Tsar Nicholas I of Russia
Nicholas I ruled Russia for thirty years as the self-appointed policeman of Europe and left the country humiliated in the Crimea. Born in 1796, the third son of Paul I, he was raised as a soldier and not expected to reign. He came to the throne in December 1825 when his elder brother Constantine renounced it secretly, producing a three-week interregnum in which nobody knew who was tsar. Liberal officers used the confusion to stage the Decembrist revolt, bringing troops onto Senate Square in St Petersburg to demand a constitution. Nicholas dispersed them with artillery, personally interrogated many of the conspirators, hanged five and exiled over a hundred to Siberia. The episode defined him. He created the Third Section, a political police answering directly to himself; imposed censorship of unusual severity; and adopted the official doctrine of Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality. He intervened abroad on the same principle, suppressing the Polish rising of 1830 and abolishing what remained of Polish autonomy, and sending 200,000 men to crush the Hungarian revolution in 1849 on behalf of the Austrian emperor. He understood that serfdom was the fundamental problem — he called it an evil palpable to all — and appointed nine secret committees on it, and did nothing, on the reasoning that touching it would be more dangerous than leaving it. The Crimean War exposed everything. Russia had no railways to the front, smoothbore muskets against rifles, and a supply system that rotted. He died in February 1855 with Sevastopol under siege, reportedly of pneumonia contracted after reviewing troops in thin uniform.
- Lived: 1796 CE – 1855 CE
- Nationality: Russian
- Roles: tsar, autocrat, conservative
