungrateful treachery; Russian-Austrian relations were hopelessly damaged until the end of the existence of both monarchies.

However, the emperor helped the Austrians not just out of charity. “It is very likely that Hungary, having defeated Austria, due to the prevailing circumstances, would have been forced to provide active assistance to the plans of the Polish emigration,” wrote the biographer of Field Marshal Paskevich, Prince. Shcherbatov.

A special place in the foreign policy of Nicholas I was occupied by the Eastern Question.

Russia under Nicholas I abandoned plans to divide the Ottoman Empire, which were discussed under previous tsars (Catherine II and Paul I), and began to pursue a completely different policy in the Balkans - the policy of protecting the Orthodox population and ensuring its religious and civil rights, up to political independence . For the first time this policy was applied in the Akkerman treaty with Turkey in 1826. According to this treaty, Moldavia and Wallachia, remaining part of the Ottoman Empire, received political autonomy with the right to elect their own government, which was formed under the control of Russia. After half a century of the existence of such autonomy, the state of Romania was formed on this territory - according to the San Stefano Treaty of 1878. “In exactly the same order,” wrote V. Klyuchevsky, “other tribes of the Balkan Peninsula were liberated: the tribe rebelled against Turkey; the Turks sent their forces to him; at a certain moment, Russia shouted to Turkey: “Stop!”; then Turkey began to prepare for a war with Russia, the war was lost, and the insurgent tribe received internal independence by agreement, remaining under supreme authority Turkey. With a new clash between Russia and Turkey, vassalage was destroyed. This is how the Serbian Principality was formed according to the Adrianople Treaty of 1829, the Greek Kingdom - according to the same agreement and according to the London Protocol of 1830 ... "

Along with this, Russia sought to ensure its influence in the Balkans and the possibility of unhindered navigation in the straits (Bosphorus and Dardanelles).

During the Russian-Turkish wars of 1806-1812. and 1828-1829, Russia made great strides in implementing this policy. At the request of Russia, which declared itself the patroness of all Christian subjects of the Sultan, the Sultan was forced to recognize the freedom and independence of Greece and the broad autonomy of Serbia (1830); According to the Unkyar-Iskelesik Treaty (1833), which marked the peak of Russian influence in Constantinople, Russia received the right to block the passage of foreign ships to the Black Sea (which it lost in 1841)

The same reasons: the support of the Orthodox Christians of the Ottoman Empire and disagreements on the Eastern Question, pushed Russia to aggravate relations with Turkey in 1853, which resulted in her declaring war on Russia. The beginning of the war with Turkey in 1853 was marked by the brilliant victory of the Russian fleet under the command of Admiral PS Nakhimov, who defeated the enemy in Sinop Bay. It was the last major battle of the sailing fleet.

Russia's military successes caused a negative reaction in the West. The leading world powers were not interested in strengthening Russia at the expense of the decrepit Ottoman Empire. This created the basis for a military alliance between England and France. The miscalculation of Nicholas I in assessing the internal political situation in England, France and Austria led to the fact that the country was in political isolation. In 1854, England and France entered the war on the side of Turkey. Due to the technical backwardness of Russia, it was difficult to resist these European powers. The main hostilities unfolded in the Crimea. In October 1854, the Allies laid siege to Sevastopol. The Russian army suffered a series of defeats and was unable to provide assistance to the besieged fortress city. Despite the heroic defense of the city, after an 11-month siege, in August 1855, the defenders of Sevastopol were forced to surrender the city. At the beginning of 1856, following the results of the Crimean War, the Treaty of Paris was signed. According to its terms, Russia was forbidden to have naval forces, arsenals and fortresses on the Black Sea. Russia became vulnerable from the sea and was deprived of the opportunity to pursue an active foreign policy in this region.

Even more serious were the consequences of the war in the economic field. Immediately after the end of the war, in 1857, a liberal customs tariff was introduced in Russia, which practically abolished duties on Western European industrial imports, which may have been one of the peace conditions imposed on Russia by Great Britain. The result was an industrial crisis: by 1862, iron smelting in the country fell by 1/4, and cotton processing - by 3.5 times. The growth of imports led to the outflow of money from the country, the deterioration of the trade balance and the chronic shortage of money in the treasury.

During the reign of Nicholas I, Russia participated in the wars: the Caucasian War of 1817-1864, the Russian-Persian War of 1826-1828, the Russian-Turkish War of 1828-29, the Crimean War of 1853-56.

