Suddenly on 12 December letters from Dibich and Chernyshev arrived from the south, addressed with ‘utmost urgency for the emperor’s hands only!’ warning of ‘the new plot with its branches throughout the empire’.
‘Just then I felt the full burden of my fate,’ wrote Nicholas, ‘and recognized with horror the situation I found myself in.’ He summoned Miloradovich and Golitsyn, and together they opened the note from Chernyshev naming the conspirators of the Northern Society. Nicholas realized that ‘I had to act without wasting a moment.’ He ordered Miloradovich to arrest them – but the governor-general did little except dally in bed with his latest ballerina. Nicholas commissioned his brother’s minister Speransky, assisted by the historian Karamzin, who had visited the dowager empress every day since Alexander’s death, to draft the accession manifesto. He then went to the private apartments where, as his wife wrote, ‘My Nikolai returned and knelt before me to be the first to greet me as empress,’ even though ‘Constantine does not want to issue a manifesto and holds firmly to his former decision.’
That evening, a young Guards lieutenant, Yakov Rostovtsev, called on Nicholas and warned him that the coup was set for 14 December – the ‘fatal day’.
Next morning, on the 13th, Nicholas signed his manifesto as emperor and ordered Lopukhin and the foreign minister Nesselrode to assemble the State Council that night. Grand Duke Michael, on his way back from Warsaw, would testify that Constantine had refused the throne. At 8 p.m., the twenty-three members of the Council gathered in the Winter Palace, but Michael never arrived. Finally, after midnight, Nicholas appeared alone: everyone stood as he read the manifesto. ‘Today I request you to take the oath,’ he declared in the portentously grandiloquent style that he made his own. ‘Tomorrow I shall command you.’ They bowed and took the oath.
Nicholas went to join his mother and wife, accepting the bows of their courtiers. The conspirators spent the night organizing the revolt, electing its grandest name Prince Sergei Trubetskoi as ‘dictator’. But only a few units agreed to rebel. The ‘dictator’ dithered, fearing that it was ‘a hopeless undertaking’. As for Nicholas, he told Alexander Benckendorff that ‘By tonight, perhaps both of us will no longer be among the living but at least we’ll die doing our duty.’ He ‘slept quietly, all conscience clear’.
On the ‘fatal day’ of the 14th, the emperor was up at 4 a.m. and addressed the Guards colonels at five: ‘You will answer to me with your heads for the tranquillity of the capital. Even if I shall be emperor for only one hour, I shall show myself worthy of the honour.’ The officers then rushed off to their units. At 7 a.m., Miloradovich, the Senate and the Synod gathered at the Winter Palace as soldiers took the oath to their second emperor in two weeks. At eleven, Miloradovich again reported that the city was ‘perfectly quiet’ and supposedly returned to his mistress. But moments later, just as Michael finally arrived from Warsaw, officers burst in to report: ‘Sire, the Moscow Regiment is in full revolt,’ its commanders badly wounded. ‘The rebels are heading for the Senate. Order the Preobrazhensky and Household Cavalry to move against them.’
Nicholas was ‘thunderstruck’.
The new emperor prayed privately and then, telling his mother and wife ‘There’s a bit of trouble in the Moscow Regiment, I’ll head over there,’ he ‘decided to go where the danger threatened’. Alexei Orlov, commander of the Horse Guards, was the first to report for action.* Nicholas ordered him to surround rebel positions. Orlov departed at a gallop. As Nicholas emerged on to Palace Square, crowded with onlookers, he found the Preobrazhensky Guards at attention in all their glory. ‘Form attack columns!’ he ordered. As they set off, Miloradovich rode up: ‘This is bad. They’re heading for the Senate. But I’ll talk to them.’ Nicholas marched out with the Preobrazhensky towards the Senate – ‘an unparalleled moment in my life!’ He ordered rifles loaded – and he sent back an adjutant to move his children from the Anichkov to the well-guarded Winter Palace. The tsar spotted Prince Sergei Trubetskoi watching from the General Staff headquarters – not knowing that he was the rebel ‘dictator’. Miloradovich galloped up to the rebels to harangue them, but one of them shot him in the heart, another bayoneted him. He died that night. Now Nicholas, accompanied by his closest retainers Alexander Benckendorff and Vladimir Adlerberg (son of his governess), rendezvoused with Orlov and posted his loyal forces around the insurgents in Senate Square. He sent Adlerberg back to the Winter Palace to escort his family to the safety of Tsarskoe Selo – just in time. The empresses refused to leave Petersburg, but as the loyalist guards took up positions, a unit of rebel Grenadiers arrived at the palace. Disappointed, the rebels almost bumped into Nicholas himself, who barked the order: ‘Halt!’
