On the Russian side, the Slavophiles tried to fire up Nicholas’s hidden pan-Slavic ambitions, which Tyutchev supported. In 1849 he wrote “The Dawn”:
Arise, Rus! The hour is nigh!
Arise for the sake of Christ’s service!
Isn’t it time to make the sign of the cross
And toll the bell of Tsargrad?
Tyutchev and his fellow thinkers did not limit their goals to the taking of Tsargrad (as Russians called Constantinople). This is how he defined the borders of the “Russian Kingdom” in another poem of that year, “Russian Geography”: “From the Nile to the Neva, from Elba to China, from the Volga to the Euphrates, from the Ganges to the Danube.”
Such voracious geographical appetites struck even Nicholas as excessive, so this poem remained in manuscript. Later, when the emperor read Tyutchev’s poem “Prophecy” in Contemporary, in which the poet predicted that Nicholas would triumphantly enter St. Sophia in Constantinople as “All-Slavic Tsar,” the monarch crossed out the lines and wrote, “Such phrases must not be allowed.”14 Nicholas’s decision was handed down to the minister of foreign affairs.
But despite Tyutchev’s political extremes, Nicholas valued him highly as an agent of influence. In 1853, on the eve of armed conflict with Turkey, Tyutchev was sent to Paris on a special assignment to work on French journalists, who were almost all in favor of Turkey in the conflict with Russia. The French ambassador in St. Petersburg warned his government about this, advising that Tyutchev “must be kept under observation,” which the French police did.
The British ambassador also informed his department about Tyutchev’s assignment in Europe, adding, “One gets the impression that at the present moment the Russian government is making great efforts to influence the public press in foreign nations and, as is known, has spent significant sums on this.”15
Equipped with royal subsidies, Tyutchev did what he could in Paris. It was too little, too late: no propaganda moves on the part of the Russian government could prevent England and France from siding with Turkey in the coming war.
In September 1854, the sixty-thousand-strong Anglo-French expeditionary corps landed in the Crimea and with the Turks besieged Sevastopol, an important naval base on the Black Sea. From the start, the war did not go the way Nicholas wanted. He had overestimated Russian military might. Nicholas was certain that in his thirty years on the throne, he had turned Russia into an undefeatable colossus. Suddenly, he discovered that the colossus had feet of clay.
Nicholas had almost a million armed men. But the Russian soldiers used obsolete rifles and artillery, the provisioning was terrible (there wasn’t a single railroad connecting continental Russia with Sevastopol), and the Russian sailing fleet could not compete with European steamships.
The war turned into a competition of technology and, more broadly, of economies; serf-holding, backward Russia could not beat the advanced West. The bravery of the Russian soldiers was of little help.
The bad news from Sevastopol plunged the proud and severe Nicholas into a deep depression. That magnificent giant, fifty-eight years old, with a rich commanding voice that sometimes made even experienced officers faint, now wept like a child when he received dispatches about defeats in the Crimea, and at night he prayed fervently, bowing low before the icons in the Winter Palace chapel.16 The once ironclad health of the emperor collapsed along with his faith in Russia’s military power.
Nicholas I burned up in a few days, dying February 18, 1855; the official cause of death was pneumonia. It came so unexpectedly that there was talk in St. Petersburg that he had committed suicide by poison.
That conspiratorial theory, so typical for Russian history, with its secrets and mysterious deaths of national leaders, is still kept alive by several suspicious circumstances: the suddenness of Nicholas’s death, its coincidence with bad news from the Crimean front, and the contradictions in the official reports on the emperor’s final illness.
Dying in the Winter Palace, where he lay on a simple iron bed under a soldier’s overcoat rather than a blanket, Nicholas I spoke haltingly with a rasp to his heir, Grand Duke Alexander: “I hand over command, unfortunately not in the good order I would have liked, leaving you many worries and concerns.”
Those bitter words concerned the military and diplomatic situation, the only one that worried Nicholas. The failure in the war in the Crimea revealed the great vulnerability of his empire.
Nicholas had no idea that he was leaving yet another legacy to his son—a group of young men, his subjects, who would constitute the glory and pride of nineteenth-century Russian culture. They were Ivan Turgenev, thirty-six, Afanasy Fet, thirty-four, Fedor Dostoevsky and Nikolai Nekrasov, both thirty-three, Alexander Ostrovsky, thirty-one, and Leo Tolstoy, twenty-six.
All these young lions formed in Nicholas’s reign, when, according to yet another great contemporary of Nicholas I, the dissident Alexander Herzen, “educated Russia, with a ball and chain, eked out a pathetic existence in profound, humiliating, insulting silence.”
This polemical evaluation of cultural life under Nicholas as an intellectual desert was taken up by Soviet propaganda and survived for three-quarters of a century, turning into dogma. The real situation was not quite so black-and-white.
Let us recall such cultural titans as Pushkin, Gogol, and the composer Glinka, who all interacted with Nicholas. It is true that Catherine II was in close contact with the poet Derzhavin, and Alexander I with Karamzin and Zhukovsky. But in those days the Russian cultural elite was a compact group and its members naturally were part of the court circle as well.
The situation under Nicholas I was different: Glinka and Gogol had no entrée into royal circles. Their promonarchist views were not the result of special status in the court, but rather were formed at least in part thanks to the emperor’s skillful attitude and personal attention.
It should be no surprise that his contemporaries often had diametrically opposed views of Nicholas, influenced by their political convictions. In the opinion of conservative writer and critic Konstantin Leontiev, Nicholas I was the “ideal autocrat the likes of which history has not produced in a long time.”17
The radical liberal Herzen, on the contrary, saw in Nicholas misfortune for Russia and considered him one of the “military leaders who have lost everything civilian, everything human, and have only one passion left—to rule; narrow mind, no heart at all.”
Nicholas I’s historical standing was hopelessly damaged by the humiliating failure in the Crimean War. Even the monarchist and nationalist Tyutchev was disillusioned in his former idol.
Since Nicholas’s own main criterion for a nation’s grandeur was its military might, the severity of this judgment was warranted. The army created by Nicholas, his beloved child, did not stand the test. However, the ideological triad “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality,” developed under his aegis, proved to be much stronger. While sometimes vanishing from the cultural horizon, it has survived in its basic form to this day. It was used, with modifications to suit changing political realities, under Alexander II, Alexander III, and Nicholas II, and later even by Joseph Stalin, Leonid Brezhnev, and Vladimir Putin. For the Soviet leaders, orthodoxy was the Communist ideology, autocracy—the rule of the Party—and nationality remained. Under Putin, the triad morphed again: Russian Orthodoxy was returned, autocracy became paternalistic rule, and nationality persisted as nationalism.