Emperor Engineer

Having received a good engineering education in his youth, Nikolai showed considerable knowledge in the field of construction equipment. So, he made sensible proposals regarding the dome of the Trinity Cathedral in St. Petersburg. In the future, already occupying the highest position in the state, he closely followed the order in urban planning and not a single significant project was approved without his signature. He established a regulation on the height of buildings in the capital, forbidding the construction of civil structures higher than the eaves of the Winter Palace. Thus, the well-known, and until recently, St. Petersburg city panorama was created, thanks to which the city was considered one of the most beautiful cities in the world and was included in the list of cities considered the cultural heritage of mankind.

Knowing the requirements for choosing a suitable place for the construction of an astronomical observatory, Nikolai personally indicated a place for it on the top of Pulkovo Mountain

The first railways appeared in Russia (since 1837).

There is an opinion that Nikolai got acquainted with steam locomotives at the age of 19 during a trip to England in 1816. The locals proudly showed Grand Duke Nikolai Pavlovich their successes in the field of locomotive building and railway construction. There is a statement that the future emperor became the first Russian stoker - he could not resist asking engineer Stephenson for his railway, climbing onto the platform of a steam locomotive, throwing several shovels of coal into the furnace and riding this miracle.

The far-sighted Nikolai, having studied in detail the technical data of the railways proposed for construction, demanded a broadening of the Russian gauge compared to the European one (1524 mm versus 1435 in Europe), rightly fearing that the enemy would be able to come to Russia by steam locomotive. This, a hundred years later, significantly hampered the supply of the German occupation forces and their maneuver due to the lack of locomotives for the broad gauge. So in the November days of 1941, the troops of the Center group received only 30% of the military supplies necessary for a successful attack on Moscow. The daily supply was only 23 echelons, when 70 were required to develop success. In addition, when the crisis that arose on the African front near Tobruk required the rapid transfer to the south of part of the military contingents withdrawn from the Moscow direction, this transfer was extremely difficult for the same reason.

The high relief of the monument to Nicholas in St. Petersburg depicts an episode that occurred during his inspector tour of Nikolaevskaya railway, when his train stopped at the Verebinsky railway bridge and could not go further, because the rails were painted white out of loyal zeal.

Under the Marquis de Travers, due to lack of funds, the Russian fleet often operated in the eastern part of the Gulf of Finland, which was nicknamed the Marquis Puddle. At that time, the naval defense of St. Petersburg relied on a system of wood-and-earth fortifications near Kronstadt, armed with outdated short-range cannons, which allowed the enemy to destroy them from long distances without hindrance. Already in December 1827, at the direction of the Emperor, work began on replacing wooden fortifications with stone ones. Nikolai personally reviewed the designs of the fortifications proposed by the engineers and approved them. And in some cases (for example, during the construction of the fort "Paul the First"), he made specific proposals to reduce the cost and speed up construction.

The emperor carefully selected the performers of the work. So, he patronized the previously little-known lieutenant colonel Zarzhetsky, who became the main builder of the Kronstadt Nikolaev docks. The work was carried out in a timely manner, and by the time the English squadron of Admiral Napier appeared in the Baltic, the defense of the capital, provided by strong fortifications and mine banks, had become so impregnable that the first Lord of the Admiralty, James Graham, pointed out to Napier that any attempt to capture Kronstadt was disastrous. As a result, the St. Petersburg public received a reason for entertainment by going to Oranienbaum and Krasnaya Gorka to observe the evolution of the enemy fleet. Created under Nicholas I for the first time in world practice, the mine and artillery position turned out to be an insurmountable obstacle on the way to the capital of the state.

Nicholas was aware of the need for reforms, but taking into account the experience gained, he considered their implementation a lengthy and cautious matter. Nikolai looked at the state subordinate to him, as an engineer looks at a complex, but deterministic mechanism in its functioning, in which everything is interconnected and the reliability of one part ensures the correct operation of others. The ideal of a social structure was army life fully regulated by charters.

Death

He died “at twelve minutes after one in the afternoon” on February 18 (March 2), 1855 due to pneumonia (he caught a cold while taking the parade in a light uniform, being already sick with the flu).

There is a conspiracy theory, widespread in the society of that time, that Nicholas I accepted the defeat of General Khrulev S.A. near Yevpatoriya during the Crimean War as the final harbinger of defeat in the war, and therefore asked the life physician Mandt to give him poison that would allow him commit suicide without unnecessary suffering and quickly enough, but not suddenly, to prevent personal shame. The emperor forbade the autopsy and embalming of his body.

As eyewitnesses recalled, the emperor passed away in a clear mind, not for a minute losing his presence of mind. He managed to say goodbye to each of the children and grandchildren and, having blessed them, turned to them with a reminder that they should remain friendly with each other.

