Nicholas I became tsar on an unlucky Monday and faced a revolt the same month
Nicholas I never expected to rule Russia; two older brothers stood ahead of him. When he did take the throne in December 1825, it was on a bitterly cold Monday that Russians read as a bad omen, and within days army officers rose against him. His 29-year reign became a byword for iron-willed autocracy.
Born in 1796 at Gatchina Palace, Nicholas was the ninth child of the future Paul I; four months later his grandmother Catherine the Great died and his parents took the throne. The crown seemed destined for his brothers, Alexander and Constantine, but neither had legitimate sons. When Alexander died suddenly of typhus in 1825, a confused interregnum followed until Constantine, in Warsaw, formally gave up his claim, a condition Alexander had imposed on his second marriage. Military plotters exploited the muddle in the Decembrist Revolt, which Nicholas quickly crushed.
His biographer Nicholas V. Riasanovsky describes a man of iron will, intense duty and tireless work, who saw himself as a junior officer obsessed with polish and detail. Trained as a military engineer, he was handsome, nervous and aggressive, and came to embody autocracy itself. He lacked his brother's intellectual range and saw himself as a stern father ruling by any means necessary.
Abroad he had early successes. He helped create an independent Greece, took territory covering present-day Armenia and Azerbaijan from Qajar Iran in the war of 1826 to 1828, and won the Russo-Turkish War of 1828 to 1829. In 1831 he put down the Polish November Uprising, and he gave Austria decisive help to suppress the Hungarian Revolution of 1848. But he then led Russia into the Crimean War, with disastrous results; historians fault his micromanagement and poor strategy, and several judge his reign a catastrophic failure at home and abroad.
By the time he died in 1855, the empire stretched over more than 20 million square kilometres but badly needed reform. His private life was happier. In 1817 he married Princess Charlotte of Prussia, his third cousin, who took the name Alexandra Feodorovna, and all seven of their children survived childhood.
Source: Nicholas I of Russia
