The Presidential Library collections illustrate Nicholas I’s reign: "The tsar, gifted with a great mind, was not confused at the difficulty of the first steps"

July 6, 2018 marks the 222nd anniversary of the birth of Emperor Nicholas I. The Presidential Library portal makes available a selection of digitized books and documents devoted to the Russian autocrat. It includes rare old editions and modern studies, biographical sketches and memoirs of contemporaries, as well as the personal correspondence of the tsar and his memoirs. The presented in the collection drama “Emperor Nicholas I” (1908) by G. Panyurina where characters Pushkin, Zhukovsky, Kakhovsky, Nesselrode, Benkendorf, Speransky and others were presented, is of special interest. A selection is part of the "The House of Romanov. Zemsky Sobor of 1613" large-scale collection, which contains about 900 items of storage.  

"The more important historical person is, the harder it is for future generations to distinguish truth from falsehood, and recreate in mind the image of a noble statesman or public figure", - we read in "The Emperor Nicholas” study (1894). And further, the author, denoting himself a pseudonym Nicholas, reveals the circumstances that predetermined the fate of the emperor: "The force foresees the force, which is justified by many examples. Empress Catherine II, who visited Gatchina on the birthday of the future autocrat, on her return told her circle: "I am the grandmother of the third grandson, who, judging by the extraordinary power that he is gifted, it seems destined to reign in spite of the fact that he has two elder brothers" . This was said as a joke, as sometimes the witty empress loved to say at solemn occasions. Nobody noticed these words of prophecy, but after a few dozen years, capricious fate turned the joke into a serious one".

Alexander I did leave children alone, and according to the law his elder brother, Tsarevich Konstantin Pavlovich, was to become an emperor, but he voluntarily renounced the throne. The right to inherit the throne passed to Nicholas Pavlovich.

His childhood was overshadowed by the murder of his father, Emperor Paul I in a specially built for him Mikhailovsky castle. Moving there from the luxurious Winter Palace, the children took painfully. The electronic copy of the book "Memories of the infant years of the Emperor Nicholas, written in his own hand" (1906) can be read as follows: "I remember that everywhere was very damp and that on the window sills was placed freshly baked bread to reduce dampness. Everyone was very nasty, and everyone was sorry for their former place, everywhere there were regrets about the old Winter Palace. It goes without saying that all this was said in a whisper and with one another ... I remember what they said about the withdrawal of the Winter Palace under the barracks, it angered us, children, more than anything". 

The day of the murder of Emperor Paul is passsed through the eyes of the child: "We noticed in the window, on the lift bridge under the church, sentries that were not the day before. None of us suspected that we lost our father; We were taken to my mother's house and soon we went to the Winter Palace ... It was good for us to see our rooms and, to tell the truth, our wooden horses, which we forgot there".

December 14, 1825, the day of the second oath to Emperor Nicholas I, on the Senate Square in St. Petersburg there was a famous uprising of the Decembrists. ""What the beginning of the reign it is!" - said the Emperor who came to the Empress's palace. Sad and painful silence was an eloquent answer", - so conveys the tragic atmosphere of December 14 A. Magam in the book "The Emperor Nicholas I and his reign" (1859), which electronic copy is also included in the collection of the Presidential Library.

Nicholas I, however, had a strong character, "Gifted with major intelligence tsar did not not bother to challenge the first steps immediately felt under him a solid and reliable basis", - says the essay "The Emperor Nicholas” mentioned above. His reign was marked by many transformations. Heir to the throne began with the reform of the internal management system: took steps to improve military and civil legal proceedings; significantly increased the role of the Governing Senate weakened under Alexander I by the influence of the State Council; strengthened justice. 

During the thirty years of the country's rule (1825-1855), the emperor significantly expanded its territory, adding vast territories in the Caucasus, the Central Asia, and the Far East. Before Nicholas I, who received engineering education, Russia remained strictly agrarian against the backdrop of the emerging European powers on the verge of an industrial revolution. Under Nicholas Pavlovich, enterprises of various specializations began to be open in large numbers - from the production of various alloys and machine tools to the manufacture of porcelain. The first railway was built – the Tsarskoselskaya, and later the Nikolayevskaya Railway, which connected St. Petersburg and Moscow. At the time of the reign of Nicholas I came the heyday of Russian science and Russian art. In St. Petersburg, the Military Academy, the Engineering School, the School of Law, the Technological Institute, and two cadet corps were established. 

However, the speed of the changes taking place in the state did not suit everyone. The electronic copy of the collection "Materials for the history of the reign of Emperor Nicholas Pavlovich" (1880), consisting of articles by V. Shteingel, M. Lunin, N. Melgunov and P. Chaadayev, published for reasons of censorship in Weimar, describes an opinion opposite to the estimates of the apologists of the existing building: "The main idea of ​​our policy of the last 30 years, internal and external, was born not on Russian soil; it is borrowed from Austria. Full comprehensive introduction of it belongs to the reign of Emperor Nicholas. The main features of this system, as it is known, are the preservation of the state system with the help of the army, the Germanization of its non-German subjects with the help of the bureaucracy, if possible". The authors of the collection considered the tsar's major mistake to be that he plunged Russia into a deliberately lost war with Turkey.   

On the portal of the Presidential Library you can get familair with important documents of that period, such as the Code of Laws of the Russian Empire, which was first published in 1832 by the decree of Nicholas I. These are 15 volumes of then acting legislative acts of the Russian Empire grouped by subject. Under Nicholas I the Charter of Censorship of 1829 was adopted. This is the second censorship charter, issued to soften the previous one: in 1826 the first version of it appeared, which prohibited printing almost anything that had any political background - so fresh the memories of the events of December 14, 1825 were.

The tsar tried to make censored the works of the genius poet Alexander Pushkin, becoming his personal censor. However, the more he read into Pushkin's poetic lines and prose, the more he got his artistic and civil right. According to Professor E. V. Petukhov, performed at the solemn act of the University of Yuryev on December 12, 1896 and published a year later - "About the Relations of Emperor Nicholas I and A. Pushkin" - a serious analysis of the circumstances determining the dominant in the communion of the Tsar and poet was made: "These mutual relations, which are extremely close to the persons of such a divided social position, executed on the one hand by benevolence and generosity, and on the other - by an independent directness, dignity and spiritual nobility, are curious the very first page in the history of our latest literature". Behind Nicholas’s attention to Pushkin was not only a patronizing attitude toward the writer, but also an unquestionable interest in his poetry, to which the Emperor regarded as the pride and glory of Russia.

The time of the reign of Nicholas I is called paradoxical by many researchers: the rapid industrial and economic development was combined with bureaucratic rigidity and widespread corruption, while the great Pushkin, Karamzin, Lermontov and others created under the vigilant supervision of the Third Department of His Imperial Majesty's own Chancery headed by Count Benckendorff. Turgenev was sent into exile to his estate for daring to place in the newspaper an obituary dedicated to the censored writer Gogol.

The electronic copy of N. Yermilov's book "Essays from the life of the Emperor Nicholas Pavlovich" (1900), the sovereign summed up his life in the last conversation with his successor son: "Serving Russia ... I wanted to take on all the hard, all the difficult, leave you a peaceful kingdom, arranged and happy – but Providence judged otherwise".