His son Alexander II ascended the Russian throne.

“I was surprised,” A.E. Zimmerman recalled, “that the death of Nikolai Pavlovich, apparently, did not make a special impression on the defenders of Sevastopol. I noticed in everyone almost indifference to my questions, when and why the Sovereign died, they answered: we don’t know ... ”.

Culture, censorship and writers

Nicholas suppressed the slightest manifestations of freethinking. In 1826, a censorship charter was issued, nicknamed "cast iron" by his contemporaries. It was forbidden to print almost everything that had any political overtones. In 1828, another censorship charter was issued, somewhat softening the previous one. A new increase in censorship was associated with the European revolutions of 1848. It got to the point that in 1836 the censor P. I. Gaevsky, after serving 8 days in the guardhouse, doubted whether it was possible to let news like “such and such a king died” be allowed to go into print. When, in 1837, an article about an attempt on the life of the French King Louis Philippe was published in the St.

In September 1826, Nikolai received Pushkin, who had been released by him from Mikhailov’s exile, and listened to his confession that on December 14 Pushkin would have been with the conspirators, but he treated him kindly: he saved the poet from general censorship (he decided to censor his writings himself), instructed him to prepare note "On public education", called it after the meeting " smartest person Russia ”(however, later, after the death of Pushkin, he spoke of him and this meeting very coldly). In 1828, Nikolai dismissed the case against Pushkin about the authorship of the Gavriiliada after a handwritten letter from the poet, which, according to many researchers, was handed over to him personally, bypassing the commission of inquiry, contained, in the opinion of many researchers, recognition of the authorship of the seditious work after long denials. However, the emperor never fully trusted the poet, seeing him as a dangerous "leader of the liberals", the poet was under police surveillance, his letters were censored; Pushkin, having gone through the first euphoria, which was also expressed in poems in honor of the tsar (“Stans”, “To Friends”), by the mid-1830s, he also began to evaluate the sovereign ambiguously. “He has a lot of ensign and a little Peter the Great,” Pushkin wrote about Nikolai in his diary on May 21, 1834; at the same time, the diary also notes “sensible” remarks on the “History of Pugachev” (the sovereign edited it and gave Pushkin 20 thousand rubles in debt), ease of handling and good language of the tsar. In 1834, Pushkin was appointed chamber junker of the imperial court, which weighed heavily on the poet and was also reflected in his diary. Nikolai himself considered such an appointment a gesture of recognition of the poet and was internally upset that Pushkin was cool about the appointment. Pushkin could sometimes afford not to come to the balls to which Nikolai invited him personally. Balam Pushkin preferred communication with writers, while Nikolai showed him his displeasure. The role played by Nikolai in Pushkin's conflict with Dantes is controversially assessed by historians. After the death of Pushkin, Nikolai granted a pension to his widow and children, but he tried in every possible way to limit speeches in memory of him, showing, in particular, thereby dissatisfaction with the violation of his ban on duels.

Guided by the charter of 1826, the Nikolaev censors reached the point of absurdity in their prohibitive zeal. One of them forbade printing an arithmetic textbook after he saw three dots between the numbers in the text of the problem and suspected the author's malicious intent. Chairman of the censorship committee D.P. Buturlin even suggested deleting certain passages (for example: "Rejoice, invisible taming of cruel and bestial lords...") from the akathist to Pokrov Mother of God because they looked "unreliable".

Nikolai also doomed Polezhaev, who was arrested for free poetry, to years of soldiery, twice ordered Lermontov to be exiled to the Caucasus. By his order, the magazines "European", "Moscow Telegraph", "Telescope" were closed, P. Chaadaev and his publisher were persecuted, F. Schiller was banned from staging in Russia.

I. S. Turgenev was arrested in 1852, and then administratively sent to the village only for writing an obituary dedicated to the memory of Gogol (the obituary itself was not passed by the censors). The censor also suffered when he let Turgenev's Notes of a Hunter go to print, in which, in the opinion of the Moscow Governor-General Count A. A. Zakrevsky, "a decisive direction was expressed towards the destruction of the landlords."

Liberal contemporary writers (primarily A. I. Herzen) were inclined to demonize Nicholas.

There were facts showing his personal participation in the development of the arts: personal censorship of Pushkin (the general censorship of that time was much tougher and more cautious in a number of issues), support for the Alexandrinsky Theater. As I. L. Solonevich wrote in this regard, “Pushkin read “Eugene Onegin” to Nicholas I, and N. Gogol read “Dead Souls”. Nicholas I financed both, was the first to note the talent of L. Tolstoy, and wrote a review about the Hero of Our Time, which would do honor to any professional literary critic ... Nicholas I had both literary taste and civic courage to defend The Inspector General and after the first performance, say: “Everyone got it - and most of all ME.”

