contemporary dispatches of Austrian Ambassadors accredited to the
Court of St. Petersburg. Being one of the first Russians to see them
I examined these historic treasures closely for, to my knowledge,
they have until now only been accessible to German and Polish
writers.

It seemed to me that the personality of Nicholas I is of particular
interest because in him absolutism is shown in its purest form.
Neither the genius, nor the cruelty, nor the high ambitions joined
to a spice of madness veil, as with Ivan the Terrible and Peter the
Great, his conception of the autocratic system. Keeping especially
to the psychology of the Tsar and the ambience in which he lived
and worked, I have also tried to explain the origins of absolute
power and the part it played in my country's past.

Nicholas I's ascent to the throne on 14th December was blood-
stained, as my readers will see, by the repression of a military
rebellion. On this 'fateful day' which, in the words of a memorialist,
Prince P. Wiazemski, 'cast its dark rays on a whole epoch' and
shadowed through its results the reign of Nicholas I, Imperial power
and revolutionary forces came face to face for the first time. On
that day Tsarism gained an easy victory and its adversaries expiated
their impulse towards liberty in Siberian convict prisons. To-day
all that belongs to the remote past. Fresh horizons spread before the
Russian nation and perhaps the appeased spirits of Nicholas I and
his 'evil friends of the 14th' contemplate from the Elysian Fields a
country that has reconciled the principles of social justice with those
of order and authority.

I would like to add that I have used the phonetic method of
transcribing all Russian names, as being the only way of making
them intelligible to English readers (thus I have not written 'Czerny-
cheff' but 'Tchernichov', 'Pushkin' and not 'Puscin'). The dates,
as far as possible, are those of the European calendar, which in the
nineteenth century is twelve days in advance of the Russian calendar;
I have admitted knowingly only one exception--the date of 14th
December, 1825--a date so portentous in history.

Finally, I wish to express my warmest thanks to all those who have
made my researches easier, and most of all to the loyal collaborator
who so kindly read my manuscript, during a springtime of exile in
Pau and Bearn, and who gave me such valuable help.

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