Nicholas I: “I wanted to leave the peaceful, well-organized and happy empire – but the Providence judged otherwise”

July 6, 2020 marks the 224th anniversary of the birth of Nicholas I. The Presidential Library’s portal provides access to a collection of digitized books and documents dedicated to the emperor, whose reign included 30 years. The selection is part of a large-scale electronic collection “The House of Romanov. The Zemsky Sobor of 1613". It includes rare ancient publications and modern studies, biographical essays and memoirs of contemporaries, as well as personal correspondence of the tsar and his memoirs, including “Memoirs of the infant years of Emperor Nikolai Pavlovich, written by him personally”, published in 1906.

The childhood of the future emperor was overshadowed by the murder of his father, Paul I. This partly explains his categorical rejection of rebellion and terror.

The unexpected death of Alexander I in 1825 changed the current dynastic situation: the successor of Alexander Pavlovich, brother Konstantin Pavlovich, back in 1822, refused his right to occupy the Russian throne. Realizing that all attempts to convince his brother of the opposite are useless, Nikolai Pavlovich decided to declare himself emperor on the basis of a manifesto secretly signed by Alexander I in 1823. This document approved the abdication of the throne of Cesarevich and Grand Duke Konstantin Pavlovich and the appointment of the heir to the throne of Grand Duke Nikolai Pavlovich. “The tsar gifted with a great mind was not at all embarrassed by the difficulty of taking his first steps, immediately feeling firm and reliable ground beneath him”, - says the essay “Emperor Nicholas” (1894).

The first test was waiting for him already on December 14, 1825, when the Decembrist uprising took place on the Senate Square in St. Petersburg, one of the goals of which was to prevent the troops and the Senate from taking the oath to the new tsar and not allowing Nicholas I to take the throne.

The advanced nobility from among the officers who returned from Europe after the end of the Patriotic War of 1812 decided to put Russia on a bourgeois-democratic track. From the experience of European countries, the Decembrists wanted to establish a constitution under which a change of government to a constitutional monarchy or republic would be possible.

But this was the task of the “upper classes”, and the “lower classes” did not even hear such a word: “constitution”. The book “Emperor Nicholas I and His Reign” (1859) describes in detail the uprising on Senate Square and conveys an atmosphere of general confusion, depression and fear.

The rebels tried to enter the Senate building, but the guard for two hours restrained the onslaught of the soldiers of the Moscow regiment and defended the post entrusted to him. However, the situation on Senate Square was heating up. Then “The Emperor with a constrained heart decided to suppress a personal feeling of regret. It was ordered to make artillery guns and make several shots with blank charges; but the crowd, in their blindness, seeing no harm, received even more courage. Then the real buckshot spoke! The ranks of the rebels hesitated and fled. Most of the masses rushed across the ice to Vasilievsky Island, but they were overtaken by squadrons of the Horse Guards and captured a large number. It was all over”, - the ending of the uprising is described in the book “Emperor Nicholas I and His Reign”.

This is one point of view at the uprising. And here is the point of view of the Decembrist Mikhail Lunin set forth in the collection Materials for the History of the Reign of Emperor Nikolai Pavlovich (1880): “Truth, like delusion, has its own strict sequence. Since the government did not know how, over the course of a century, to satisfy the most urgent needs of the people, those who were under control had to resort to their own means in order to achieve the goal. In no case should they be accused of impatience and haste”ю

This point of view was shared by the first poet of Russia, Alexander Pushkin. As you know, at their first meeting in Moscow, Nicholas I asked him if there would be a poet on Senate Square on December 14 along with rioters? And Pushkin answered: yes, because they were his friends.

The Presidential Library’s portal features important documents of the era of the reign of Nicholas I, for example, the Code of Laws of the Russian Empire, which was first published in 1832, consisting of 15 volumes of legislative acts of the Russian Empire that were in force at that time. Under Nicholas I, the Charter on Censorship of 1828 was also adopted, issued to mitigate the previous one, dictated by the events of December 14, 1825 and for its severity, nicknamed "cast iron". This information is available in the section “On this Day” on the Presidential Library’s portal.

Nicholas I attempted to become the personal censor of Alexander Pushkin. However, the more the emperor read the poetic lines and Pushkin's prose, the more imbued with his artistic and civil rightness. In a speech by Professor Yevgeny Petukhov, delivered at the solemn meeting of Yuriev University in 1896, “On the Relations of Emperor Nicholas I and Alexander S. Pushkin” (1897), the scientist noted: “These mutual relations are unusually close for people so divided between themselves by their social status "On the one hand, full of benevolence and generosity, and on the other - independent directness, dignity and spiritual nobility, make up a curious page in the history of our latest literature". 

The electronic copy of Nikolai Yermilov’s book “Features from the Life of Emperor Nikolai Pavlovich” (1900) cites the sovereign’s words in his last conversation with his heir: “Serve Russia ... I wanted to ...leave the peaceful, well-organized and happy empire - but the Providence judged otherwise".