In 1850, by order of Nicholas I, the play by N. A. Ostrovsky "Let's Settle Our People" was banned from staging. The Committee of Higher Censorship was dissatisfied with the fact that among the characters drawn by the author there was not “one of those respectable merchants of ours, in whom piety, honesty and directness of mind constitute a typical and inalienable attribute.”

Liberals were not the only ones under suspicion. Professor M. P. Pogodin, who published The Moskvityanin, was placed under police supervision in 1852 for a critical article about N. V. Kukolnik's play The Batman (about Peter I), which received praise from the emperor.

A critical review of another play by the Dollmaker - "The Hand of the Most High Fatherland Saved" led to the closure in 1834 of the Moscow Telegraph magazine, published by N. A. Polev. The Minister of Public Education, Count S. S. Uvarov, who initiated the repressions, wrote about the journal: “It is a conductor of the revolution, it has been systematically spreading destructive rules for several years now. He doesn't like Russia."

Censorship did not allow publication of some jingoistic articles and works containing harsh and politically undesirable statements and views, which happened, for example, during the Crimean War with two poems by F.I. Tyutchev. From one (“Prophecy”), Nicholas I with his own hand crossed out a paragraph that dealt with the erection of a cross over Sophia of Constantinople and the “all-Slavic king”; another (“Now you are not up to poetry”) was banned from publication by the minister, apparently due to the “somewhat harsh tone of presentation” noted by the censor.

"He would like," S. M. Solovyov wrote about him, "to cut off all the heads that rose above the general level."

Nicknames

Home nickname is Nix. Official nickname - Unforgettable.

Leo Tolstoy in the story "Nikolai Palkin" gives another nickname for the emperor:

Family and personal life

In 1817, Nicholas married Princess Charlotte of Prussia, the daughter of Friedrich Wilhelm III, who, after converting to Orthodoxy, received the name Alexandra Feodorovna. The couple were each other's fourth cousins ​​and sisters (they had a common great-great-grandfather and great-great-grandmother).

In the spring of the following year, their first son Alexander (future Emperor Alexander II) was born. Children:

• Alexander II Nikolaevich (1818-1881)
• Maria Nikolaevna (6.08.1819-9.02.1876)

1st marriage - Maximilian Duke of Leuchtenberg (1817-1852)

2nd marriage (unofficial marriage since 1854) - Stroganov Grigory Alexandrovich, Count

• Olga Nikolaevna (08/30/1822 - 10/18/1892)

husband - Friedrich-Karl-Alexander, King of Württemberg

• Alexandra (06/12/1825 - 07/29/1844)

husband - Friedrich Wilhelm, Prince of Hesse-Kassel

• Konstantin Nikolaevich (1827-1892)
• Nikolai Nikolaevich (1831-1891)
• Mikhail Nikolaevich (1832-1909)

Had 4 or 7 alleged illegitimate children (see List of illegitimate children of Russian emperors # Nicholas I).

Nikolay was in connection with Varvara Nelidova for 17 years.

Assessing the attitude of Nicholas I towards women in general, Herzen wrote: “I do not believe that he ever passionately loved any woman, like Pavel Lopukhin, like Alexander of all women except his wife; he 'was kind to them', nothing more.

Personality, business and human qualities

“The sense of humor inherent in Grand Duke Nikolai Pavlovich is clearly visible in his drawings. Friends and relatives, met types, peeped scenes, sketches of camp life - the plots of his youthful drawings. All of them are executed easily, dynamically, quickly, with a simple pencil, on small sheets of paper, often in the manner of a caricature. “He had a talent for caricatures,” Paul Lacroix wrote about the emperor, “and in the most successful way he captured the funny sides of the faces that he wanted to put in some kind of satirical drawing.”

“He was handsome, but his beauty was cold; there is no face that reveals the character of a person so mercilessly as his face. The forehead, quickly running back, the lower jaw, developed at the expense of the skull, expressed an unyielding will and weak thought, more cruelty than sensuality. But the main thing is the eyes, without any warmth, without any mercy, winter eyes.

He led an ascetic and healthy lifestyle; never missed Sunday services. He did not smoke and did not like smokers, did not drink strong drinks, walked a lot, and did drills with weapons. His strict adherence to the daily routine was known: the working day began at 7 o'clock in the morning, at exactly 9 o'clock - the acceptance of reports. He preferred to dress in a simple officer's overcoat, and slept on a hard bed.

