Imperator Nikolai I i ego epokha - Kisin Sergei Valer'evich

In pre-revolutionary liberal, and then in Soviet stereotypes, Emperor Nicholas I was presented solely as a strangler of freedom, a rude soldafon "Nikolai Palkin", "gendarme of Europe", a persecutor of Decembrists, Polish patriots, freethinkers and Pushkin, the enemy of technological progress. Many contemporaries considered him almost an ideal sovereign, a fearless officer, a subtle and skilful politician, a codifier, a reformer who built a stable vertical of power, a clearly working bureaucracy, headed by himself Nicholas, who worked around the clock seven days a week. It was he, the only one of the Russian tsars, who could rightly say about himself: "The state is me." On a large documentary material and testimonies of contemporaries the author understands the peculiarities of this controversial figure of Russian history and its era.