In spite of his reverence for his brother's memory, Nicholas made a clean sweep of "the angel's" Bible Society; as for Alexan der's projects of reform, the pitiful legacy of a life of unfulfilled purposes, these were reported upon by committees, and shelved. Nicholas too saw the need for reform ; the Dekabrist conspiracy had burnt that into his soul; but he had his own views as to the reform needed. The state was corrupt, disorganized; what was wanted was not more liberty but more discipline. So he put civil servants, professors and students into uniform, and for little offences had them marched to the guard-house; thought was disciplined by the censorship, the army by an unceasing round of parades and inspections. The one great gift of Nicholas I. to Russia, a gift which he really believed would be welcome be cause it would bring every subject into immediate contact with the throne, was—the secret police, the dreaded Third Section of the Private Chancery of the emperor.
The crowning fault of Nicholas was, however, that he would not delegate his authority; whom could he trust but himself ? In this he resembled his contemporary the emperor Francis I. But Francis would "sleep upon" a difficult problem; Nicholas never slept. His constitution was of iron, his capacity for work prodigious ; reviews and parades, receptions of deputations, visits to public institutions, then eight or nine hours in his cabinet read ing and deciding on reports and despatches—such was his ordinary day's work. Under the "Iron Tsar" the outward semblance of authority was perfectly maintained; but behind this imposing facade the whole structure of the Russian administrative system continued to rot and crumble.
Revelations of the rottenness of the under-structure had, in deed, begun before the outbreak of the war with Turkey in 1828. The newly organized squadron which in 1827 set out on the cruise which ended at Navarino only reached Plymouth with difficulty, and there had to be completely refitted. The disastrous Balkan campaign of 1828 was an even more astounding revelation of corruption, disorganization and folly in high places. The weary and starving soldiers were forced to turn out amid the marshes of the Dobrudscha before the emperor as spick and span as on the parade grounds of St. Petersburg; but he could do nothing to set order in the confusion of the commissariat, which caused the troops to die like flies of dysentery and scurvy ; or to remedy the scandals of the hospitals. His presence hampered the initiative of Prince Wittgenstein, the nominal commander-in-chief ; for Nicholas was incapable of leaving him a free hand.
These then were the leading principles which underlay Nicholas's domestic and foreign policy from first to last : to discipline Russia, and by means of a disciplined Russia to discipline the world. The mission of Russia in the West was, in accordance with the principles of the Holy Alliance as Nicholas interpreted them, to uphold the cause of legitimacy and autocracy against the Revolu tion ; her mission in the East was, with or without the co-operation of "Europe," to advance the cause of Orthodox Christianity, of which she was the natural protector, at the expense of the decaying Ottoman empire. The sympathy of Europe with the insurgent Greeks gave the tsar his opportunity. The duke of Wellington was sent to St. Petersburg in 1826 to congratulate the new tsar on his accession and arrange a concert in the Eastern Question. The upshot proved the diplomatic value of Nicholas's apparent sincerity of purpose and charm of manner; the "Iron Duke" was to the "Iron Tsar" as soft iron to steel; Great Britain, without efficient guarantees for the future, stood committed to the policy which ended in the destruction of the Ottoman sea-power at Navarino and the march of the Russians on Constantinople. By the treaty of Adrianople in 1829 Turkey seemed to become little better than a vassal state of the tsar, a relation intensified, after the first revolt of Mehemet Ali, by the treaty of Unkiar-Skelessi in 1833. In the West, Nicholas himself proposed an armed inter vention of the Alliance "to restore order" in Belgium and France; and when his allies held back even proposed to intervene alone, a project rendered impossible by the outbreak of the great insurrec tion in Poland, which tied the hands of all three powers.
Then, the insurrection in Poland once crushed, and Poland itself scarce surviving even as a geographical expression, he drew the three eastern autocratic powers together in a new "Holy Alliance" by the secret convention of Berlin (Oct. 3, 1833) re affirming the right and duty of intervention at the request of a legitimate sovereign. The cordial understanding with Austria, cemented at Miinchengratz and Berlin, was renewed, after the accession of the emperor Ferdinand, at Prague and Toplitz (1835) ; on the latter occasion it was decided "without difficulty" to suppress the republic of Cracow, as a centre of revolutionary agitation. He allowed himself to be persuaded by Metternich to support the cause of Don Carlos in Spain, and so early as May 1837, in view of the agitation in Hungary, he announced that "in every case" Austria might count on Russia.