He had a good memory and great working capacity; The working day of the king lasted 16 - 18 hours. According to the words of Archbishop Innokenty (Borisov) of Kherson, “he was such a crowned bearer, for whom the royal throne served not as a head to rest, but as an incentive to unceasing work.”

Fraylina A.F. Tyutcheva, writes that he “spent 18 hours a day at work, worked until late at night, got up at dawn, sacrificed nothing for pleasure and everything for the sake of duty, and took on more work and worries than the last day laborer from his subjects. He honestly and sincerely believed that he was able to see everything with his own eyes, hear everything with his ears, regulate everything according to his own understanding, transform everything with his will. But what was the result of such a hobby of the supreme ruler for trifles? As a result, he only piled up a heap of colossal abuses around his uncontrolled power, all the more pernicious because they were covered from the outside by official legality and that neither public opinion nor private initiative had the right to point them out, nor the opportunity to fight them.

The king's love for law, justice, and order was well known. I personally visited military formations, reviews, examined fortifications, educational institutions, office premises, and government agencies. Remarks and "spreading" was always accompanied by specific advice on correcting the situation.

A younger contemporary of Nicholas I, historian S. M. Solovyov, writes: "according to the accession of Nicholas, a military man, like a stick, accustomed not to reason, but to perform and capable of accustoming others to perform without reasoning, was considered the best, most capable boss everywhere; experience in affairs - no attention was paid to this. Soldiers sat down in all government places, and ignorance, arbitrariness, robbery, all kinds of unrest reigned with them.

He had a pronounced ability to attract talented, creatively gifted people to work, “to form a team”. The employees of Nicholas I were the commander Field Marshal His Serene Highness Prince I.F. Paskevich, the Minister of Finance Count E.F. Kankrin, the Minister of State Property Count P.D. Kiselev, the Minister of Public Education Count S.S. Uvarov and others. Talented architect Konstantin

Ton served under him as a state architect. However, this did not stop Nikolai from severely fining him for his sins.

Absolutely not versed in people and their talents. Personnel appointments, with rare exceptions, turned out to be unsuccessful (the most striking example of this is the Crimean War, when, during the life of Nicholas, the two best corps commanders - Generals Leaders and Rediger - were never assigned to the army operating in the Crimea). Even very capable people were often appointed to completely inappropriate positions. “He is the vice director of the trade department,” Zhukovsky wrote to the appointment of the poet and publicist Prince P. A. Vyazemsky to a new post. - Laughter and more! We use people nicely…”

Through the eyes of contemporaries and publicists

In the book of the French writer Marquis de Custine "La Russie en 1839" ("Russia in 1839"), which is sharply critical of the autocracy of Nicholas and many features of Russian life, Nicholas is described as follows:

It can be seen that the emperor cannot for a moment forget who he is and what attention he attracts; he constantly poses and, consequently, is never natural, even when he speaks with all frankness; his face knows three different expressions, none of which can be called kind. Most often, severity is written on this face. Another expression, rarer, but much more suited to his beautiful features, is solemnity, and, finally, the third is courtesy; the first two expressions evoke cold surprise, slightly softened only by the charm of the emperor, of whom we get some idea, just as he honors us with a kind address. However, one circumstance spoils everything: the fact is that each of these expressions, suddenly leaving the face of the emperor, disappears completely, leaving no traces. Before our eyes, without any preparation, a change of scenery is taking place; it seems as if the autocrat puts on a mask that he can take off at any moment.(...) A hypocrite, or a comedian, are harsh words, especially inappropriate in the mouth of a person who claims respectful and impartial judgments. However, I believe that for intelligent readers - and only to them I am addressing - speeches do not mean anything in themselves, and their content depends on the meaning that is put into them. I do not at all want to say that the face of this monarch lacks honesty - no, I repeat, he lacks only naturalness: thus, one of the main disasters from which Russia suffers, the lack of freedom, is reflected even on the face of its sovereign: he has several masks, but no face. You are looking for a man - and you find only the Emperor. In my opinion, my remark for the emperor is flattering: he conscientiously corrects his craft. This autocrat, towering over other people due to his height, just as his throne rises above other chairs, considers it a weakness for a moment to become an ordinary person and show that he lives, thinks and feels like a mere mortal. He does not seem to know any of our attachments; he forever remains commander, judge, general, admiral, finally, monarch - no more and no less. By the end of his life he will be very tired, but the Russian people - and perhaps the peoples of the whole world - will lift him to a great height, for the crowd loves amazing accomplishments and is proud of the efforts made in order to conquer it.

