Nicholas I of Russia

“ Nicholas, allowing himself to be ruled by this spirit, plunged further and further into a system which, though contrary to that of Peter the Great, we do not pretend absolutely to condemn on that account, and which the marquis de Custinee has highly extolled in his celebrated book, La Russie en 1839. “The emperor Nicholas,” he said, “thought that the day of mere seeming was past for Russia, and that the whole structure of civilisation was to remake in that country. He has relaid the foundations of society. ”

“ Upon their return to Russia, the utter despotism of the tzar seemed more than ever hateful to them. Several conspiracies had been organized for his assassination, and now the plan was formed to assassinate the whole imperial family, and introduce a republic.
Nicholas was seriously alarmed by the danger which threatened, though he was fully conscious that his only safety was to be found in courage and energy. He accordingly made preparation for the administration of the oath of allegiance to the army. "I shall soon," said he, "be an emperor or a corpse." ”

“ With the personal failure of Nicholas II. this book has nothing to do. From the very first day that he had ascended the Throne of Russia it had been evident to any person gifted with the talent of observation that his reign was bound to end in disaster and in ruin; that all the work performed by his late father, who, after all, when things are well considered, had been a great man and a wise Sovereign, would very soon be destroyed by his want of character and of principle and by his abominable selfishness. ”

“ Nicholas had failed in all his calculations. In vain had he tried to lure England into a secret compact by the offer of Egypt—in vain had he preserved Hungary to Austria—in vain sought to attach Prussia to himself by acts of friendship; and his Nemesis was pursuing him, avenging a long series of affronts to France. Unsupported by a single nation, he was at war with three; and after a brilliant reign of twenty-eight years unchecked by a single misfortune, he was about to die, leaving to his empire the legacy of a disastrous war, which was to end in defeat and humiliation. ”

“ The czar began war upon the tribes dwelling in the mountains, but found that he had engaged in a very difficult enterprise. A soldier-priest named Schamyl defied the power of Russia for a quarter of a century. It cost Nicholas (p. 210) more in men and money to subdue the liberty-loving mountaineer, than all the wars he waged in Asia.
The year 1830, was one of great unrest in Europe. Nicholas was deeply angered when his friend Charles X of France was expelled. The revolution in Paris was the signal for a similar movement in the capital of Poland. ”

“ Nicholas, by several of his enactments, has enabled his son to rule with less difficulty than would otherwise have been the case. By the ruin of some of the principal nobles he has saved him from the worst enemies of his ancestors, who so frequently proved their destroyers; and by the creation of a wealthy middle class, every day improving in education and numbers, he has formed a strong body who find that it is their interest to support him. When it is no longer their interest so to do, the whole fabric of Russian government will crumble to the dust. ”

“ The Emperor Nicholas was fond of choosing as his ministers and advisers men who were not likely to oppose any of his measures. The incompetency of his ministry was notorious both in Russia and other countries. When his successor, Alexander II., ascended the throne, he was asked why he did not retain the ministry of Nicholas instead of choosing a new one. He replied, "My father was a man of such transcendent ability that he could afford to surround himself with incompetent men; I feel my weakness, and must have the best talent in the Empire to assist me." ”

“ An incident in the life of Nicholas I. of Russia furnishes a fitting parallel to what the bigots of our time are now experiencing. Among the many admirers of that other great Deist, Voltaire, was the Empress Catharine, who ordered a statue of him from the leading sculptor of Europe. When it arrived Catharine was dying, and for years it lay untouched in the box in which it had been shipped.
At length Alexander caused it to be set up in a room of the imperial palace, where it remained until Nicholas ascended the throne. Nicholas was a most admirable type of the religious bigot ”

“ Everybody acquainted with Russia knows that Czar Nicholas used to make all the aristocracy tremble at his feet. No nobleman, to whatever rank he might belong, could leave the country without his consent, and paying a certain sum of money for the privilege. ”

“ Alexander. Russia had her own way in almost every respect; and in 1846 Nicholas was almost as powerful a ruler as Napoleon had been a generation earlier, with the additional advantage of being a legitimate sovereign, who could not be destroyed through the efforts of any coalition. Three years later he saved Austria from destruction by his invasion of Hungary,—an act of hard insolence, which quite reconciles one to the humiliation that overtook him five years later. He was then so powerful that the reactionists of the West cried for Russian cannon, to be used against the Reds. ”

“ Nicholas II, son of Alexander III and Princess Dagmar of Denmark, is one of those tantalising personalities whom one knows to be in themselves far removed from subtlety, yet whom one cannot honestly pretend to understand. He came to the throne an unknown man, eagerly scrutinised by every moderate reformer in Russia. He departs from it with his personality and actions still largely enveloped in mystery. This obscurity is, as I said, not due to any depth or subtlety in the mind of the Tsar ”

“ In full knowledge of his designs, they allowed him to commit himself—to pick a quarrel with Turkey about some rubbish relating to the keys of the Holy Places—to march his forces across the Pruth—to occupy the Principalities,—to do, in short, the work of one effective campaign. They never intimated to the country that the religious questions,—on which Russia, with scandalous hypocrisy, rested her justification of invasion,—were mere pretexts to mask the avowed intentions of Nicholas. ”

“ The Emperor Nicholas, during his reign, was supposed to have some ninety millions of the human family subject to his sway. With a standing army of a million of men, two hundred thousand of whom were cavalry, he possessed power unequaled by that of any other single kingdom on the globe. In the recent struggle at Sevastopol all the energies of England, France and Turkey were expended against Russia alone, and yet it was long doubtful whose banners would be victorious. ”