‘We are for Constantine!’ they cried, not recognizing Nicholas. They could have assassinated him then and changed everything.
‘Very well,’ answered the emperor, pointing towards the Senate. ‘Your place is over there.’
When Nicholas and Benckendorff inspected their positions, the 3,000 rebels, surrounded by 9,000 loyal troops, fired on them. Grand Duke Michael marched up to demand their surrender, but they almost shot him. Nicholas noticed that the rebels were no longer shouting ‘Hurrah for Constantine’ but instead ‘Hurrah for Constitution’, a slogan repeated by peasant-soldiers who, noted Nicholas, ‘thought Constitutsia was the wife of Constantine’.
It was 3 p.m.; soon it would be dark; the workers on top of St Isaac’s Cathedral were pelting his troops with debris. As for the rebels, ‘they fired a volley at me,’ but Nicholas longed to end the stand-off without bloodshed. He ordered Orlov’s Horse Guards, in their white tunics with scarlet collars and brass helmets, then the Chevalier-Gardes in their breastplates, to charge, but as the rebels fired at them, both of these gorgeously accoutred squadrons of horsemen slipped on the ice. ‘Sire, there’s not a moment to lose; there’s nothing else to be done; we need case-shot!’ said Prince Vasilchikov.
‘Would you have me spill blood on the first day of my reign?’
‘Yes sire,’ answered Vasilchikov, ‘to save your empire.’
‘Guns to fire in order starting from right flank!’ barked Nicholas. The rebels broke; their leaders tried to rally them for an assault across the ice to secure the Peter and Paul Fortress. Strafed by cannonfire, the ice cracked, the rebels scattered. Ordering Benckendorff and Vasilchikov to round up the fleeing revolutionaries, the tsar returned to the Winter Palace.
Nicholas reviewed the troops of the Sapper Regiment, who had saved the family, in Palace Square. From the moment the shooting stopped, he consciously converted the crushing of the rebellion into a blood oath of loyalty to the dynasty, a sacrament of Russianness and rejection of Western liberalism. ‘I ordered my son to be brought.’
Blue-eyed Alexander, eight, was in uniform. ‘Here is my son,’ Nicholas said. ‘Serve him faithfully.’ He placed the boy in the arms of soldiers, who kissed his hands and feet.
In the palace, ‘my rooms were much like a general headquarters during campaign . . . as despatches poured in from Vasilchikov and Benckendorff’. Prisoners were delivered, including the ‘dictator’ Trubetskoi, who claimed innocence until, faced with written evidence, ‘he fell to my feet shamefully’.
‘Take him away, everything is finished with you!’ said Nicholas. ‘These interrogations took place all night . . . Not only did I not have time to lie down, I didn’t even have time to change my clothes.’
‘Dear dear Constantine, your will has been done,’ he scribbled to his brother. ‘I am emperor but my God at what a price!’
‘It cuts one to the heart,’ exclaimed the baffled Grand Duke Michael. ‘Are we low fellows and these honourable gentlemen or is it the other way round?’
Scarcely had Nicholas appointed an Investigation Commission* to get to the bottom of the conspiracies than revolution flared in Ukraine. On 3 January 1826, the group of 800 rebel soldiers were suppressed, the leaders sent to Petersburg. Before Nicholas could truly begin his reign, he had to punish t
he rebels, bury his brother and crown himself.1
While Benckendorff and the Investigation Commission interrogated their 579 suspects, the cortège of the late emperor Alexander was wending its way to Petersburg, directed by the tsar’s beloved coachman Ilya who had never left his side, even driving him round Paris. But when it arrived, the body was so grotesquely distorted that there was no open coffin, which fuelled the rumours that there was no body inside.