Along with this, Custine wrote in his book that Nicholas I was mired in debauchery and dishonored a huge number of decent girls and women: “If he (the tsar) distinguishes a woman on a walk, in the theater, in the world, he says one word to the adjutant on duty. A person who has attracted the attention of a deity falls under supervision, under supervision. They warn the spouse, if she is married, parents, if she is a girl, about the honor that has fallen to them. There are no examples of this distinction being accepted otherwise than with an expression of respectful gratitude. Similarly, there are no examples yet of dishonored husbands or fathers not profiting from their dishonor. Custine claimed that all this was “put on stream”, that girls dishonored by the emperor were usually given off as one of the court suitors, and none other than the tsar’s wife herself, Empress Alexandra Feodorovna, did this. However, historians do not confirm the accusations of debauchery and the existence of a “conveyor of victims” dishonored by Nicholas I contained in Custine’s book, and vice versa, they write that he was monogamous and for many years maintained a long attachment to one woman.

Contemporaries noted the “basilisk look” peculiar to the emperor, unbearable for people of the timid ten.

General B.V. Gerua in his memoirs (Memoirs of my life. Tanais, Paris, 1969) gives the following story about Nicholas: “Regarding the guard duty under Nicholas I, I recall the tombstone at the Lazarevsky cemetery of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra in St. Petersburg. His father showed me when we went with him to worship the graves of his parents and passed by this unusual monument. It was excellently executed in bronze - probably by a first-class craftsman - the figure of a young and handsome officer of the Semyonovsky Life Guards Regiment, lying as if in a sleeping position. His head rests on a bucket-shaped shako of the Nikolaev reign, its first half. The collar is open. The body is decoratively covered with a thrown-on cloak, which descended to the floor in picturesque, heavy folds.

My father told the story of this monument. The officer lay down on guard duty to rest and unfastened the hooks of his huge stand-up collar, which cut his neck. It was forbidden. Hearing some noise through a dream, he opened his eyes and saw the Sovereign above him! The officer never got up. He died of a broken heart."

N.V. Gogol wrote that Nicholas I, with his arrival in Moscow during the horrors of the cholera epidemic, showed a desire to raise up and encourage the fallen - “a trait that hardly any of the crowned bearers showed”, which caused A. S. Pushkin “these wonderful poems ”(“ A conversation between a bookseller and a poet; Pushkin talks about Napoleon I with a hint of modern events):

In Selected Places from Correspondence with Friends, Gogol enthusiastically writes about Nikolai and claims that Pushkin also allegedly addressed Nikolai, who read out Homer during the ball, with the apologetic poem “You talked to Homer alone for a long time ...”, hiding this dedication for fear of being branded a liar . In Pushkin studies, this attribution is often questioned; it is indicated that the dedication to the translator of Homer N. I. Gnedich is more likely.

An extremely negative assessment of the personality and activities of Nicholas I is associated with the work of A. I. Herzen. Herzen, who from his youth painfully experienced the failure of the Decembrist uprising, attributed cruelty, rudeness, vindictiveness, intolerance to “free thinking” to the personality of the tsar, accused him of following a reactionary course of domestic policy.

I. L. Solonevich wrote that Nicholas I, like Alexander Nevsky and Ivan III, was a true “sovereign master”, with a “master’s eye and master’s calculation”

N. A. Rozhkov believed that Nicholas I was alien to the love of power, the enjoyment of personal power: "Paul I and Alexander I, more than Nicholas, loved power, as such, in itself."

AI Solzhenitsyn admired the courage of Nicholas I, shown by him during the cholera riot. Seeing the helplessness and fear of the officials around him, the tsar himself went into the crowd of rebellious people with cholera, suppressed this rebellion with his own authority, and, leaving the quarantine, he himself took off and burned all his clothes right in the field so as not to infect his retinue.

