About the book: 2020 / In pre-revolutionary liberal and then Soviet stereotypes, Emperor Nicholas I was presented exclusively as a strangler of freedom, a rude martinet "Nikolai Palkin", "gendarme" Europe,” persecutor of the Decembrists, Polish patriots, freethinkers and Pushkin, enemy of technological progress. Many contemporaries considered him almost an ideal sovereign, a fearless officer, a subtle and skillful politician, a codifier, a reformer, who built a stable vertical of power, a well-functioning bureaucratic apparatus, headed by Nicholas himself, who worked 24/7. It was he, the only one of the Russian tsars, who could rightfully say about himself: “The state is me.” Using extensive documentary material and testimony from contemporaries, the author understands the features of this controversial figure in Russian history and his era..