Nicholas I

Nicholas I (born July 6 [June 25, Old Style], 1796, Tsarskoye Selo [now Pushkin], near St. Petersburg, Russia—died February 18 [March 2, New Style], 1855, St. Petersburg) was a Russian emperor (1825–55), often considered the personification of classic autocracy. For his reactionary policies, he has been called the emperor who froze Russia for 30 years.

Early life

Nicholas was the son of Grand Duke Paul and Grand Duchess Maria. Some three and a half months after his birth, following the death of Catherine II the Great, Nicholas’s father became Emperor Paul I of Russia. Nicholas had three brothers, two of whom, the future emperor Alexander I and Constantine, were 19 and 17 years older than he. It was the third, Michael, his junior by two years, and a sister, Anne, who became his childhood companions and intimate lifelong friends.

Paul was extremely neurotic, overbearing, and despotic. Yet it is believed that he showed kindness and consideration to his younger children and that, in fact, he loved and cherished them tenderly. He was killed in a palace revolution of 1801, which made Alexander emperor when Nicholas was not quite five years old. Maria, on the contrary, remained formal and cold in her relationship to the children, very much in keeping with her general character. She belonged, apparently, among those human beings who combine numerous conventional virtues with a certain rigidity and lack of warmth. In the words of a competent observer: “The only failing of this extraordinary woman was her being excessively, one may say, exacting of her children and of the people dependent on her.”

Education

The future emperor’s first guardian and instructor was a Scottish nurse, Jane Lyon, who was appointed by Catherine II to care for the infant and who stayed with Nicholas constantly during the first seven years of his life. From Lyon the young grand duke learned even such things as the Russian alphabet, his first Russian prayers, and his hatred of the Poles (at least he liked later to trace the origin of his bitter antipathy toward that people to the stories told by his nurse about her painful experience in Warsaw in the turbulent year of 1794).

In 1802–03 men replaced women in Nicholas’s entourage, and his regular education began. As directed by Gen. Matthew Lamsdorff, it emphasized severe discipline and formalism. The growing grand duke studied French and German as well as Russian, world history, and general geography in French, together with the history and geography of Russia. Religion, drawing, arithmetic, geometry, algebra, and physics were added to the curriculum. Nicholas received instruction also in dancing, music, singing, and horseback riding and was introduced at an early age to the theatre, costume balls, and other court entertainment.

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A more advanced curriculum went into effect in 1809, with courses ranging from political economy, logic, moral philosophy, and natural law to strategy. English, Latin, and Greek were added to the language program. Though, on the whole, a belief that Nicholas had not been trained for his role of Russian sovereign is wrong, he did profit little from the instruction, which he found rigid and tedious. He loved only military science, becoming a fine army engineer and expert in several other areas of military knowledge. Moreover, he always remained in his heart a dedicated junior officer.

Circumstances also favoured militarism. Nicholas’s education, as well as that of his younger brother, was interrupted and largely terminated by the great struggles against Napoleon in 1812–15. The grand dukes were allowed to join the army in 1814, and, although they saw no actual fighting, they lived through the heady emotions of those momentous years and also enjoyed the opportunities to stay in Paris and other places in western and central Europe. On November 4, 1815, at a state dinner in Berlin, Alexander I and King Frederick William III rose to announce the engagement of Nicholas and Princess Charlotte of Prussia (Alexandra, after she became Orthodox).

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The solemn wedding followed some 20 months later, on July 13, 1817. The match represented a dynastic and political arrangement sought by both reigning houses, which had stood together in the decisive years against Napoleon and after that at the Congress of Vienna—the peace settlement following the Napoleonic Wars—and it proved singularly successful. Not only was Nicholas in love with his wife, but he became very closely attached to his father-in-law as well as to his royal brothers, one of whom was later to be his fellow ruler as King Frederick William IV. Beyond that, Nicholas was powerfully attracted by the Prussian court and even more so by the Prussian army. He felt remarkably happy and at home in his adopted family and country, which for many years he tried to visit as often as he could.

To complete his training, Grand Duke Nicholas was sent on two educational voyages—an extensive tour of Russia that lasted from May to September in 1816 and a journey to England, where the future emperor spent four months late that same year and early in 1817. The Russian trip covered much ground at great speed and was quite superficial, but it has interest for the historian because of the notes that Nicholas, following the instructions of his mother, took on everything seen and heard. The grand duke’s observations deal, typically, with appearances rather than with causes and reflect a number of his prejudices, including his bitter dislike of Poles and Jews. Such quick inspection tours later became almost an obsession of the emperor.

In England, Nicholas stayed mostly in London, although he travelled to a score of other places. While he did attend the opening of Parliament and in general obtained some knowledge of English politics, his only recorded comments on that score were unfavourable. The future emperor found it much more congenial to examine military and naval centres. His favourite English companion was the duke of Wellington. Less than a year after his return to Russia and a few months after his marriage, Nicholas was appointed inspector general of the army corps of engineers. In subsequent years he held several other military positions but of secondary significance.