“ He was the man, to whom Nicholas is reported to have said, in one of his saddened moods, “There is only one honest man in Russia:” and, while the favourite was bowing his acknowledgment of the supposed compliment, never for a moment doubting, that he, the immaculate Orlov, was the “one honest man,” whose presence the clear-sighted autocrat recognised and rejoiced in, Nicholas dispelled the illusion by quietly adding—“and that is myself.” Yet I knew very well that no one had greater influence over Nicholas; and that, next to the Czar himself, no one had so much power in Russia. ”

“ It was only a part of a much larger plan, and when Nicholas had proclaimed himself the Protector of the Orthodox Christians in the East, he had placed himself in a relation to the Eastern Question which could be held by no other sovereign in Europe; for persecuted Christians in the East were not Catholic but Orthodox; and was not he the head of the Orthodox Church? It was to secure this first move in the game of diplomacy that Russia joined England and France, and placed the struggling little state of Greece upon its feet in 1832. ”

“ With all our republican prejudices, we cannot deny that Nicholas is a man of talent, with a mind liberalized by education; we have been informed, also, that he is a man of serious and religious character;—he certainly, acting as he does in the eye of all the world, must have great restraint upon him from public opinion, and a high sense of character. But who is the man to whom American laws intrust powers more absolute than those of Nicholas of Russia, or Ferdinand of Naples? ”

“ It would have been hard enough to be branded by the centuries to come as the last of the Romanoffs and as an unworthy Heir of Peter the Great. It was worse than hard for Russia, even more than for Nicholas II., to have to realize that, through stupidity, weakness of character, and an exaggerated opinion of his own power and might, he had been the direct cause of the ruin of his country and the means of plunging it into an abyss of distress and of anarchy from which it will take the work of several generations to redeem it. ”

“ He loves Russia; how much has been splendidly evident since the war broke out, and when all is over one effect will surely be that he will be all the more beloved by Russia. I see, too, as a result of his generous attitude the possibility of a resurrected Poland, whose populace will freely give suzerainty to Nicholas II. because they recognise amid all the riot and disaster of to-day that he is their friend. ”

“ The hard character and harsh policy of Nicholas ended in furnishing to England an opportunity to throw Russia herself into the background for the time, and that opportunity she made use of, but not to the extent that she had determined upon, owing to her dependence upon France, which became the shield of Russia after having been the sword of England. The United States were a formidable rival of England ”

“ Russia, moreover, was the one power which all western Europe had cause to dread. Ever since the Empress Catherine II., the encroachments and territorial aggrandizement of this great military empire had been going on. The Emperor Nicholas was the most powerful sovereign of the world, having a million of men under arms, ready to obey his nod, with no check whatever on his imperial will. ”

“ At the death-bed of his father, Nicholas was betrothed to a princess of the House of Hesse, whose mother was Princess Alice, daughter of Queen Victoria. Upon her marriage this Anglo-German princess was compelled to make a public renunciation of her own faith, and to accept that of her imperial consort—the orthodox faith of Russia. The personal traits of the Emperor seem so exemplary that, if he fails to meet the heroic needs of the hour, the world is disposed not to reproach him, but rather to feel pity for the young ruler who has had thrust upon him such an insoluble problem. ”

“ If they could have mustered a single statesman amongst ’em who had pluck enough to tell Russia at the outset that if she laid hands on Turkey we should have considered it an ultimatum, there would never have been any war at all—the Emperor Nicholas confessed as much on his death-bed. ”

“ Not another ruble reached Pipis for the prosecution of the philanthropical work, the architect took himself off, and we took possession of the empty house. The court-yard is convenient for our horses, and in the hot summer days my Cossacks find pleasant lying in the large cool halls." Not all the acuteness, foresight, and far-sightedness, and many kingly qualities, which combine to render Nicholas the most remarkable of existing monarchs, can protect from such impositions as this the sovereign of so extensive a country as Russia. ”

“ Nevertheless, seeing the absolute power of Nicholas, and the intense importance he attaches to the conquest of the Caucasus, it is difficult to admit that obstacles arising out of the nature of the ground and the character of the population could not have been overcome in a region so limited, if there were not other and more potent causes continually at work to impede the military operations of Russia. ”

“ I give a translation of this document which, by its nobility and the burning patriotism in every line, compelled the admiration of even the Czar’s enemies:
The Act of Abdication of the Czar Nicholas II.
By the grace of God, We, Nicholas II., Emperor of all the Russias, Tsar of Poland, Grand-Duke of Finland, etc., etc.... to all Our faithful subjects make known:
In these days of terrible struggle against the external enemy who has been trying for three years to impose his will upon Our Fatherland, God has willed that Russia should be faced with a new and formidable trial. ”

“ Nicholas is less the specialist and more the general practitioner. He certainly has his share of duties assigned him. With St. Mary and St. Andrew he shares the guardianship of Russia, with Olaf that of Norway, [79] with St. Julian of Rimini, that of the whole eastern coast of Italy. Of cities he is the patron saint: in the North, of Moscow and Aberdeen, in the South, of Bari and Corfu, in intermediate countries, of Amiens, Civray (Poitou) , Ancona, Fribourg (Switzerland) , and several places in Lorraine. ”

“ As soon as the news of the revolution in Paris reached Russia, the absolute ruler of that vast empire mobilized his armies, "so that, if circumstances should demand it, the tide of Anarchy Russia stems revolution could be dammed." After the abortive revolt at Cracow, Czar Nicholas issued an imperial manifesto, closing with a quotation from Isaiah: "Listen, ye heathen, and submit, for with us is God." When the spirit of revolt spread to Moldavia and Wallachia, Emperor Nicholas without further ado despatched a Russian army corps across the Pruth. ”