Here, in the Omsk Fortress, Dostoyevsky learned in 1853 about the start of the Crimean War, in which the Russian Army fought against the Turks and then the British and French, who had joined them. Things did not go so well for Russia. Nicholas had expected a triumph. Despite the emperor’s endless stream of orders, bureaucratic inertia and embezzlement prevailed. It became clear that decades of military parades on the squares of Petersburg were no substitute for technological progress. The Russian Army was backward and poorly equipped. The loss in the Crimea turned into a cruel and absolutely unforeseen humiliation for Nicholas’s Petersburg.
The sharp-tongued poet Fyodor Tyutchev authored a typical Petersburg bon mot: “Nicholas has the facade of a great man.” Under the pressure of the fateful events in the Crimea, the facade crumbled, and according to people close to the emperor, the huge and haughty fifty-year-old man “wept like a baby every time he heard more bad news.”
In February 1855 Nicholas got the flu and died within a few days, according to the official version. (Some historians think it was suicide.) He called his elder son, Alexander, to his private apartments in the Winter Palace and confessed, “I’m turning my command over to you in disorder.” His last advice to his heir was “Hold on to everything,” and he gave an energetic shake of his fist, despite swiftly approaching death. Even on his deathbed—an iron cot with a gray soldier’s overcoat instead of a blanket—Nicholas remained true to himself.
Petersburgers, awed by the thirty-year reign of the “Don Quixote of autocracy,” refused at first to believe the news of his death. “I always thought, and I wasn’t alone, that Emperor Nicholas would outlive us, and our children, and maybe our grandchildren,” wrote one in his diary.
The writer Ivan Turgenev, a curious and sociable man, headed for the Winter Palace to check out the rumors and approached a guard. “Is it true that our Sovereign has died?” The soldier grimaced and said nothing. But Turgenev persisted stubbornly until the soldier barked, “It’s true, move along.” Seeing that Turgenev still didn’t believe him, he added, “If I said that and it weren’t true, I’d be hanged.” He turned away. Only then did Turgenev believe it.
Fate and his personal qualities made Nicholas play a unique role in the development of Petersburg culture. He both encouraged and stifled it. “They chase us toward enlightenment with the whip, and with the whip they punish the overly educated,” noted Alexander Herzen. Nicholas, like Stalin one hundred years later, personally interfered in all areas of culture: literature, music, painting, theater, opera, ballet, and architecture. In every field he considered himself a specialist.
During the reign of Nicholas and under his personal supervision, the majestic ensembles of the Palace and Senate Squares, the magnificent St. Isaac’s Cathedral, and other impressive architectural complexes like the famous Teatralny and Mikhailovskaya Streets were built. A good measure of the importance Nicholas attributed to architecture can be seen in an order he gave forbidding residents of Petersburg from building houses over seventy-seven feet high, that is, higher than the cornice of the Winter Palace. The majority of these projects were executed by Nicholas’s favorite architect, Carlo Rossi, born in 1777 in Petersburg to an Italian ballerina. Nicholas valued Rossi’s artistic genius and his honesty, determination, and responsibility for his work.
Rossi, in planning the construction of the Imperial Alexandrinsky Theater, proposed covering the enormous hall with a special system of metal girders—a risky idea for those times. Nicholas doubted their strength and ordered construction stopped. His vanity stung, Rossi wrote the tsar a letter stating that should anything happen to his roof, he should be immediately hanged on one of the theater’s trusses, as an example to other architects. Such arguments always worked with Nicholas, and he allowed the building to be completed. Performances continue to this day in the theater, one of the city’s most beautiful. Nothing has gone wrong with the roof yet.
People were not as durable as girders, and one after another broke during the emperor’s reign. The critic Kornei Chukovsky used to proclaim, “A writer in Russia must live a long time,” but Pushkin, Lermontov, and Gogol did not live up to this maxim. Nicholas did not care. Even though he had begun his reign with an audience for Pushkin, he ended it by keeping Dostoyevsky from writing. Such was the evolution of the emperor’s attitude toward Russian culture.
