Nicholas I

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NICHOLAS I

near-constant warfare in early reign
revolutions of 1848 and crimean war
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NICHOLAS I (1796–1855; ruled 1825–1855), emperor of Russia.

Nicholas Pavlovich Romanov ascended Russia's throne in 1825 and immediately faced revolution and danger. Confusion about the succession, combined with revolutionary sentiment fanned by the wars against Napoleon I and Alexander I's repression of dissent in the last decade of his reign, led to the Decembrist revolt upon Alexander's death. The Decembrists' purposes were confused and their revolt ill-organized and lacking substantial popular support. It occurred because Nicholas had not expected to succeed Alexander, thinking that his elder brother, Constantine, was the legal and rightful heir. He was unaware that Constantine had refused his inheritance and that Alexander had sanctioned this illegal deviation from the normal line of succession. Nicholas was as surprised as anyone when he found that he was to be Russia's next tsar.

He moved quickly to crush the Decembrists, continuing a policy that dated as far back as Catherine the Great (r. 1762–1796) of using Russian power to quell revolutions within the empire and throughout Europe. He sent many of the revolutionaries into exile and executed a handful. Nicholas was shocked by the rebellion, which had sprung from the heart of the elite young nobility, the guards regiments. He emerged from the experience with a renewed determination to fight the hydra of revolution wherever it emerged.

near-constant warfare in early reign

Nicholas I spent the next five years almost constantly at war, first with Persia (1826–1828), then with Turkey (1829–1829), and finally against a massive Polish uprising (1830–1831). The struggle with Persia resulted mainly from the shah's opportunistic attempt to take advantage of obvious weakness in the Russian court in order to restore the balance in the Caucasus, tipped in Russia's favor by Alexander I's wars with Turkey and Persia. Once the shah realized that Nicholas was master in his own house and able to respond to the threat, hostilities petered out.

The Russo-Turkish War resulted from continuing Russian efforts to maintain the Russo-Turkish relationship on a desirable footing. Nicholas considered and explicitly rejected seizing the Turkish straits, but he needed to ensure that the Ottoman sultan would remain subservient to Russia in order to protect the enormous volume of Russian trade that passed through them. The sultan, for his part, felt obliged to assert his independence of his larger neighbor to the north, and he declared a jihad against Russia.

The first campaign in 1828 went poorly for the Russians. Inadequate Russian forces met unexpectedly strong Turkish resistance in the Danubian fortresses. By the following year, Nicholas and his advisors had developed a better plan that swept the Turks back to Adrianople, where they made peace. The flaws in the original planning process and the conduct of the campaign persuaded Nicholas to begin thinking about a large-scale reform of the entire Russian military administration. The experience of the Polish rebellion strengthened that impetus.

The Polish revolt of 1830 was an extension of the revolutions that wracked Europe generally in that year. In fact, it interrupted Russian preparations to send an auxiliary army to help suppress revolution in western Europe; the troops were used to suppress the Poles instead. The complexities and scale of the rebellion made its suppression difficult. Nicholas continually feared, moreover, that his problems would attract the hostile intervention of Britain or even France on behalf of the Poles, as he had feared Austrian intervention on behalf of the Turks in the previous conflict. As a result, he was more determined than ever at the end of the rebellion to reform his military, which he did in the years 1832 to 1836. This reform destroyed a nascent general staff system and replaced it with the system that still organizes the Russian military in the early twenty-first century, built around a powerful War Ministry to which even the military commanders were subordinate.

Nicholas's reforms had the same goal as his repressions: to strengthen the Russian state against the threat of revolution. The military reforms were therefore aimed as much at saving money as at improving military efficiency, for Nicholas assumed power of a state on the verge of bankruptcy. Alexander had inflated the currency and Russia's debt to pay for the wars against Napoleon and the maintenance thereafter of a vast army of more than eight hundred thousand. Nicholas added to the debt with his wars and continued to maintain a large army because he felt threatened by the rise of hostile liberalism in France and Britain and by revolution at home and abroad. The state's penury had a baleful effect on the army and navy in this period, however, as both services were starved for resources with which to train and buy equipment.

revolutions of 1848 and crimean war

Nicholas continued to wage active war against revolution in his own states and abroad throughout his reign. When the Hungarians revolted against their Habsburg masters in 1848, Nicholas sent a contingent of 150,000 Russian soldiers to help the Austrians suppress the rebellion. He also greatly strengthened the apparatus of repression in his own lands, building the dreaded "Third Section" of His Majesty's Own Chancery into an effective organ for maintaining surveillance on the empire's intellectuals, and increasing the efficiency and severity of censorship dramatically. In 1849 his fear of domestic revolution led to the arrest, on charges of conspiracy against the state, of a number of Russian intellectuals, the so-called Petrashevsky Circle, most of whose members, in truth, probably posed no real danger to Nicholas's power. Under the doctrine of Official Nationality Nicholas attempted to maintain and increase the primacy of Orthodox Christianity, autocracy, and Russian nationalism as a way of unifying the state against the revolutionary danger.

In a sense, Nicholas had been right all along to fear revolution, for it was the Revolution of 1848 that ultimately brought to power Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, who as French emperor Napoleon III (after 1852), eager for foreign adventure, provoked the crisis that led to the Crimean War (1853–1856). Nicholas would have preferred, as usual, to manage Turkey without attacking or destroying the Ottoman Empire, but Anglo-French support of the Turks led to conflict. The Russians would mobilize more than 2.3 million men in the course of the war—the largest army ever assembled in Europe to that date. The fear of Franco-British landings along Russia's enormous coastline, together with logistical difficulties, however, meant that only a fraction of that force ever saw action. Russia's navy, atrophied and corrupted by Nicholas's disdain for it, was unable to defend the Crimea or to support amphibious operations against the Turkish straits. Russia's penury and the vastness of its army, finally, had prevented Nicholas from purchasing the new rifled muskets for his force that the French and the British now had and from building useful railroads with which to support operations in the Crimea. Despite a far-from-brilliant military performance by the allies, therefore, the Russians were unable to hold Sevastopol or the Crimea. Nicholas died in 1855 with the war going very badly, and his successor, Alexander II, found himself obliged to make peace because of the impending bankruptcy of the state.

See alsoAlexander II; Crimean War; Russia; Russo-Turkish War.