This story of the intellectual life of the era as a struggle between a severely repressive government and an increasingly alienated educated public, though enshrined in the literature by later revolutionaries, does not paint an accurate picture. The dissidents were a small minority. Most educated Russians took pride in the knowledge that their country was the strongest land power in the world and a respected member of the European concert of nations. They felt secure from outside threats and were enjoying a period of relative economic prosperity. Although the few dissidents and some foreign visitors lamented government supervision of intellectual life, most Russians recognized the need for censorship and were able to create and consume a rich and varied cultural life within its bounds. Over 200 new periodical publications were begun in Nicholas’s reign, and several dozen were on the market at any one time. The creative arts flourished; the Russian opera came into its own in the works of Mikhail Glinka and Alexander Dargomyzhsky the paintings of Karl Briullov, Alexander Ivanov, and Ivan Aivazovskii shifted artistic style away from classicism to romanticism, while the genre painting of Pavel Fedotov and others captured characteristic moments of Russian life. A rapid growth of scientific literature and scientific investigation was evident. Official Nationality and Slavophilism were symptoms of educated Russians’ need for a clearer sense of national identity and their place in the world; the result was plans for historical and ethnographic museums to house representations of the people and culture of Russia. This was the period of the founding of the Imperial Russian Geographic Society, which set out to map literally and figuratively the physical and cultural boundaries of the nation. Its establishment in early 1845 was followed by a major ethnographic research programme to discover the folklore, material life, and practices of the Russian and other peoples inhabiting the empire. Nicholas’s reign also saw an increasing effort by the Orthodox Church to raise the educational, religious, and moral level of the common people through a rapid growth of local schooling and printings of inexpensive editions of didactic literature. The Church likewise launched new efforts in the missionary field, including work in the Altai Mountain region, eastern Siberia, and Alaska that led to linguistic and ethnographic reports that corresponded to the work of the Geographic Society. Indeed, the Geographic Society could well stand as a symbol for an age whose leaders were intent on recording the economic, topographical, and human conditions of the empire. This process reflected Nicholas’s inductive approach to reform, the exhaustive study of conditions before acting, an impulse that helped prepare the Great Reforms of the 1860s while encouraging educated Russians to find a personal and national identity in service to the common people.
Close of the Reign
The final years of Nicholas’s reign effaced many of its most important achievements. The success with which a flexible censorship had allowed for important scientific and cultural growth while checking dissident opinion was lost in the orgy of repression that followed the news of revolution in Europe in 1848. The continuing expansion and democratization of the educational system and the opportunities for Russians to continue higher studies abroad succumbed to the same crack-down when, in the wake of the Petrashevskii circle’s arrest, Nicholas slashed university enrolments by two-thirds and ordered all Russians studying abroad to return home (unwisely, as it turned out, because the returning students brought with them detailed and accurate information about the upheavals occurring in their places of study). The progress being made on peasant reform came to a halt, as the tsar feared further social change of any kind. Even the success of the government in stabilizing the currency and promoting economic development was harmed by the expensive and futile war in the Crimea.
