NICHOLAS I. [NIKoLm emperor of Russia (1796-1855), eighth child of the emperor Paul I. and his wife Maria Feodorovna, was born at Tsarskoe-Selo on June 25 (July 6, N.S.), 1796. He was only five years old when his father's murder brought his brother Alexander I. to the throne (18o ). His education was supervised by M. von Lambsdorff, director of the 1st cadet corps and ex-governor of Courland. But Nicholas and his brother Constantine had little taste for learning. They were interested mainly in military matters.
The grand-duke Nicholas joined the Russian headquarters in France in 1814, but not to take part in any fighting. In 1815 he was with the Allies in Paris, and in the following year set out on the grand tour, visiting Moscow and the western provinces of Russia, Berlin (where he was betrothed to Princess Charlotte Louise, daughter of Frederick William III.), and England. His marriage marked the beginning of intimate relations between the courts of Berlin and St. Petersburg. On the 17/29th of April 1818 their first child, the future emperor Alexander II., was born. In the autumn Nicholas was placed in command of the 2nd brigade of the ist division of the Guard.
Alexander I. died at Taganrog on Dec. i, 1825. Constantine was at Warsaw; Nicholas was too conscious of his unpopularity in the army-the fruit of his drastic discipline-to dare to assume the crown without a public abdication on the part of the legiti mate heir. The result (see CONSTANTINE PAVLOVICH ) was a three weeks' interregnum, of which the discontented spirits in the army took advantage to bring to a head a plot that had long been hatching in favour of constitutional reform. When on Dec. the troops who had already taken the oath to Constantine were ordered to take another to Nicholas, it was easy to persuade them that this was a treasonable plot against the true emperor. The Moscow regiment refused to take the oath, and part of it marched, shouting for Constantine and "Constitution," to the square before the Senate House, where they were joined by a company of the Guard and the sailors from the warships. In this crisis Nicholas showed high personal courage, if little decision and initiative. For
hours he stood, or sat on horseback, amid the surging crowd, facing the mutinous soldiers—who had loaded their muskets and formed square—while effort after effort was made to bring them to reason, sometimes at the cost of life—as in the case of Count Milorado vich, military governor of St. Petersburg, who was mortally wounded by a pistol shot while arguing with the mutineers. When at last the emperor consented to use force, a few rounds of grape shot sufficed to quell the mutiny. The chief conspirators—Prince Shchepin-Rostovski, Suthoff, Ryleyev, Prince Sergius Trubetskoi, Prince Obolenski and others—were arrested the same night and interrogated by the emperor in person. A special commission, consisting entirely of officers, was then set up; and before this, for five months, the prisoners were subjected to a rigorous in quisition. The prisoners were kept in solitary confinement in the casemates of the inner fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul. They were brought blindfolded before the commission, and then sud denly confronted with their interrogators. Many went mad under the ordeal, one died, and one starved himself to death (Schiemann, ii. 73). It was soon clear that the Dekabrist (December) rising was but one manifestation of a vast conspiracy permeating the whole army. A military rising on a large scale in the south was only averted by the news of the failure of the mutiny at St. Petersburg; and at Moscow there were many arrests, including that of Colonel Paul Pestel, the chief of the revolutionary southern league. The 121 prisoners were finally brought to trial before a supreme criminal court, established by imperial ukaz (June 1-12, 1826). Some were condemned to death, others to solitary con finement in fortresses, others to the Siberian mines and colonies. Of the latter many were accompanied by their wives, though the Russian law allows divorce in the case of such sentences; the emperor unwillingly allowed the devoted women to go, but decreed that any children born to them in Siberia would be illegitimate.