And here is what N.E. Wrangel writes in his "Memoirs (from serfdom to the Bolsheviks)": Now, after the harm caused by the lack of will of Nicholas II, Nicholas I is again in vogue, and I will be reproached, perhaps that I this, “adored by all his contemporaries,” the Monarch did not treat with due respect. The fascination with the late Sovereign Nikolai Pavlovich by his current admirers, in any case, is both more understandable and sincere than the adoration of his deceased contemporaries. Nikolai Pavlovich, like his grandmother Ekaterina, managed to acquire an innumerable number of admirers and praisers, to form a halo around him. Catherine succeeded in this by bribing encyclopedists and various French and German greedy brethren with flattery, gifts and money, and her Russian close associates with ranks, orders, endowing peasants and land. Nikolai also succeeded, and even in a less unprofitable way - by fear. By bribery and fear, everything is always and everywhere achieved, everything, even immortality. Nikolai Pavlovich's contemporaries did not "worship" him, as it was customary to say during his reign, but they were afraid. Ignorance, non-worship would probably be recognized as a state crime. And gradually this custom-made feeling, a necessary guarantee of personal security, entered the flesh and blood of contemporaries and then was instilled in their children and grandchildren. The late Grand Duke Mikhail Nikolayevich10 used to go to Dr. Dreherin for treatment in Dresden. To my surprise, I saw that this seventy-year-old man kept kneeling down during the service.

How does he do it? - I asked his son Nikolai Mikhailovich, a well-known historian of the first quarter of the 19th century.

Most likely, he is still afraid of his "unforgettable" father. He managed to instill in them such fear that they will not forget him until their death.

But I heard that the Grand Duke, your father, adored his father.

Yes, and, oddly enough, quite sincerely.

Why is it strange? He was adored by many at the time.

Do not make me laugh. (...)

Once I asked Adjutant General Chikhachev, the former Minister of the Navy, whether it was true that all his contemporaries idolized the Sovereign.

Still would! I was even flogged for this time and it was very painful.

Tell!

I was only four years old when, as an orphan, I was placed in the juvenile orphanage section of the building. There were no educators, but there were ladies-educators. Once mine asked me if I love the Sovereign. I heard about the Sovereign for the first time and answered that I did not know. Well, they beat me up. That's all.

And did it help? Loved?

That is how! Directly - began to idolize. Satisfied with the first spanking.

What if they didn't worship?

Of course, they wouldn't pat on the head. It was mandatory, for everyone, both upstairs and downstairs.

So it was necessary to pretend?

At that time, they did not go into such psychological subtleties. We were ordered - we loved. Then they said - only geese think, not people.

Monuments

In honor of Emperor Nicholas I in the Russian Empire, about a dozen monuments were erected, mainly various columns and obelisks, in memory of his visit to one place or another. Almost all sculptural monuments to the Emperor (with the exception of the equestrian monument in St. Petersburg) were destroyed during the years of Soviet power.

Currently, there are the following monuments to the Emperor:

• St. Petersburg. Equestrian monument on St. Isaac's Square. Opened June 26, 1859, sculptor P. K. Klodt. The monument has been preserved in its original form. The fence surrounding it was dismantled in the 1930s, recreated again in 1992.

• St. Petersburg. Bronze bust of the Emperor on a high granite pedestal. It was opened on July 12, 2001 in front of the facade of the building of the former psychiatric department of the Nikolaev military hospital, founded in 1840 by decree of the Emperor (now the St. Petersburg District Military Clinical Hospital), 63 Suvorovsky pr. a bust on a granite pedestal, was opened in front of the main facade of this hospital on August 15, 1890. The monument was destroyed shortly after 1917.

• St. Petersburg. Gypsum bust on a high granite pedestal. Opened on May 19, 2003 on the front staircase of the Vitebsk railway station (Zagorodny pr., 52), sculptors V. S. and S. V. Ivanov, architect T. L. Torich.

The third son of Paul I, brother of Alexander I, Nicholas (1796-1855) came to the throne in 1825 and ruled Russia for three decades. His time is the apogee of autocracy in Russia.

In 1796, in Last year reign of Catherine II, her third grandson was born, who was named Nicholas. He grew up as a healthy and strong child, standing out among his peers. tall. He lost his father at the age of four. He did not have a close relationship with his older brothers. He spent his childhood in endless war games with his younger brother. Looking at Nicholas, Alexander I thought longingly that this frowning, angular teenager would eventually take his throne.

Nicholas studied unevenly. Social Sciences seemed boring to him. However, he was attracted to the exact and natural sciences, and he was really fond of military engineering. Once he was given an essay on the topic that military service is not the only occupation of a nobleman, that there are other occupations that are honorable and useful. Nikolai did not write anything, and the teachers had to write this essay themselves, and then dictate it to their student.

Unlike Alexander I, Nicholas I was always a stranger to the ideas of constitutionalism and liberalism. . In everyday life, he was very unpretentious. Severity kept even in the family circle. Once, when he was already an emperor, he was talking with the viceroy in the Caucasus. At the end of the conversation, as usual, he asked about the health of his wife. The viceroy complained about her frustrated nerves. “Nerves?” Nicholas asked again. “The Empress also had nerves. But I said that there were no nerves, and they were gone.”

