Nicholas I

Franz Krüger’s portrait of Nicholas I is a later photograph of a canvas: dark uniform, sash, star. Use it as a face of the reign, not as a picture of a police office. Do not ask it to do Senate Square. The last article closed on five hangings. This page is the thirty years that followed. Nicholas was born on 6 July 1796, 25 June Old Style, at Tsarskoye Selo, and died on 18 February 1855, 2 March New Style, in St Petersburg. He is often considered the personification of classic autocracy. For his reactionary policies he has been called the emperor who froze Russia for thirty years. The Crimean War that ended the freeze has the next article. Keep this one as the system: militarism, bureaucracy, gendarmes, a slogan, and a policeman’s ambition in Europe.

He was Paul’s son, Alexander’s much younger brother, raised with a Scottish nurse and then with severe discipline under General Matthew Lamsdorff. He loved only military science. Circumstances favoured militarism: his education was interrupted by the struggles against Napoleon in 1812–15. He married Princess Charlotte of Prussia, Alexandra after she became Orthodox, in 1817. The new regime became preeminently one of militarism and bureaucracy. The emperor surrounded himself with military men, to the extent that late in his reign there were almost no civilians among his immediate assistants. He relied on special emissaries, most of them generals of his suite, sent across Russia to execute the sovereign’s will. The entire machinery of government came to be permeated by the military spirit of direct orders, absolute obedience, and precision — at least as far as official reports and appearances were concerned. Corruption and confusion lay immediately behind that façade.

He often bypassed regular channels and resented formal deliberation. The importance of the Committee of Ministers, the State Council, and the Senate decreased. He depended on ad hoc committees of a handful of trusted assistants; the same men in different combinations formed these committees throughout the reign. They typically worked in secret. The failure of one committee to perform its task merely led to the formation of another. Some nine committees tried to deal with the issue of serfdom. Determined to preserve autocracy, afraid to abolish serfdom, and suspicious of all independent initiative, the emperor and his government could not introduce the much-needed basic reforms. In practice as well as in theory they looked backward. The next chapter of this book will have a son who does abolish serfdom. This page will not steal 1861. It will record a father who would not.

George Dawe painted Alexander von Benckendorff in 1822, before the Third Department existed. Use it as the face Nicholas later trusted with gendarmes, then return to 1826. A Military Gallery likeness is not a police charter.

While punishing the Decembrists severely — five hanged, others sent to Siberia — he wished to make use of all their good ideas. He reserved for himself the control over public opinion and confided to Aleksandr Khristoforovich, Count Benckendorff, the organization of a new secret police of gendarmes controlled by the third section of the personal and imperial chancery. His Majesty’s Own Chancery acquired new departments: in 1826 the Second and the Third, to deal with the codification of law and the newly created corps of gendarmes; in 1828 the Fourth, for charitable and educational institutions of the empress dowager Maria; in 1836 the Fifth, to reform the condition of the state peasants; in 1843 the Sixth, for Transcaucasia. The Third Department, the political police, acted as the autocrat’s main weapon against subversion and as his principal agency for controlling behaviour. Its assigned fields ranged from “all orders and all reports in every case belonging to the higher police” to “reports about all occurrences without exception!”

Count Sergey S. Uvarov, minister of education 1833–49, created in 1832 the slogan Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality — Pravoslaviye, Samoderzhaviye, i Narodnost — that came to represent the official ideology of Nicholas’s government. He presented the phrase in a report on education in Moscow university and the gimnazii, recommending that the state’s programme stress the Orthodox Church, the autocratic government, and the national character of the Russian people as factors distinguishing Russian society and protecting it from the corrupting influence of western Europe. As official ideology became the basis of education, theology and the classics received emphasis; philosophy, considered the main medium of corrupting Western ideas, was virtually eliminated. Strict censorship was imposed on publications critical of autocracy. Interpreting narodnost as nationalism, some officials pressed Russification in non-Russian schools and pressure on non-Orthodox groups — an impetus, Britannica notes, not entirely approved of by the emperor.

