NICHOLAS I. AND NATIONALIST REACTION Nicholas was quite another type of man from his brother. A rough nature of limited understanding, he was conscious of his inferiority and sincerely disliked the idea of becoming tsar. But once he was tsar, he was sure he would be enlightened from above for the accomplishment of his Divine mission and he conceived an exalted idea of his personal dignity and infallibility. But he was no mystic. Cold and reserved, he inspired fear and hatred and he consciously made use of these feelings as the instrument of his power. His aim was to freeze every germ of free thought and independent moral feeling, as disturbing agents of the order of things entrusted by God to his personal care.
Nicholas' reign can be divided in three parts by two European sets of revolutions: those of 183o and those of 1848. During the first five years (1825-3o) he did not feel quite sure of himself and he appealed for help to advisers of Alexander's liberal period, such as Kochubey, Speransky and Kankrin. He even instructed a special committee of Dec. 6 (i8), 1826, to col lect for him all useful hints about necessary reforms. While pun ishing severely the decembrists (five of them were hanged; others sent to Siberia) he wished to make use of all their good ideas. But he reserved for himself the control over public opinion, and he confided to Count Benckendorf the organization of a new secret police of gendarmes controlled by the "third section" of his per sonal chancery. He adopted Alexander's policy of protecting the kings from their peoples; but he made an exception for Turkish Christians (in the first place it was the Greeks). He thus carried on a war against Turkey (1827-9). By the treaty of Adrianople Greece was liberated; the "hospodars" of the Danubian Princi palities were to be appointed for life and free from Turkish interference in internal affairs. The Straits and the Black sea were to be open.
Nicholas especially attended to education ; he wished to clear it of everything politically dangerous and confine it to the upper class. He abolished the liberal University statutes of Alexander (18o4) ; by the new statutes of 1835 he detached primary educa tion which was intended for the lower classes from the "gym nasiums" and universities where only children of gentry and of officials were to be admitted.
The expulsion of Charles X. of France and the Polish insur rection of 183o-31 determined the "legitimist" tendency of Nicholas' foreign policy: he wished to become a real "policeman" of Europe and at Munchengratz he renewed relations with Metter nich. But his excessive interest in the "sick man" in Constanti nople finished by rousing Europe against him. In 1833 Nicholas saved the sultan from the Egyptian rebel Mohammed Ali and by the Treaty of Unkiar-Skelessi received for that service free passage for Russian ships to the Mediterranean, while to all other powers the Dardanelles were to be closed during war-time. This concession drew the attention of the European powers and in 1841 all the five great powers agreed that the Dardanelles should be closed to warships of all nations.
"Slavophils" and "Westerners."—In sharp contrast with Nicholas' educational policy, a new generation grew up, which was bred by Russian universities, especially Moscow university, between 1830 and 1848. They were not politicians or liberals of a Franco-English type. They were idealists and students of the philosophy of Schelling, Fichte and Hegel. In Moscow literary salons they did not discuss the form of the government, but dug deep into the very foundations of Russian history and the Russian national mind. Most of them declared that Russia was unlike Europe, and its type of civilization potentially far higher than the European one. They thought to discover Russia's peculiarity in
her old peasants' commune (mir), which, they said, revealed the socialistic soul of Russia as unlike the individualist western soul. They execrated Peter the Great's europeanisation of Russia as a fatal deviation from the genuine course of Russian history, and they wanted Russia to come back to the forsaken principles of the Eastern Church and State—to orthodoxy and autocracy. The majority of public opinion, led by Herzen, Belinsky, Bakunin, Granovsky and others, revolted against this "slavophil" doctrine. They opposed to it their own doctrine of the "western" origin of Russian civilization. Herzen and Bakunin emigrated from Russia on the approach of the revolutions of 1848. They became the origi nators of Russian socialism, which however did not frighten Nicholas so much as Russian liberalism—an applied doctrine whose dangers he had experienced at the hands of the "Decembrists," whose movement in December 1825 has already been described. Nicholas was not insensible to the chief social question in Russia—that of serfdom. How could he be when peasants' upris ings were steadily growing in frequency? They numbered about 41 in the first part of his reign, while in the second there were 378, and 137 during the last seven years. Nicholas formed a series of secret committees which, after many failures, prepared the law of 1842 on "voluntary accords" which abolished personal serf dom and fixed the amount of peasant lots and payments. Owing to Kiselev's energy, the same changes were obligatorily intro duced in Poland (1846) and in some western provinces A real persecution of intellectuals began after the revolutions of 1848. A secret committee, presided over by Buturlin, was founded to punish press offences. Uvarov himself was found too liberal and resigned. His successor prince Shirinsky-Shikhmatov wished to "base all teaching on religious truth"; the chairs of history and philosophy were closed, the number of students limited; many writers arrested, exiled or otherwise punished. The private circle of followers of Petrashevsky, a young socialist, was sent to forced labour in Siberia (including Dostoyevsky) for having read and discussed prohibited literature.