THE choice of my subject demands an explanation.
At a time when the people of the Soviet Union, after taking
their destiny in their own hands, have proved their maturity by
achieving the most dazzling victories, some of my readers may
perhaps ask themselves why I wish to draw their attention to a man
who was the living symbol of Tsarist autocracy. Did not Chamfort
say, long before the present upheavals, that only 'the history of free
nations' deserved study, and that the history of people under despot-
ism, 'was only a simple collection of anecdotes'?

May I be allowed to disagree, this once, with the witty author of
Maxims and Thoughts? The roots of the present go deep into the
past: the U.S.S.R. of to-day is the outcome of the Russia of
Nicholas I, just as the France of Hoche and Carnot is born of the
France of Louis XIV.

Yet I recognize the difficulties an author runs into in undertaking
a biography devoted to a Tsar of the Romanov dynasty. Through
living for long months, for years even, with an historic personality,
through brooding over his intimate thoughts, his daily occupations,
his family life, the author involuntarily ends in sympathizing with
that person, in finding excuses, or at least explanations for his most
reprehensible acts. How many times, when writing The Life of
Nicholas I, have I thought of the satirical words of Pushkin in which
he reproaches Karamzine, his contemporary and appointed historian
of ancient Russia, for having sullied his reputation by extolling the
joys of autocratic power and the pleasure of the knout'!

The case of Nicholas I is particularly difficult. In a chapter, part of
which is not published, of Hadji-Mourad, Leon Tolstoi states that
the whole life of this sovereign 'from that terrible hour when he
gave the order to machine-gun the crowd in the Senate Square
was just one long horrifying crime'. 'A narrow-minded soldier,
coarse, arrogant and uncultivated, living solely for power, longing
only to reinforce this power'--these, according to Tolstoi, were the
characteristics of a monarch he marked with the merciless nick-
name of 'Nicholas the Flogger' ( Nicholas Palkine').

But on the other hand, it is from the famous novelist we get the
debatable points which permit us to consider Nicholas more im-
partially and objectively. 'With what do we reproach this sovereign?'
he exclaims in War and Peace--speaking of Nicholas's own brother,

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