witnessed his consolidation of power through force. He continued the wars in the Caucasus begun by Alexander I, and consolidated Russian power in Transcaucasia by defeating the Persians in 1828. Russia also fought the Ottoman Empire in 1828-1829 over the rights of Christian subjects in Turkey and disagreements over territories between the two empires. Although the fighting produced mixed results, Russia considered itself a victor and gained concessions. One year later, in 1830, a revolt broke out in Poland, an autonomous part of the Russian Empire. The revolt spread from Warsaw to the western provinces of Russia, and Nicholas sent in troops to crush it in 1831. With the rebellion over, Nicholas announced the Organic Statute of 1832, which increased Russian control over Polish affairs. The Polish revolt brought back memories of 1825 for Nicholas, who responded by pushing further Rus-sification programs throughout his empire. Order reigned, but nationalist reactions in Poland, Ukraine, and elsewhere would ensure problems for future Russian rulers.
Nicholas also presided over increasingly oppressive measures directed at any forms of perceived opposition to his rule. Russian culture began to flourish in the decade between 1838 and 1848, as writers from Mikhail Lermontov to Nikolai Gogol and critics such as Vissarion Belinsky and Alexander Herzen burst onto the Russian cultural scene. Eventually, as their writings increasingly criticized the Nicholaevan system, the tsar cracked down, and his Third Section arrested numerous intellectuals. Nicholas’s reputation as the quintessential autocrat developed from these policies, which reached an apex in 1848. When revolutions broke out across Europe, Nicholas was convinced that they were a threat to the existence of his system. He sent Russian troops to crush rebellions in Moldavia and Wallachia in 1848 and to support Austrian rights in Lombardy and Hungary in 1849. At home, Nicholas oversaw further censorship and repressions of universities. By 1850, he had earned his reputation as the Gendarme of Europe.
In 1853, Nicholas’s belief in the might of his army set off a disaster for his country. He provoked a war with the Ottoman Empire over continued disputes in the Holy Land that brought an unexpected response. Alarmed by Russia’s aggressive policies, England and France joined the Ot1048
NICHOLAS II
toman Empire in declaring war. The resulting Crimean War led to a humiliating defeat and the exposure of Russian military weakness. The war also exposed the myths and ideas that guided Nicholaevan Russia. Nicholas did not live to see the final humiliation. He caught a cold in 1855 that grew serious, and he died on February 18. His dream of creating an ordered state for his son to inherit died with him.
Alexander Nikitenko, a former serf who worked as a censor in Nicholas’s Russia, concluded: “The main shortcoming of the reign of Nicholas consisted in the fact that it was all a mistake.” Contemporaries and historians have judged Nicholas just as harshly. From Alexander Herzen to the Marquis de Custine, the image of the tsar as tyrant circulated widely in Europe during Nicholas’s rule. Russian and Western historians ever since have largely seen Nicholas as the most reactionary ruler of his era, and one Russian historian in the 1990s argued “it would be difficult to find a more odious figure in Russian history than Nicholas I.” W. Bruce Lincoln, Nicholas’s most recent American biographer (1978), argued that Nicholas in many ways helped to pave the way for more significant reforms by expanding the bureaucracies. Still, his conclusion serves as an ideal epitaph for Nicholas: He was the last absolute monarch to hold undivided power in Russia. His death brought the end of an era. See also: ALEXANDER I; ALEXANDRA FEDOROVNA; AUTOCRACY; CRIMEAN WAR; DECEMBRIST MOVEMENT AND REBELLION; NATIONAL POLICIES, TSARIST; UVAROV, SERGEI SEMENOVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Curtiss, J. H. (1965). The Russian Army under Nicholas I, 1825-1855. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Custine, Astolphe, Marquis de. (2002). Letters From Russia. New York: New York Review of Books. Gogol, Nikolai. (1995). Plays and Petersburg Tales. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Herzen, Alexander. (1982). My Past and Thoughts. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kasputina, Tatiana. (1996). “Emperor Nicholas I, 1825-1855.” In The Emperors and Empresses of Russia: Rediscovering the Romanovs, ed. Donald Raleigh. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Lincoln, W. Bruce. (1978). Nicholas I: Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Lincoln, W. Bruce. (1982). In the Vanguard of Reform: Russia’s Enlightened Bureaucrats, 1825- 1861. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. Riasanovsky, Nicholas. (1959). Nicholas I and Official Nationality in Russia, 1825-1855. Berkeley: University of California Press. Whittaker, Cynthia. The Origins of Modern Russian Education: An Intellectual Biography of Count Sergei Uvarov, 1786-1855. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. Wortman, Richard. (1995). Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, Vol. 1: From Peter the Great to the Death of Nicholas I. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
STEPHEN M. NORRIS
(1868-1918), last emperor of Russia.
