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Who was Tsar Nicholas I?
Who was Nicholas I?
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Nicholas I[ pron 1] (6 July [ O.S. 25 June] 1796 – 2 March [ O.S. 18 February] 1855) was Emperor of Russia, King of Congress Poland, and Grand Duke of Finland. He was the third son of Paul I and younger brother of his predecessor, Alexander I. Nicholas's thirty-year reign began with the failed Decembrist revolt.
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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) 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.
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.”
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).
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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.
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.
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Jul 23, 2024 · Emperor Nicholas I of Russia. (more) Nicholas especially attended to education; he wished to clear it of everything politically dangerous and confine it to the upper class.
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May 21, 2018 · The Russian czar, statesman, and autocrat Nicholas I (1796-1855) reigned from 1825 to 1855. During his reign Russian 19th-century autocracy reached its greatest power. The third son of Czar Paul I , Nicholas was tutored in political economy, government, constitutional law, jurisprudence, and public finance.
Emperor Nicholas I on the Senate Square in St. Petersburg during the Decembrists' Revolt, December 14th, 1825. Public domain. Nicholas I’s reign started in a turmoil – the Decembrists’ revolt,...
Nicholas I, Russian Nikolay Pavlovich, (born July 6, 1796, Tsarkoye Selo, near St. Petersburg, Russia—died March 2, 1855, St. Petersburg), Tsar of Russia (1825–55). He was the son of Paul I and was trained as an army officer.
Following the events of December 1825, the new Tsar Nicholas 1 was determined to stamp out any revolutionary movements. He formed a police force to detect revolutionaries. All writings were rigorously censored.
