Istoriia Rossii XIX stoletiia. Tom III [History of Russia in the 19th Century Volume III]

The third volume is devoted to the first period of Nicholas Pavlovich's reign. The nature of ‘Knight Nicholas,’ as he was called in childhood, the ‘Don Quixote of autocracy,’ as he was later called, was infused with the absolute conservatism of his mentors, the historian Nikolai Karamzin and General Matthias Lambsdorff: the individual is insignificant, the state is valuable in itself. An inept yet pompous foreign policy was paid for at a certain price—the blood of Russian soldiers, and technological breakthroughs at the cost of the torment and misery of the common man. By the middle of Nicholas I's reign, behind the outward splendor of the court and the might of the million-strong army, astute observers increasingly saw the stagnation and decline of a vast country shackled in the shackles of slavery.