NICHOLAS I ROMANOV, Tsar of Russia. - B. at Tsarskoye Selo on June 25 (July 7), 1796, d. at Petersburg on Feb. 17 (29), 1855. After his brother's renunciation of the throne he proclaimed himself emperor on Dec. 14 (26), 1825. Taking advantage of this circumstance and of various rumors artfully put about, the members of certain secret societies of liberal and radical inspiration decided to pass to action: these were almost exclusively young officers, who refused to swear allegiance to N. I and, at the head of some troop detachments, went over decisively to insurrection.
It was the first revolt that was not a mere palace conspiracy, but expressed a clear discontent against autocracy and in which generic "socialist" postulates were foreshadowed. The revolt took place on Dec. 14 (26), 1825 and from the Russian name for Dec. (dekabr') it was called the revolt of the Decembrists. This event, closely linked to his coronation, helped to form in N. a rigidly absolutist attitude, which found its practical affirmation in the struggle against revolution both on the internal and on the international plane. He was a supporter of protectionism. During his reign there was an important monetary reform. The question of the abolition of serfdom kept him engaged for a long time, without however any true and proper solution of the problem being reached. A supporter of an economy perhaps not wrongly called by some historians "pre-capitalist," he also gave notable impetus to the railways, thereby contributing to the development of modern capitalism. On the plane of foreign policy, N. was above all a strenuous defender of legitimist policy in Europe, without however neglecting the Eastern question. Under his reign the Russian thrust in the Balkan region continued, together with it the defense of the Christian populations: although not ignoring Russian interests in those lands and the situation created by the oppression of Christians by the Crescent, he showed, in the name of his absolutism, significant hesitations about supporting revolutions, even though of Slavic and Christian inspiration. In the war of 1853-55 against the Western powers, the Russia of N. showed its grave internal weaknesses. The Russian intervention of 1849 against the Hungarian revolution was not enough to obtain Austrian gratitude. On the internal plane, the economic and technical development of the country had not been such as to avoid unpleasant surprises of various kinds during the course of the military campaign. N. had deluded himself that he could stop revolutionary ideas at the frontiers of the Russian Empire: but a rigidly intransigent censorship and police had not succeeded in preventing the penetration of those ideas into the country: indeed, in the absence of a climate of legality, the young intellectual generation absorbed the most extreme ideas of the West with fanaticism and with an extremist spirit. N. I had repressed, at the dawn of his reign, the first revolutionary attempt of modern Russia. At the end of his reign Russia was defeated and isolated, pervaded in all social strata by uneasiness and by an intense fever for reforms, while the first wave of "nihilism" was beginning to spread over the whole country. N. did not lack skill and cunning on certain occasions: during the Polish revolt of 1830-31, his policy sought to influence the Pontiff against the Polish "rebels," presented as pure and simple allies of all the other European revolutionaries.
He did everything to keep hidden from the Russian public the Pontiff's remonstrances against the situation of Catholicism in Russian Poland. Also in the other parts of the Empire he was opposed to Catholicism and to the return of schismatics to Catholicism.
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