The future Nicholas II was born at Tsarskoe Selo in May 1868, the first child of the heir to the Russian throne, Alexander Alexandrovich, and his Danish-born wife, Maria Fedorovna. Nicholas was brought up in a warm and loving family environment and was educated by a succession of private tutors. He particularly enjoyed the study of history and proved adept at mastering foreign languages, but found it much more difficult to grasp the complexities of economics and politics. Greatly influenced by his father, who became emperor in 1881 as Alexander III, and by Konstantin Pobedonostsev, one of his teachers and a senior government official, Nicholas was deeply conservative, a strong believer in autocracy, and very religious. At the age of nineteen, he entered the army, and the military was to remain a passion throughout his life. After three years service in the army, Nicholas was sent on a ten-month tour of Europe and Asia to widen his experience of the world.
In 1894 Alexander III died and Nicholas became emperor. Despite his broad education, Nicholas felt profoundly unprepared for the responsibility that was thrust upon him and contemporaries remarked that he looked lost and bewildered. Within a month of his father’s death, Nicholas married; he had become engaged to Princess Alix of Hesse in the spring of 1894 and his accession to the throne made marriage urgent. The new empress, known in Russia as Alexandra, played a crucial role in Nicholas’s life. A serious and devoutly religious woman who believed fervently in the autocratic power of the
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Coronation of Nicholas II, Russian engraving. THE ART ARCHIVE/BIBLIOTH?QUE DES ARTS D?CORATIFS PARIS/DAGLI ORTI Russian monarchy, she stiffened her husband’s resolve at moments of indecision.
The couple had five children, Olga (b. 1895), Tatiana (b. 1897), Maria (b. 1899), Anastasia (b. 1901), and Alexei (b. 1904). The birth of a son and heir in 1904 was the occasion for great rejoicing, but this was soon marred as it became clear that Alexei suffered from hemophilia. Their son’s illness drew Nicholas and Alexandra closer together. The empress had an instinctive aversion to high society, and the imperial family spent most of their time at Tsarskoe Selo, only venturing into St. Petersburg on formal occasions.
While Nicholas’s reign began with marriage and personal happiness, his coronation in 1896 was marked by disaster. Public celebrations were held at Khodynka on the outskirts of Moscow, but the huge crowds that had gathered there got out of hand and several thousand people were crushed to death. That night the newly crowned emperor and empress appeared at a ball, apparently oblivious to the catastrophe. The image of Nicholas II enjoying himself while many of his subjects lay dead gave his reign a sour start.
THE RUSSO-JAPANESE WAR
Nicholas followed his father’s policies for much of his first decade as monarch, relying on the men who had advised Alexander III, especially Sergei Witte, the minister of finance and the architect of Russia’s economic growth during the 1890s. Russian industry grew rapidly during the decade, aided by investment from abroad and particularly from France, assisted by a political alliance between the two countries signed during the last months of Alexander III’s reign. Russia was also expanding in
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the Far East. The construction of the Trans-Siberian Railroad, linking European Russia with the empire’s