As international royalty arrived for the funeral, Nicholas took control of foreign policy, using Nesselrode as his factotum. His first challenge was the fate of the ailing Ottoman empire, the so-called Eastern Question – ‘the most important of all’ – that would culminate in war: the Orthodox Greeks and Slavs were already in revolt against the sultan. ‘I will give you my word of honour’, Nicholas told the French ambassador, ‘that I don’t want, don’t desire and don’t plan to add a single inch of territory to the holdings of Russia,’ but ‘neither will I allow that any other shall have an inch of it’. As for the rebels, ‘I abhor the Greeks,’ yet he was determined to enforce the treaties of Catherine the Great and Alexander which proclaimed that Russia was the protector of the Orthodox. He dreamed of a Russian Constantinople. ‘I know very well that in view of the fact that I’m only twenty-nine’, foreign statesmen ‘impute to me military leanings and desire for military victories, but they misjudge me, I love peace.’
‘The Duke of Wellington arrived this evening,’ reported the dowager empress to Annette. ‘I think he’s lost weight, but he still has his beautiful features and he made me very happy with what he said about Nicholas whose conduct on 14 December he much admired.’ When Wellington dined with the Romanovs, ‘his conversation is so interesting, his manner so natural he puts everyone at ease. The more one sees of him, the more one would like to see of him.’ But Wellington had also come to mediate between Nicholas and Sultan Mahmud II, who, angered by Russian interference, had revoked earlier agreements and refused to withdraw his troops from Wallachia and Moldavia. Wellington encouraged Nicholas, whom he thought more reasonable than Alexander, to avoid war. They agreed a deal whereby Britain would force the Ottomans to grant limited Greek independence while recognizing Russian interests in Wallachia and Moldavia. Yet Nicholas was less reasonable than he seemed: he had already sent the sultan an ultimatum.
On 13 March, Nicholas presided over the burial of Alexander* in the Peter and Paul Cathedral. ‘A Greek funeral is certainly calculated to rouse one’s feelings,’ wrote Wellington, but with a stinking corpse and endless chanting, it was a ‘terrible ceremony.’ He could not wait to get home.2
As Nicholas awaited the outcome of his Ottoman ultimatum, he oversaw the destruction of the Decembrists. ‘We must seek revenge for Russia and for our national honour,’ he told Constantine. ‘There can be no mercy!’
After the Investigation Commission had delivered its report, a Special Supreme Court met on 3 June and sentenced five of the rebels to quartering, thirty-one to beheading and eighty-five to imprisonment. There was no trial and the sentences were specified by the tsar. But on 12 July, when they were brought before the court, Nicholas commuted the sentences to five hangings and the rest to imprisonment, hard labour in the mines or Siberian exile.†
The tsar devised every detail of the executions as a ‘lesson to Europe’. On 13 July, the imperial couple attended a plangent ceremony on Senate Square to remember ‘a purifying sacrifice for Russian blood shed for the faith, tsar and fatherland on this spot’. At three o’clock that afternoon in the fortress, five rebels had their swords broken over their heads, their insignia ripped from their uniforms; then, dressed in robes, they were led up to the scaffold. The hangings were bungled. The ropes broke, breaking the legs of the victims, who cried, ‘Poor Russia, we don’t even know how to hang a man properly.’ They were simply hanged again.
‘It’s over; the widows remain!’ Nicholas told Golitsyn. While he showed mercy to the rebel wives, he was suspicious of them too: ‘What’s the news of poor Ryleeva, I hope she’ll let me know what she needs; find what Trubetskoi and Muravev’s wives are doing.’ He wrote of one of the widows, ‘Madame Konvonitsyna almost burst into my bedroom. Out of all these women I fear her the most.’ Bizarrely he recruited his father’s pious mistress, Nelidova, to make visits to the Decembrist families. ‘However painful to be forced to measures that immersed families in despair,’ he wrote to her, ‘I have no less reason to complain than them.’ Seeing the Decembrists as a symptom of a European plot against monarchy and religion, he saw his life’s work as essentially defensive. Nicholas kept the report of the Investigation Commission on his desk for the rest of his life – its ‘testimony so diverse, voluminous and complex that I need a firmness of mind to avoid getting lost in the chaos of it’. It was his moral lodestar, his guide to ruling.
‘I know I’ve been a disagreeable brigade commander, but now I’ll change,’ he declared. But during the early days he talked a lot with the historian Karamzin who advised that ‘One of the worst political evils of our time is the absence of fear,’ adding that tsars should pay ‘more attention to men than forms’. Nicholas put both maxims into action.
