Emperor Nikolai I Pavlovich Romanov/Holstein-Gottorp of Russia is a difficult case to write about, for the simple reason that the verdict on his royal tenure is long out, and it is hard to beat, post factum. Admittedly, he was a man with a cold stare and a heart of stone. His contemporary nickname Nikolai Palkin (it sounds a lot like Nikolai Palych in normal Russian pronunciation, and means Nikolai of the Stick) refers to the cruelty of corporal punishments of soldiers used all across Russia on his watch. The fact that Russia’s greatest poets Pushkin and Lermontov were both killed on duels which he did not prevent or stop puts a horrendous blame on his historical legacy. In fact, his thirty-year reign started with a colossal misunderstanding resulting in the tragic Decembrist revolt, punished by the hanging death of its principal leaders and hard labor and lifelong exile for others, all the punished ones were the flower of Russian liberal nobility, some of the brightest and most capable men of the nineteenth century’s Russia.
As for his foreign policy, it is well known that the disastrous for Russia Crimean War also happened on his watch in the last years of his reign, and there were even persistent rumors, never disproved, that Emperor Nicholas did not really die of the complications of a bad cold, as officially reported, but took poison, as a token of his personal responsibility for Russia’s stinging defeat. (Ironically, Nicholas must have misjudged Europe’s distraction from Russo-Turkish affairs as a result of a wave of liberal revolutions in 1848-1849, giving birth to Marx’s and Engels’s Communist Manifesto, while he had mistakenly counted on Europe’s “gratitude” for Russia’s help in putting them down. On the other hand, just a couple of decades later, his successor Alexander II followed the correct judgment this time of a totally new situation in Europe, with the emergence of Italy and a united Germany, and the anti-Turkish revolts in South-Eastern Europe, and was able to conduct a very successful Russo-Turkish war of 1877-1878 with complete immunity from European “prosecution.”)
So, what else is there to add to the already well-known facts and historical judgments?
Apparently, there are some solid equally undisputed facts which seem to give another side of the story. Yes, the tragic Decembrist revolt of 1825 was harshly suppressed, but its harshness does not appear as harsh as it seems, when put in the right context. None of the defendants were tortured, whereas in previous times, even in the particularly enlightened Golden Age of Catherine the Great, torture had been a routine occurrence. As for the manner of death of the leaders of the conspiracy, the intent of regicide was established beyond doubt, from the defendants’ correspondence and voluntary confessions. On Russia’s legal books, both actual and attempted regicide was a crime punishable by quartering, and such was their exact sentence. It was only on Nicholas’s personal instruction that this brutal manner of execution was substituted by hanging. By the same token, although cruelty of power to the powerless was an all-pervasive phenomenon in Russia at the time, Nicholas would never again sign a single death warrant during his remaining three decades in power: a truly remarkable achievement!
With regard to Pushkin, the bulk of the blame for his tragic fate has traditionally been put on the Emperor’s shoulders. Once again, there is another side to this story. Certain facts indicate that Nicholas was well aware of Pushkin’s value as a literary genius. Remembering that censorship was pervasive in Russia anyway, and every censor was expected to go beyond the limits of the necessary and reasonable in the performance of his censorship duties, fearful of being accused of insufficient zeal, Nicholas, having assumed personal censor’s role over Pushkin (and naturally there was no one in Russia to dare question the Emperor’s judgment) made the poet’s life much easier, and allowed him to get away with many more liberties than had his censor been anyone else. Pushkin was of course a free-speaking man, and much of what he was accused of, and what he freely confessed to, would have cost him dearly, had he been handled by some government official, yet with Nicholas keeping an eye on him directly, Pushkin was as safe as anybody in Russia could only dream to be. Equally unfair would be to accuse Nicholas I of condoning, or even facilitating the fatal duel. Pushkin acted on his own and against the Emperor’s explicit wishes forbidding duels in Russia, rather than ever condoning them.
And another thing, which is a curious tragicomedy of disparate perceptions. Promoting Pushkin to the rank of Kammerjunker in 1833, Nicholas may have seen this gesture as a sign of his personal recognition of the poet’s value to the Russian State. Pushkin was however incensed at the idea of himself and his beautiful wife having from now on been obligated to attend St. Petersburg balls and other social functions which were sure to expose her to the attention of every high-placed philanderer and feed his already brooding jealousy to the point of an explosion. He was ready, on the spur of the moment, to turn down the dubious “honor,” but was apparently dissuaded from it by his friends and well-wishers, who must have told him that thus standing up to the Emperor would be seen as an insult to His Royal Majesty, and result in much more unpleasantness for him than merely having to tolerate the inconvenience of following the court etiquette. (Just three years after that, Pushkin’s duel and death, resulting from that same exposure that he had feared in the first place, would prove that the great “honor” had been in fact a lethal “inconvenience,” but still this was not to prove that the Emperor had to be blamed for Russia’s national tragedy directly.)
