Nicholas I of Russia

Biography

Nicholas was born at Gatchina in 1796, the third son of Paul I, and was trained mainly as a soldier and military engineer. Few expected him to reign, but his brother Alexander I died without legitimate sons and the next brother, Constantine, had renounced the throne. In December 1825 Nicholas proclaimed his accession and at once put down the Decembrist revolt of liberal army officers.

His thirty-year reign became a byword for autocracy. He expanded the political police, curtailed local autonomies, and backed Sergey Uvarov's doctrine of Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality as the guiding principle of the state. Crowned king of Poland in Warsaw in 1829, he crushed the November Uprising of 1830–1831 and replaced the Polish constitution with the Organic Statute of 1832.

Abroad he helped secure Greek independence, won wars against Persia and the Ottoman Empire in the late 1820s, signed the Treaty of Hünkâr İskelesi with the Ottomans in 1833, and sent troops to help Austria defeat the Hungarian revolution in 1849. His pressure on the Ottoman Empire led in 1853 to the Crimean War against Britain, France and the Ottomans, which went badly for Russia. Nicholas died in Saint Petersburg in March 1855, before the war ended.