ABSTRACT
Nicholas I died on February 18, 1855. In all of Russia's history, only one other man's death was to elicit such feelings of relief and trepidation. Nicholas' masterwork of autocracy reflected not only his temperament but the traumas of his early years. When he was five years old, his father, Emperor Paul, had been murdered, and if not the assassination at least the plot to depose the unbalanced tsar had had the assent of the heir, Nicholas' much older brother, Alexander I. Nicholas Shelgunov, one of the most typical revolutionaries of the 1860s, recalled the old emperor's times as almost a work of art in despotism: "everybody knew his place." Nicholas' own ascent to the throne was also marked by bloodshed. Nicholas' primary goal in repression was to bar any ideological coexistence, to use a modern term, with "Europe." Nicholas himself, while judging despotism necessary, perceived perhaps more clearly than his subordinates its self-defeating nature.