Nicholas is usually portrayed as a cardboard cut-out of a hubristically arrogant martinet, but he was a rare mixture: he possessed the acumen and the will to rule and control every detail of policy – and a strong sense of duty. He was a natural autocrat, perhaps the perfect model, yet he knew that autocracy was flawed. In January 1826, he created His Majesty’s Own Chancellery* as his engine of autocracy. He saw ‘all life as service’, his government as a military headquarters and ministers as officers who were simply required to obey orders, not analyse them. He was not looking for brilliance, prizing retainers who were ‘not wise, but service-orientated’. As for the Council, it existed ‘only to give me its view on questions about which I seek such opinions, no more and no less’. He used generals as all-purpose troubleshooters. This coterie had mostly served his brother, and had distinguished themselves in the Napoleonic wars, not to mention December 1825, so they had experienced politics at the highest level. Some were rigid pettifoggers but a few were imaginative and talented.* Using his personal authority to control his ministers and his Chancellery as a sort of government inspectorate to avoid arbitrary authoritarianism, his so-called ‘system’ was in fact a haphazard personal arrangement of random autocratic interference.
On 25 June 1826, Nicholas appointed Alexander Benckendorff to head the Third Section of his Chancellery, a political police whose role was to ‘collect information concerning all events’ and ‘dangerous and suspicious persons’. Benckendorff, inspired by the police in Austria, had canvassed Nicholas for the creation of this secret police and he also took control of the small Gendarmerie, which already existed under the War Ministry. He became its commander, expanding it into a political police force to become ‘the moral physician of the people’. He hoped that its reassuring officers in their bright-blue uniforms would ‘embrace the whole empire, be feared and respected and inspired by the moral authority of its chief’ – himself.
Benckendorff set up his office at 16 Fontanka, employing just sixteen staff plus 300 Gendarmes, but the revolt had transformed denunciation and surveillance into acts of patriotism. He collected informers and zealously perlustrated mail until his deputy, Maxim von Fock, could rightly boast, ‘It is impossible to sneeze in one’s house without it being reported to the Sovereign within an hour.’
Benckendorff was an unlikely secret policeman. This once dissolute Baltic German aristocrat, son of Empress Maria’s dearest friend and brother of Dorothea Lieven, was so vague that he sometimes forgot his own name and had to consult his own business card. When the empress, Mouffy, first arrived in Petersburg, Benckendorff had danced and flirted with her. ‘I had been told a lot about him,’ she recalled, ‘and heard his courage in war extolled and his wild way of living deplored though everyone laughed over it,’ but his ‘composure of manner struck me as it corresponded in no way to his rep
utation as a rake’.†
Though he was fifteen years older than Nicholas, Benckendorff regularly dined en famille with the emperor and believed that ‘Russia’s past was admirable, its present is more than magnificent and as for its future – it is beyond anything that the boldest mind can imagine.’ He boasted that he alone told truth to power and had a licence to say the unsayable, proposing at various times, religious toleration, the urgent building of railways and the abolition of serfdom.
The tsar must always be awesome and move in mysterious ways: on his lightning tours, he and his secret police chief would share a drozhky, travelling at high speed and warning no one, as he told Benckendorff, ‘in order to keep my route in complete secrecy, all the more to astound Moscow’. But, for all his feyness, Benckendorff’s menacingly pompous harassment of artists, orchestrated by the tsar, made him the first of Russia’s long line of bullying secret policemen.3
On 25 July 1826, the emperor rode into Moscow flanked by his brother Michael, but his little son Alexander was the real star. On 30 July ‘There was a great review,’ Nicholas’s mother told his sister. ‘Sasha [Alexander] was with his regiment and went past his father, riding his fat horse at a gallop . . . a little angel, perfectly at ease, noticing everything without any false embarrassment. His father is so thrilled and everyone was enchanted with this child.’ When Constantine arrived, the three brothers and little Alexander prayed at the Dormition Cathedral. ‘You can’t imagine the enthusiasm which Constantine’s arrival causes here,’ wrote Maria. ‘People make the sign of the cross, and now say all the lies that plagued us are put to rest.’
On 22 August, Nicholas crowned himself, with Constantine acting as his ‘assistant just as he was at Alexander’s coronation’, wrote their delighted mother. Afterwards, the heroes of 14 December, Orlov and Chernyshev, were raised to count, while the imperial nanny-virago, Charlotte Lieven, became a princess. Nicholas’s manifesto promised gradual reform ‘not by daring and rash dreams, which are always destructive, but gradually and from above’ – and he made a signal of reconciliation.