Emperor Nicholas I and his era. The Don Quixote of autocracy. 1825—1855.

In pre-revolutionary liberal and then Soviet stereotypes, Emperor Nicholas I was presented exclusively as a suppressor of freedom, a coarse soldier "Nicholas the Palatine", the "gendarme of Europe", a persecutor of Decembrists, Polish patriots, freethinkers and Pushkin, an enemy of technological progress. Many contemporaries, however, considered him almost an ideal ruler, a fearless officer, a subtle and skillful politician, a codifier, a reformer who built a stable vertical of power, a clearly functioning bureaucratic apparatus, at the head of which stood Nicholas himself, working around the clock without days off. He alone, of all Russian tsars, could justifiably say of himself: "The state is I." Based on extensive documentary material and testimonies of contemporaries, the author explores the peculiarities of this controversial figure in Russian history and his era.