…None of these things must produce an impression that I somehow sympathize with Emperor Nicholas I on account of the undeserved dark spots on his historical reputation. On the contrary, I have always found him a thoroughly unsympathetic figure, and my opinion of him is unlikely to ever mellow. It’s just that certain things ought to be put in their historical perspective, and this is one such case.
(After this entry, I intend to move to my Wishful Thinking section. A large number of historical entries have been posted earlier, from January to March 2011, and the reader can visit them all on this blog, starting with the mega-posting Origins Of Russian History, followed by Cooperating With Destiny, etc.
As for his foreign policy, it is well known that the disastrous for Russia Crimean War also happened on his watch in the last years of his reign, and there were even persistent rumors, never disproved, that Emperor Nicholas did not really die of the complications of a bad cold, as officially reported, but took poison, as a token of his personal responsibility for Russia’s stinging defeat. (Ironically, Nicholas must have misjudged Europe’s distraction from Russo-Turkish affairs as a result of a wave of liberal revolutions in 1848-1849, giving birth to Marx’s and Engels’s Communist Manifesto, while he had mistakenly counted on Europe’s “gratitude” for Russia’s help in putting them down. On the other hand, just a couple of decades later, his successor Alexander II followed the correct judgment this time of a totally new situation in Europe, with the emergence of Italy and a united Germany, and the anti-Turkish revolts in South-Eastern Europe, and was able to conduct a very successful Russo-Turkish war of 1877-1878 with complete immunity from European “prosecution.”)
So, what else is there to add to the already well-known facts and historical judgments?
Apparently, there are some solid equally undisputed facts which seem to give another side of the story. Yes, the tragic Decembrist revolt of 1825 was harshly suppressed, but its harshness does not appear as harsh as it seems, when put in the right context. None of the defendants were tortured, whereas in previous times, even in the particularly enlightened Golden Age of Catherine the Great, torture had been a routine occurrence. As for the manner of death of the leaders of the conspiracy, the intent of regicide was established beyond doubt, from the defendants’ correspondence and voluntary confessions. On Russia’s legal books, both actual and attempted regicide was a crime punishable by quartering, and such was their exact sentence. It was only on Nicholas’s personal instruction that this brutal manner of execution was substituted by hanging. By the same token, although cruelty of power to the powerless was an all-pervasive phenomenon in Russia at the time, Nicholas would never again sign a single death warrant during his remaining three decades in power: a truly remarkable achievement!
With regard to Pushkin, the bulk of the blame for his tragic fate has traditionally been put on the Emperor’s shoulders. Once again, there is another side to this story. Certain facts indicate that Nicholas was well aware of Pushkin’s value as a literary genius. Remembering that censorship was pervasive in Russia anyway, and every censor was expected to go beyond the limits of the necessary and reasonable in the performance of his censorship duties, fearful of being accused of insufficient zeal, Nicholas, having assumed personal censor’s role over Pushkin (and naturally there was no one in Russia to dare question the Emperor’s judgment) made the poet’s life much easier, and allowed him to get away with many more liberties than had his censor been anyone else. Pushkin was of course a free-speaking man, and much of what he was accused of, and what he freely confessed to, would have cost him dearly, had he been handled by some government official, yet with Nicholas keeping an eye on him directly, Pushkin was as safe as anybody in Russia could only dream to be. Equally unfair would be to accuse Nicholas I of condoning, or even facilitating the fatal duel. Pushkin acted on his own and against the Emperor’s explicit wishes forbidding duels in Russia, rather than ever condoning them.
And another thing, which is a curious tragicomedy of disparate perceptions. Promoting Pushkin to the rank of Kammerjunker in 1833, Nicholas may have seen this gesture as a sign of his personal recognition of the poet’s value to the Russian State. Pushkin was however incensed at the idea of himself and his beautiful wife having from now on been obligated to attend St. Petersburg balls and other social functions which were sure to expose her to the attention of every high-placed philanderer and feed his already brooding jealousy to the point of an explosion. He was ready, on the spur of the moment, to turn down the dubious “honor,” but was apparently dissuaded from it by his friends and well-wishers, who must have told him that thus standing up to the Emperor would be seen as an insult to His Royal Majesty, and result in much more unpleasantness for him than merely having to tolerate the inconvenience of following the court etiquette. (Just three years after that, Pushkin’s duel and death, resulting from that same exposure that he had feared in the first place, would prove that the great “honor” had been in fact a lethal “inconvenience,” but still this was not to prove that the Emperor had to be blamed for Russia’s national tragedy directly.)
…None of these things must produce an impression that I somehow sympathize with Emperor Nicholas I on account of the undeserved dark spots on his historical reputation. On the contrary, I have always found him a thoroughly unsympathetic figure, and my opinion of him is unlikely to ever mellow. It’s just that certain things ought to be put in their historical perspective, and this is one such case.
(After this entry, I intend to move to my Wishful Thinking section. A large number of historical entries have been posted earlier, from January to March 2011, and the reader can visit them all on this blog, starting with the mega-posting Origins Of Russian History, followed by Cooperating With Destiny, etc.
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