Nicholas’s reign is divided into three periods by two European sets of revolutions: those of 1830 and those of 1848. During the first five years he did not feel quite sure of himself, and he appealed for help to advisers of Alexander’s liberal period, such as Kochubey, Speransky, and Count Kankrin. In December 1826 he even instructed a special committee to collect useful hints about necessary reforms. Speransky’s great later work, under Nicholas, was the first Complete Collection of the Laws of the Russian Empire in 1830 and a Digest of the Laws. Count Pavel Kiselev changed and improved the lot of the state peasants. Even limited reforms became impossible after 1848. Frightened by European revolutions, Nicholas became completely reactionary. A secret committee under Dmitry Buturlin was founded to punish press offenses. A real persecution of intellectuals began.

The expulsion of Charles X from France and the November Insurrection of 1830–31 in Poland determined the legitimist tendency of Nicholas’s foreign policy. He wished to become a real policeman of Europe, and at Münchengrätz in September 1833 he renewed relations with Metternich. Wunder’s later print shows the emperor announcing the Polish outbreak to his guard: a nineteenth-century image of that wish, not a dispatch from Warsaw. After the revolutions of 1848–49 he was a dauntless champion of legitimism and a virtual hegemony of eastern and central Europe. His excessive interest in the “sick man” at Constantinople finished by rousing Europe against him. That interest, and the collapse of a once successful foreign policy, lead into the Crimean War. Stop this page before Sinope and the Alma. The next article is that war. This one is the freeze that made the war a revealing failure.

He hanged the officers, took their ideas into secret committees, and set gendarmes to watch everything — including, he hoped, Europe.

Important developments took place only in areas where change would not threaten the fundamental structure. Speransky codified. Kiselev improved state peasants. Serfdom on private estates remained. Nine committees did not unmake it. Education was fenced. Philosophy was starved. The Third Section read everyone’s occurrences. The façade of discipline covered corruption. Late in the reign almost no civilians stood among the emperor’s immediate assistants. He wanted to be a father of his people, concerned with daily lives, and could do little beyond minutiae because he would not share power or free the serfs. Britannica’s verdict is that they looked backward. The nickname — the emperor who froze Russia for thirty years — is the same verdict in a phrase.

Keep 1812’s snow out of this page. Keep Tilsit’s raft out of it. Keep the Malakhov out of it. Nicholas here is 1825–55 as a system: military household, secret committees, Third Section, Official Nationality, a Polish rising that confirmed his wish to police Europe, a turn to full reaction after 1848, and a foreign policy that would isolate him. Readers who want the siege of Sevastopol will find it next. This article’s inventory should smell of chancery paper and gendarme blue, not of gunpowder on a Crimean road. A slogan of three words is not nothing. It is also not a reform. A complete collection of laws is not nothing. It is also not a constitution.

Paul had tried to drill the empire and died in a castle. Alexander had talked of good laws and kept the crown. The Decembrists had stood on a square. Nicholas answered with a police, a slogan, and a refusal to touch serfdom. The next emperor would be told, by a lost war, that backwardness was now a strategic fact. This page should not deliver that lecture. It should leave the reader with Benckendorff’s portrait, Uvarov’s triad, Wunder’s announcement of a Polish rising, and an emperor who froze what he could not reform. The Crimean War will thaw the prestige of 1814 the hard way.

Georg Benedikt Wunder’s print has Nicholas telling the guard that Poland has risen. Nineteenth-century illustration, not 29 November 1830 in Warsaw. Use it for the policeman’s pose, then put it aside.

Stop this page before October 1853. The next title is a war that Britannica dates from then to February 1856. Nicholas here is the freeze: militarism, gendarmes, Official Nationality, nine committees on serfdom that did not free serfs, a Polish insurrection that confirmed legitimism, and a hegemony after 1848 that was about to collapse. Krüger’s face is the official likeness. Dawe’s Benckendorff is the eye. Wunder’s guardroom is the European claim. The man who froze Russia would not live to sign the peace. His son would. That son’s reforms are the next chapter. This chapter still owes the war that taught the son.

Britannica records last words to the heir: he would ascend to pray for Russia and for his family; after Russia he had loved them above everything; they should serve Russia. This article reports that sourced close without making it a pull quote of our own. The pull belongs to the gendarmes and the slogan. The death belongs to February 1855, in the middle of a war the next page must tell. The large Russia of the nineteenth century, which had entered Paris in 1814, ends this reign isolated, fighting, and about to be told by a treaty that the Black Sea would be neutralized. Nicholas did not live to read that treaty. He lived long enough to freeze the country that had to fight it.