Having visited England, Nikolai expressed the wish that all these talkers who make noise at rallies and in clubs would be left speechless. But in Berlin, at the court of his father-in-law, the Prussian king, he felt at home. The German officers were surprised how well he knew the Prussian military regulations.

In 1819, his brother Emperor Alexander I announced that the heir to the throne, Grand Duke Konstantin Pavlovich, wanted to renounce his right to succeed to the throne, so Nicholas would become the heir as the next brother in seniority. Formally, Grand Duke Konstantin Pavlovich renounced his rights to the throne in 1823, since he had no children in a legal marriage and was married in a morganatic marriage to the Polish Countess Grudzinskaya.

KONSTANTIN PAVLOVICH ROMANOV
On August 16, 1823, Alexander I signed a manifesto appointing his brother Nikolai Pavlovich as heir to the throne.

However, Nicholas the First Pavlovich refused to proclaim himself emperor until the final expression of the will of his elder brother. Nicholas refused to recognize Alexander's will, and on November 27 the entire population was sworn in to Constantine, and Nicholas Pavlovich himself swore allegiance to Constantine I as emperor. But Konstantin Pavlovich did not accept the throne, at the same time he did not want to formally renounce him as emperor, to whom the oath had already been taken. An ambiguous and very tense interregnum was created, which lasted twenty-five days, until December 14th.

After the death of Emperor Alexander I and the abdication of the throne by Grand Duke Konstantin, Nicholas was nevertheless proclaimed emperor on December 2 (14), 1825.

During the reign of Nicholas I Pavlovich, Russia participated in the wars: the Caucasian War of 1817-1864, the Russian-Persian War of 1826-1828, the Russian-Turkish War of 1828-29, the Crimean War of 1853-56.

Among the people, Nicholas I received the nickname "Nikolai Palkin", because in childhood he beat his comrades with a stick. In historiography, this nickname was established after the story of L.N. Tolstoy "After the Ball".

Nicholas I Pavlovich died suddenly on February 18 (March 2), 1855 at the height of the Crimean War; according to the most common version - from transient pneumonia (he caught a cold shortly before his death, taking a military parade in a light uniform) or flu. The emperor forbade doing an autopsy and embalming his body.

There is a version that Nicholas the First committed suicide by drinking poison, due to defeats in the Crimean War. After his death, the Russian throne was inherited by his son, Alexander II.

Nicholas led an ascetic and healthy lifestyle. The growth of Nicholas I Pavlovich was 205 cm. He was a believing Orthodox Christian, he did not smoke and did not like smokers, did not drink strong drinks, walked a lot and did drills with weapons. He had a remarkable memory and a great capacity for work. Archbishop Innokenty wrote about him: "He was ... such a crowned bearer, for whom the royal throne served not as a head to rest, but as an incentive to unceasing work." According to the memoirs of the maid of honor of Her Imperial Majesty, Anna Tyutcheva, the favorite phrase of Emperor Nikolai Pavlovich was: "I work like a galley slave."

All historians agree on one thing: Nikolai the First Pavlovich was undoubtedly a bright figure among the rulers-emperors of Russia.

Monument to Nicholas I on St. Isaac's Square

The monument to another royal person - Tsar Nicholas I - was opened on July 25, 1859, shortly after the death of the sovereign, on St. Isaac's Square in St. Petersburg. The author of the sculpture project is Auguste Montferrand, Peter Klodt worked on the horse project, the pedestal was made by architects N. Efimov and A. Poirot, sculptors R. Zaleman and N. Ramazanov.

The monument to Nicholas I is unique in terms of an engineering find: a massive sculpture over 16 meters high has only two points of support - the horse's hind legs. The casting technology used here is the same as in the casting of the Bronze Horseman. The sculptural portrait depicts the Emperor in full dress uniform of the Cavalry Guards Regiment. On four sides, the monument is surrounded by very beautifully executed lanterns.
The pedestal of the monument is also a piece of sculpture art. It is decorated with allegorical figures of Wisdom, Strength, Faith and Justice in the form of female images. According to legend, Nikolai's wife and three of his daughters posed for these figures. Also on the pedestal are high reliefs depicting the main events of the reign of Nicholas I: the Decembrist uprising in 1825, the suppression of the cholera riot on Sennaya Square in 1831, the awarding of Speransky for compiling the first set of laws in 1832, the opening of the Verebinsky bridge on the St. Petersburg railway - Moscow in 1851. The facing of the pedestal consists of several types of marble, red Shoksha porphyry, red Finnish and dark gray Serdobol granite